This morning I ran into a common phenomena, the attraction of a relative
pronoun to the case of it's antecedent (Acts 7:16 EN TWi MNHMATI Wi). I
decided to pause and review what the local grammars (within reach) had
to say about this. I checked Porter (Idioms) pps. 244, 252-53, BDF #294,
466(1,3), and Smyth #2524.
These grammars did a good job of describing the observed behavior of
relative pronouns and the case system. What these grammars did not
provide is an explanation of this phenomena. Rather, they provided too
many explanations which led me to conclude that there is no general
agreement about why the Greek relative pronoun behaves as it does.
There is a common practice when discussing Greek grammar to attach a
name to an observed syntactical phenomena and then assume that we have
solved the problem. We say this is *attraction* and everyone smiles and
folds their hands and we are all comfortable that the issue has been
settled and everything is under control.
My quick review of the discussions of the *attraction* leads me to
believe that we have a phenomena here which is difficult to understand.
The Case system is behaving here in a manner which does not fit well
into our standard model for the Greek case system. Most of us have
probably been blinded by familiarity, so that the essential oddness of
this behavior in the relative pronoun no longer attracts our attention.
Clay Bartholomew
Three Tree Point