From: Iver Larsen (alice-iver_larsen@wycliffe.org)
Date: Mon Jan 29 2001 - 01:32:58 EST
Dear Carl,
I would need to ponder your suggestion. It looks quite complex to me when there
is a simpler way to describe it. While I am pondering, can I ask for
clarification of something? My comments are below, but I have deleted most to
the message.
>
> Moon, Iver, and any others seriously interested in this question:
> EKEINOS hO ANHR: here we might be willing to call this a simple
> noun phrase
Which is what I would do regardless of the position of EKEINOS. So, hO ANHR
EKEINOS would in my scheme also be a simple noun phrase. The difference between
the two is to me a matter of relative prominence of the demonstrative pronoun
EKEINOS.
> ... and yet it certainly CAN be a sentence in its own right: "The fellow is
yonder."
I don't think I have come across that possibility in the GNT nor is it mentioned
in BAG. Do you have any examples? Or is it something that only occurs in
Classical Greek? I need to be convinced that it is possible. If it were possible
I would expect that you could also say hO ANHR hO EKEINOS and even ANHR hO
EKEINOS. And what about hOUTOS? Since these two belong to the same category,
what is true of one should be true of the other. Could you possibly say "The
fellow is this"?
> But suppose we write, EKEINOS hO ANHR QAUMASTOS! Whereas in
> ordinary English we'd say, "That fellow is marvelous!", yet I think that
> the way the EKEINOS item functions makes this essentially: "The fellow
> (he's over yonder) is marvelous!"
I wouldn't think so.
> Although I can't offhand think of an
> example like this from the GNT, it's not altogether uncommon in earlier
> Attic to have: TACUS PARESTAI hO BASILEUS, "The king will arrive quickly."
> Here TACUS is used adverbially: it agrees in number, gender, and case with
> hO BASILEUS, but it is construed with the verb PARESTAI.
Whereas the normal adverb in the GNT is TACEWS, the adjective TACUS is used
adverbially in the neuter singular form TACU. BAG says that the adverbial
function is "mostly in the neuter singular." I don't know how to understand
"mostly". In the GNT we only find TACU as an adverb, not TACUS, but maybe BAG is
referring to the kind of example you mention? I am not yet convinced that this
shows that EKEINOS could function in the same way, because a demonstrative
pronoun is different from a descriptive adjective or adverb.
>
(snip)
> I guess, then, that what I'm suggesting herewith is that, if we feel a need
> to alter the traditional terminology, we might do well to refer to what has
> been traditionally called "predicate position" as "adverbial position"; as
> for "attributive position" we could either keep that or substitute for it
> "adnominal position." At the same time it should be remembered that this
> terminology is always to be used with reference to position relative to the
> article and that we are using it for pedagogical purposes--in order to
> clarify how some aspects of a language with a relatively free word-order
> can rearrange elements with significant changes in semantic function.
>
> I rather doubt that such a change in terminology would find wide
> acceptance.
I don't think I would accept it, either. It is too different from the way I
would describe things using modern descriptive linguistics.
> I rather suspect that most people would agree with the maxim,
> "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"--and most people are probably not
> convinced that the traditional terminological distinction of "predicate"
> and "attributive" positions is really "broke."
That is certainly correct. As long as a Greek teacher believes the system he is
used to works fine, he would not want to change anything.
Iver Larsen
Kolding, Denmark
alice-iver_larsen@wycliffe.org
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