From: George Blaisdell (maqhth@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Apr 10 1999 - 12:22:27 EDT
>From: "George Blaisdell"
>Jim Denley Writes:
>
>>My original post began:
>
>>>Regarding the use of THi in "EN PISTEI ZW THi
>>>TOU hUIOU TOU QEOU.
>
>
>>>Greek articles are not simply definite articles.
>>They have demonstrative use as well, often
>>pressing us in English to use a
>>relative pronoun...
>>The question I'm asking is whether an article used
>>in this fashion on occasion is "relative pronoun-like"
>>in its rules. If there are occasions where this is
>>true, then it only requires gender and
>>number from its antecedent and its case describes
>>its syntactical place in the sentence.
>I am now wondering if the fact that the prep phrase EN PISTEI has an
>anarthrous noun might grammatically lead to the use of the article
>following the action verb ZW, instead of what we in English might
>expect to he a relative pronoun.
>
>If we were to rearrange the same Greek words to our English 'comfort
>zone', we would then have:
>
>ZW EN TWi PISTEI TOU hUIOU TOU QEOU.
>
>And perhaps it COULD have been written in the Greek this way, but was
>instead written differently for a reason that involves Greek word
>order and its purpose here, which in turn may have syntactical
>significance.
>
>Might the construction used, centering as it does the article TWi,
>thereby 'showcase' it with emphasis, and thus PISTEI, as the central
>idea of this word sequence?
>
>And I have no idea how or if its case might be altered according to
>syntactical purpose or placement.
I love/hate responding to my own posts!! :-)
It occurs to me that TWi is the article for PISTEI, and that what
starts out in this sentence as an anarthrous PISTEI then becomes
arthrous. So that PISTEI is NOT anarthrous at all!!! Hence the
necessity of agreement in case, as well as number and gender, of the
article with its noun. And as well, its emphatic positioning!
And Jim is correct in ascribing to the article its 'relative pronoun'
quality in English. How else can we translate what is in Greek
somewhere between an English article and an English relative pronoun.
By the simple placement of the article where it is, the Greek does
what English cannot do.
The Greek just cuts finer than English word economy allows here.
George Blaisdell
Roslyn, WA
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