Carl, et. al.,
Now this is an interesting discussion which may shed some light on what is often a mystery to those of us that try to rewrite our NT passages into a good English form, while retaining the original language! I think that you are close to having to think in the original here, rather than produce a mental translation as you go along, which is what we novices tend to do.
May I ask a question with respect to the comment you made about the basic unit of Greek being the paragraph, rather than the sentence? Although I can't give a coherent reason why, this seems to make more sense to me than anything else I have heard with regard to thought structure. When Koine does assume a written form, since it is designed primarily for audible communication as Carl observed, what are the indications of separation between paragraphs in ancient forms of the written text? What I am asking is, before modern punctuation and use of upper-case letters to designate paragraph beginnings, was there any indication in the text of the start or end of a paragraph? I had gained the notion that these MSS were usually narrow columns written on leaves of either a codex or roll with no breaks in the words or sentences, and I wondered if there were breaks between the paragraphs, or larger units.
I ask because I have little or no knowledge of the physical form of the early extant MSS, what they look like etc., and I wondered if writers had a way of indicating that they were transitioning into another thought unit.
Paul F. Evans
Pastor
Thunder Swamp Pentecostal Holiness Church
MT. Olive
E-mail: evans@esn.net
Web-page: http://ww2.esn.net/~evans
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>...and I'd explain that by saying that it's
> always seemed to me that the unit of discourse in written Greek (even
> granting that ancient Greek was written to be spoken and heard, not read
> silently) is what we call the PARAGRAPH, a grouping of clauses that has an
> organic unity wherein the interrelationship of the clauses, however
> complex, is nevertheless perspicuous.