From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 12 1996 - 11:11:18 EST
This may bore others to death, but it's the sort of tidbit of linguistic
history that I personally find fascinating.
As a follow-up to yesterday's discussion of some problems Ken Litwak
brought up in the Greek text of the Didache, I have done some further
checking on the usage of the relatively rare hINATI' or hINA TI' as it
appears in verse 5, cited by Ken as (with revised transliteration,
hopefully for the sake of greater clarity):
OUAI TWi LAMBONONTI. EI MEN GAR XREIAN EXWN LAMBANEI TIS, AQWOS ESTAI. hO
DE MH XREIAN EXWN DWSEI DIKAN, hINA TI' ELABE KAI EIs TI'?
I was able to check LSJ9 at the Perseus web site last night (great resource
for those using Netscape with either Mac or Windows and having either
SuperGreek or SMK Greek fonts that they can put as "fixed-width font"
option) and found listed as a relatively rare secondary usage:
c. hIna TI' (sc.GENHTAI?); to what end? either abs. or as a question,
Aristoph. Eccl. 719; or with a Verb following, IDEM = Aristoph. Peace 409,
cf. Plat. Apol. 26d, etc.; hINA DE TI' ; Aristoph. Cl. 1192.
I then found the following in BAGD:
BAGD: hINATI' (often written separately; for hINA TI' GENHTAI?' "in order
that what might happen?" Bld-D#1,3; W-S.#5, 7e; Rob. 739) why, for what
reason?
NT examples: Mt 9:4; 27:46 (Ps 21:2); Lk 13:7; Acts 74:25 (Ps 2:1)); 7:26;
1 Cor 10:29; 1 Cl 4:4 (Gen. 4:6); 35:7 (Ps 49:16); 46:5, 7; B 3:1 (Is
58.4). W. EIS TI' why and for what? D 1:5. Bl-D.#299, 4. Moulton &
Milligan. s.v. hINA.
Most interesting in particular was the last listing in LSJ9--a citation
from the lexicographer Hesychius, who wrote at the turn of the millennia.
He glossed, it appears, hINA TI' with DIA TI' and ES TI'. It seems very
like (to me, at least) that any implicit "GENHTAI" functioning as a
subjunctive of purpose with the subject TI' has long since receded from the
consciousness of the user of the language and that hINA has in fact become
the equivalent in this phrase of a preposition used with TI' understood as
a neuter accusative. The unified spelling in hINATI' (comparable to the
very common unified DIATI' and DIOTI for "why?" and "because ...") suggests
the same conclusion.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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