From: Daniel Ria–o (danielrr@mad.servicom.es)
Date: Sun Jan 04 1998 - 10:44:17 EST
Jonathan Robie wrote
>Hmmm...if I put both the subject and the predicate before the copulative
>verb, does the predicate still come first? Consider these sentences:
>
>1. KAI hO LOGOS QEOS HN
>2. KAI QEOS hO LOGOS HN *
>
>My intuition, which has 40 years less experience than Carl's intuition,
>says that #2 is not grammatical, but #1 is perfectly reasonable Greek.
>
Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>>>>
My intuition is that "ungrammatical" may not be quite the right way to
describe #2, but I would agree that it seems unnatural, unless, at least,
we read the KAI as adverbial rather than as a conjunction. I'd hesitate to
be dogmatic on this point, but it seems to me that the predicate word ought
to be in pretty close proximity to the copula.
<<<<
Carl is right, IMO. The word order of #2 is not ungrammatical, but
stylistically very marked. If you take out examples where the word order is
due to the kind of words, like:
Ti/ a)/ra to\ paidi/on tou=to e)/stai "Eu.Luc."1.66
still you can find several cases with the same order of #2 (attribute +
subject + verb) among hundreds of examples with a different word order.
Almost all my examples come from subordinate clauses.
o(/ti h)/|deisan to\n Xristo\n au)to\n ei\nai. "Eu.Luc."4.41
kai\ para/deigma to/de tou= lo/gou ou)k e)la/cisto/n e)sti dia\ ta\s
metoikesi/as ta\ a)/lla mh\ o(moi/ws au)xhqh=nai Th.1.2.6
poluanqrwpota/thn tw=n (/Ellhni/dwn th\n po/lin ei)=nai X."HG" 2.3.24
a)nupo/statos h( th=s o(/lhs u)poqe/sews a)rch\ ge/nhtai Plb.1.5.3
Daniel
___________________________________________________________________
Daniel Rian~o Rufilanchas
c. Santa Engracia 52, 7 dcha.
28010-Madrid
Espan~a
e-mail: danielrr@mad.servicom.es
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:38:44 EDT