From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 20 2000 - 19:22:30 EDT
At 12:56 AM +0200 6/21/00, Roe wrote:
>Thanks Carl, and others, for your help.
>
>
>> For what it's worth, Philippians 2:1 is interesting...
>
>Yes, and, having not seen that before, I'm comforted to hear you say the
>construction appeared strange before stumbling across it alone...
>
>I was about to send this to the list when I noticed that I was
>responding to a mail sent directly to me. I'll send it anyway here,
>though it doesn't specifically address your post. Someone wrote to me:
>
>> Although ADELFOS would refer to a male, the plural ADELFOI can
>> refer to males and females.
>
>
>But what about the indefinite singular...? What if one wants to say "If
>any 'brother'...", meaning any of 'the brethren' -- brother or sister?
>Would one have to say "EI TIS ADELFOS hH ADELFH..."? or could one
>simply say "EI TIS ADELFOS..."?
Yes, I think so, but I'm not sure I can prove it.
>Looking (from a novice's perspective) at passages like the following
>leads me to think the latter masculine-only rendition might work...
>
>
>1 Cor 3:18 ... EI TIS DOKEI SOFOS EINAI...
>
>1 Cor 14:37 EI TIS DOKEI PROFHTHS EINAI...
>
>Jams 1:23 hOTI EI TIS AKROATHS LOGOU ESTIN...
>
>James 1:26 EI TIS DOKEI QRHSKOS EINAI...
>
>
>These cases have TIS referred to with a masculine adjective or noun.
>Yet, they don't seem to be masculine-specific.
>
>I think I failed to ask what I really question: How (or with what
>gender) does one express the singular indefinite person? It *seems* to
>me to be with the masculine...
I rather think that there's something comparable in the 2-termination
pronouns to the -OS declension of nouns; although one thinks of
second-declension nouns as fundamentally masculine, there are in fact very
numerous nouns of the second declension that are feminine--one thinks
immediately of hODOS, NOSOS, NHSOS and I think there are quite a few plant
and tree names that are feminine. I'm not really sure to what extent this
is true, but I am strongly inclined to think that the more fundamental
distinction of "gender" is not three-way (MFN) but rather two-way
(person/thing--or there might be a better way to define that difference).
But as ANQRWPOS can take either a masculine or feminine article and mean
"male person" or "female person," so also I think that for words like TIS
the masculine gender-terminations, where applicable, are applied without
necessarily implying that a male of the species is being spoken of.
One could carry this further and note that the application of -S endings on
first-declension nominative of nouns (and -OIO/-OU genitive sg. endings) to
indicate masculine gender is a relatively late innovation: Homer has
masculine nouns with nominatives in -A and -H and genitives in -AO or -EW.
I think this whole matter probably deserves a closer look; it's probably
been written about but I'm not familiar with the literature on it. If
anyone DOES know more about research on this, it would be nice to hear of
it.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad@ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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