>Randy,
>You Wrote:
> <snip>
>You have raised an interesting issue, that the order is NOT what one
>would ordinarily expect. Does anyone know of an "official" ancient
>source that deals with anything like word order? I know some of the
>ancients deal with word definitions
I don't know of any. If there are any, I suspect they're Classical,
and the degree to which their observations would apply to Koine would
still need investigation.
>Two things come to mind, one raised by you. It would be interesting
>to see if what you have discovered holds out across the board for a
>cross-section of NT authors, and I wonder how this pans out for
>non-biblical lit. of the Koine type.
I am also interested in this question. Gary Hill (editor of _The
Discovery Bible NT_) tried to deal with the whole NT, but I don't
find his work very convincing. Timothy Friberg wrote a dissertation
on word order in Luke, which my findings corroborated quite nicely.
I'd like to see work on Matthew and on a couple of Pauline epistles
next.
Anyone who is interested in doing this sort of thing may want to have
some detail about how I compiled my statistics, which include all
kinds of data such as part of speech, mood, and clause type. If the
demand isn't too overwhelming, I could probably s-mail photocopies of
an 8-page appendix describing the word-order database I constructed
for Hebrews.
>It seems that we are left with the impression that grammatically VS
>is more "correct," and SV more or less emphatic. Did I read this
>correctly?!
No, not quite. I'm not suggesting at all that one order is better
grammar than the other, just that VS seems to be the "default" order.
Emphasis is only one reason for SV, and not the most common reason as
I see it.
>What sorts of things did you look for and what conclusions did you
>typically draw from the SV construction. I guess I am asking for a
>couple of examples to show you methodology. If it is too much
>hassle please don't feel obliged.
Well, I'd have to rewrite part of the dissertation to fully describe
my findings. Let me see what I can say briefly that may be of help.
First, certain parts of speech used as subject (Ward has mentioned
pronouns in a recent post) tend to precede the verb. Relatives and
interrogatives stand out in this regard, since these kinds of words
practically always stand at the beginning of their clause, regardless
of grammatical function within the clause.
Second, whether the kind of modifier(s) a subject has seems to make a
difference. This one gets too complex for the purposes of this post.
Third, identifying the topic of a sentence (the entity in view) and
the comment (the new information conveyed about the topic) yields the
general pattern that the topic precedes the comment. This accounts
for many instances of SV order, since the topic often coincides with
the grammatical subject. This is especially so in independent
clauses.
Fourth is emphasis. I suggested three categories of rhetorical
emphasis: 1) stressing parallelism (comparison or contrast), 2)
stressing degree, and 3) stressing logical progression. To try to
keep my preconceptions about Greek word order from influencing what
words I identified as emphatic, I carefully marked Hebrews for these
kinds of emphasis (as well as topic-comment relations) using a very
literal English translation, then came back to the Greek text to see
to what extent the words I marked as emphatic occurred in "unusual"
order.
I'll give a couple of examples of emphasis, where SV order
corresponds with emphasis on the subject. Practically the only kind
of emphasis I found on subjects was that stressing parallelism. 5:5
says hOUTWS KAI hO CRISTOS OUC hEAUTON EDOXASEN GENHQHNAI ARCIEREA,
where Christ is paralleled with Aaron. The OV order also seems to
indicate a related emphasis on the object, by the way. A contrasting
emphasis appears in 11:35, where after a long list of victories won
by heroes of the faith, we read ALLOI DE ETUMPANISQHSAN. The "OTHERS"
marks the contrast unmistakeably.
I felt all through this dissertation that I had hold of a topic whose
magnitude was far too great for me to master. So I won't be surprised
if some of my ideas get shot down. But on the other hand, I'm not so
sure that those firing are likely to have gained MUCH more mastery
than I did: they have just mastered a different piece of the pie and
are seeing things from another perspective, probably equally limited
or nearly so. I don't think any of us is anywhere near saying the
last word in answer to these questions.
****************************
In Love to God and Neighbor,
Randy Leedy
Bob Jones University
Greenville, SC
RLeedy@bju.edu
****************************