MH + Pres Imper

clayton stirling bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Fri, 29 May 1998 10:06:14 +0000

I was going back over Acts 11 this morning and ran into MH KOINOU in 11:9 and
wondered why not an aorist subjunctive? I looked in Smyth (#1835-41) and BDF
(427.4) and Porter (Ch 13. 1.1.2). I did not find a stated reason why a
speaker/writer might choose to use MH + Pres Imper rather than MH + Aorist
Subjunctive.

Porter (p 221, bottom) says "In most contexts , translations of of negated
imperatives and negated subjunctives used as prohibitions can be virtually identical."

My response to this is, who cares if the English translations are identical.
The question is what did the distinction between these two forms of
prohibitions amount to in K. Greek. Do we know? Is one form of prohibition
more emphatic than the other? Are the really identical idioms?

"It is the commonest grammatical vice for one to make a conjectural
translation into English and then to discuss the syntactical propriety of the
Greek tense on the basis of this translation . . . "
A.T. Robertson (p.821)

-- 
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062

"Surf's up, let's head for the beach!"

William Tecumseh Sherman