By "German" in reference to word-order, I assume, Ken, that you really mean
"unintelligible," although millions of German-speakers have not found
German word-order at all unintelligible. Actually German word-order is much
more fixed than is that of the Greek of antiquity.
I wonder if you've transcribed the text rightly: I think that QHREUOMENOU
be QHREUOMENOI. It would certainly make more sense that way, in which case
I would construe it:
TINES MEN GAR, EPIDEIKNUMENOI LOGWN DEINOTHTA KAI THN AP AUTHS QHREUOMENOI
DOXAN, EPI TOUTO THS PAIDEIAS TO MEROS hORMWSIN, i.e. "For some,
endeavoring to display rhetorical cleverness and and seeking renown
deriving from it, pursue this branch of erudition, ..."
This sentence really moves pretty smoothly, the elements being: nominative
subject and connective particles, first circumstantial particle and its
object (EPIDEIKNUMENOI ... DEINOTHTA), KAI, second circumstantial particle
and its object, which in this instance is split into article and noun that
frame the entire participial phrase (THN ... DOXAN), and finally the
predicate. There's no question but that TOUTO is to be construed with
MEROS. There is absolutely nothing tricky about the word-order in this
sentence; in fact, it is much more logical than a lot of the NT word-order
which you think is simpler, because it exemplifies one feature of almost
all classical Greek writing (and this is what I believe you really mean by
German): the enclosure of syntactically related elements WITHIN the words
that they interpret. Thus above, THN DOXAN encloses the participle
QHREUOMENOI which has these words as its object, while AP' AUTHS is an
adverbial phrase qualifying the participle; similarly, the final elements
of the predicate EPI ... hORMWSIN logically enclose the whole: "in the
direction of ... they pursue," and within those elements is another
enclosure, TOUTO ... TO MEROS with the genitive phrase depending upon MEROS.
The most immediate source of your trouble appears to have been with the
TOUTO; this is a demonstrative pronoun and its usage is actually much more
regular and logical in formal classical Greek than it is in NT Koine,
precisely because it is regularly predicative: it requires to be construed
with an arthrous noun, in this instance TO MEROS, and moreover such a
demonstrative as TOUTO or TODE quite commonly is in a position well in
advance of the noun it ultimately points to; in this instance, however, TO
MEROS is right on the other side of the enclosed genitive phrase depending
on TO MEROS, namely THS PAIDEIAS.
It may drive you up the walls, but if you read enough of it, you might even
come to feel as lots of non-native readers of classical Greek have felt,
that it is one of the most elegant linguistic instruments ever created.
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/