From: Karen Spray (karen.spray@lineone.net)
Date: Mon Jul 16 2001 - 12:08:16 EDT
Colloquial English maybe has a similar construction when telling stories,
using 'this' rather than 'the' - as in 'This man goes into a bar and says,
'Do you serve gorillas here?'
Love, Karen
karen.spray@fish.co.uk or karen.spray@lineone.net
----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan Robie <Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com>
To: Biblical Greek <b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2001 6:35 PM
Subject: [b-greek] Re: Use of the article..
> At 08:14 PM 7/14/2001 -0700, Glenn Blank wrote:
>
> >Let's define the notion of "definiteness" more specifically. My
> >understanding is that the "definite" article is used when the speaker
> >assumes that the audience knows specifically which referent within a
class
> >of referents the speaker has in mind. The audience would know this in
one
> >of two ways: either (A) the referent was previously introduced within
the
> >discourse, [!!! SNIP !!!]
> >or (B) the class of referents represented by the noun has only one
member,
> >as in
> >
> >THE sun
>
> I think that many cases fall into one of these two classes, but I think
you
> may be overgeneralizing here. Consider the parable of the sower:
>
> Luke 8:5 EXHLQEN hO SPEIRWN TOU SPEIRAI TON SPORON AUTOU...
>
> Why is the sower hO SPEIRWN? I'll take a swing at it, trusting that others
> will correct me if I am wrong. In this case, we have an article with a
> participle, and there are two interpretations for that - it might refer to
> the entire class of sowers, or to the sower on a particular occasion, as
in
> this parable. The definiteness in this case is that there is one specific
> (and hypothetical) sower who is portrayed in the parable. I wonder how
> similar/different hO SPEIRWN is to the phrase SPOREUS TIS - it feels
> similar to me, but I'd like to hear from those with more experience.
>
> Most English translations say something like "a sower went out to sow some
> seed". If this were translated "the sower went out to sow some seed", that
> would feel funny to me. So I think this is one case where translating the
> Greek definite article with an English indefinite article is the right
> thing to do.
>
> Jonathan
>
>
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
> You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [karen.spray@lineone.net]
> To unsubscribe, forward this message to
leave-b-greek-327Q@franklin.oit.unc.edu
> To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
>
>
>
>
---
B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [jwrobie@mindspring.com]
To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-327Q@franklin.oit.unc.edu
To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:37:01 EDT