From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 22 1998 - 17:30:07 EST
At 12:56 PM -0600 2/22/98, noel@megsinet.net wrote:
>In John 6:64, we find
> ..ALL' EISIN EX UMWN TINES hOI OU PISTEUOUSIN."
> HDEI GAR EX ARCHS hO IHSOUS TINES EISIN hOI MH
> PISTEUONTES KAI TIS ESTIN hO PARADWSWN AUTON.
>
>I was just reading through this today, and really
>got to wondering about the usage of TIS here.
>
>It's pretty obvious that the first TINES is indefinite.
>The second and third seem to be usually taken as the
>relative use of the interrogative, though. What are
>the indications in the text that lead to this?
>
>I would think that the similarity of the three
>phrases would be an argument in favor of them
>all being indefinite.
>
>Is it that there's no hOTI (or equivalent) to
>introduce the second and third phrases? Or is
>it something else that I'm not seeing?
(1) I think there can be no question that the indefinite nature of the
first TINES in the passage above and the interrogative nature of the second
TINES and the TIS are correctly discerned.
(2) If you will look carefully at the accentuation of each form, you will
note that the indefinite TINES is generally enclitic and that when it has
an accent at all it will fall on the second of two syllables, while an
accute accent will always fall on the root syllable of the interrogative.
If that weren't enough, it is also clear inthe context that the second
TINES and TIS introduce indirect questions--noun clauses functioning as the
object of HiDEI, whereas the first TINES is an indicator of unnamed persons
as the antecedent of the relative clause.
(3) Classical Attic did tend generally to use a form of hOSTIS to introduce
an indirect question, although one finds forms of TIS in the construction
even there. But hOSTIS seems far less frequent in Koine.
Finally, it may be worth noting that to the ancient speaker of Greek the
problem of distinguishing indefinite and interrogative TIS was no greater
than the problem an English-speaker has in distinguishing "that" as a
demonstrative pronoun and "that" as a relative pronoun, or in
distinguishing spoken "to," "too," and "two." Somehow or other, these are
not the sort of ambiguities that are really hard to live with or that
normally make us even reflect on them.
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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:39:05 EDT