From: Dale M. Wheeler (dalemw@teleport.com)
Date: Sat Mar 30 1996 - 14:38:22 EST
Bernard Taylor wrote:
>Philoi,
>
>I have been intrigued by the discussion of apposition and predicates, and
>would like to elicit your input via English examples. I use the pers
>pron since it is one of the few examples in English where we have
>nom/acc/gen endings, esp. in the masculine (he/him/his).
>
>How would you translate into Greek the following:
>
>I see him, a good man.
>
>Would "a good man" be in the acc (of apposition)? Or would it be in the
>nominative implying something like:
>
>I see him[. He is] a good man.
>
>Like some others, off the top of my head I can only recall appositional
>nouns in the nom. Would the (koine) Greek speaker, for whatever reason,
>only use apposition in the nominative, or is my exposure simply too
>limited, and acc apposition does occur? After all, English is like
>that. We often hear non-native English speakers put words together in a
>way that we would never do, and while it is not wrong, it just isn't
>right to our ears!
Simple apposition is a normative category in Greek Syntax (though strangely,
because of organizational issues, you won't find it--as far as I can tell--
in BDF). I just happen to have been chasing the issue of Gender, Case of
geographical names and ran across several examples: following GH both
datives and genitives (Acts 7:36, 40, Titus 1:5; Jude 5); after POTAMOS
dative and accusative (Rev 9:14; 16:12); after POLIS all cases (Rev 21:2,
10, Acts 11:5; 16:14) are some of the examples. Simple apposition doesn't
just occur with geographical names, its fairly common in the NT in
general. One example off the top of my head is Eph 1:7 is: EXOMEN THN
APOLUTRWSIN..., THN AFESIN...
Greek does, of course, have a gentive usage which in essence is the same
as apposition (BDF #167).
I think the point with respect to the English you presented is that if a
Greek speaker wanted to say (in response to a query about whether you see
someone overthere) "I see him; he is a good man."; "him would be acc, and
"good man" would be predicate nominative in its own clause (BLEPW AUTON;
[AUTOS] ESTIN AGAQOS ANQRWPOS.). I think this would still be true even if
the second sentence were said as a kind of brief interjection: "I see him;
a good man!"
The problem with your example for the accusative is that BLEPW AUTON AGAQON
ANQRWPON spawns a double accusative/object complement and would mean "I
consider him to be a good man." The example I gave above shows how
apposition works, where the second explicates the first.
***********************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Th.D.
Chair, Biblical Languages Dept Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street Portland, OR 97220
Voice: 503-251-6416 FAX:503-254-1268 E-Mail: dalemw@teleport.com
***********************************************************************
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