Re: ChARIN vs ChARITA

Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Mon, 2 Sep 1996 10:47:56 -0500

At 10:06 AM -0500 9/2/96, Nichael Lynn Cramer wrote:
>A (probably trivial) question of grammar:
>
>Should anything be read into the uses of the two different forms of acc.
>sing. of ChARIS: ChARITA (e.g. Ac 24:27) and ChARIN (e.g. in the enigmatic
>ChARIN ANTI ChARITOS of Jn 1:16)? Or should this be considered nothing
>more than essentially a question of orthography?
>
>(BTW, I'm aware of the role of ChARIN as a preposition --e.g. Lk 7:47. On
>the other hand, it seems prehaps curious that, given the opportunity for
>confusion between the two uses of ChARIN, that ChARIN remains by far the
>more common of the two forms available for use as a noun.)

I'm responding from home--w/o rfc books--but I really think that there's a
strong tendency for 3d-declension dental stems with preceding iota to form
the accusative in -IN just like pure I-stems (e.g. POLIS), and that the
acc. forms in -IDA or -ITA, although historically original and probably
enduring variants, were generally secondary forms. I don't think there's
any real difference in meaning--it's not quite like the semantic
differentiation taking place in Italian CAUSA and COSA that both derive
from Latin CAUSA.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/