Re: Adjectives and adverbs

Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Sun, 23 Nov 1997 20:14:50 -0600

At 10:12 AM -0600 11/24/97, Paul Zellmer wrote:
>I think I have to change the interpretation that I have long held of 1
>John 4:19. I was reading the passage again and suddenly realized,
>"Hey, PROTOS is an adjective!" And here I have been treating it as an
>adverb for more than 40 years (not all of that time in Greek, BTW). I
>checked out Robertson on this, and, sure enough, he calls attention to
>this fact in his treatment of adjectives and adverbs. However, in the
>next subsection, he talks about Greek adjectives that are treated like
>adverbs in English. I looked at his examples, but still wonder how one
>tells if he has an adjective that should be treated adverbially in my
>native tongue. How about this as a springboard: Why should *not*
>PROTOS in 1 John 4:19 fall into this category? (I guess I just don't
>want to change a long-held position!)

The text: hHMEIS AGAPWMEN, hOTI AUTOS PRWTOS HGAPHSEN hHMAS.

The question to be asked is how the adjective (and yes, PRWTOS is indeed an
adjective, being, in fact, the superlative of the adverb/preposition
PRO/PARA) is being used in a particular clause: does it modify a noun
attributively or predicatively; if attributively (e.g. hO PRWTOS ANQRWPOS)
then of course it tells you something fundamental about the referent of the
noun; if predicatively, then that adjective belongs to the predicate; if
the verb is a copula or is understood, then it's a predicate adjective:
PRWTOS hO ANQRWPOS, "the fellow is foremost." BUT if the verb is
transitive, look for it to function the way an English adverb does:

TWN TRECONTWN hAPANTWN PRWTOS PARESTIN hO FEIDIPPIDHS
"Of all those running, Pheidippides has arrived first."

or you could get the same sense by writing it in English as:

"Of all those running, the first one to arrive is Pheidippides."

Now in this last version the English has been recast, but in such a way as
to indicate the predicate phrase "the first one to arrive" before the verb
and subject--but the effect is still obvious, I think: PRWTOS really has to
be understood in conjunction with the verb PARESTIN rather than as an
attributive adjective modifying FEIDIPPIDHS (we're not talking about "the
first Pheidippides" or "a first Pheidippides" but about a Pheidippides who
is "first to arrive."

Apply this same test to 1 John 4:19: does PRWTOS construe fundamentally
with the 3rd person subject AUTOS? Well, certainly it derives its gender,
number, and case from AUTOS, yet the sentence is not describe "a first he"
or "the first he" (whatever those might mean, if anything) but rather
PRWTOS is predicative and fundamentally construes with HGAPHSEN: "He was
the first to love us" or "He loved us way before anybody else" (since
PRWTOS is a superlative, you could add a genitive of comparison such as
PANTWN TWN ALLWN TWN AGAPWNTWN hHMAS.

This might be a good point to add a comment about the celebrated clause,
PRWTOS MOU HN that comes up for discussion on our list from time to time.
Both in John 1:15 and again in 1:30 we read of one whom John say EMPROSQEN
MOU GEGONEN, hOTI PRWTOS MOU HN. It might be asked whether PRWTOS isn't
really an adjective here, and indeed a predicate adjective used with a
copula and an implicit 3rd person singular pronoun (AUTOS). But if that
were so, it would mean something like "He was my first" -- and while the
Samaritan woman at the well might well speak thus of the first ANHR that
she had had, this isn't what our clause means, because HN is in our clause
not a copula but existential and the PRWTOS is used predicatively with it:
"He existed long before me" (here too PRWTOS clearly has that superlative
force).

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/