From: Ronald Ross (rross@expressmail.net)
Date: Thu Dec 09 1999 - 10:56:13 EST
To: Steven Craig Miller and George Goolde,
I agree with Steven. It seems to me that to insist on a eight case system in Greek
is a failure to recognize the distinction between morphological cases, of which Greek
seems to have five, and semantic roles, of which Greek and any other language has a
bunch. To insist on eight cases seems to me like an attempt to match up the
morphological cases with the semantic roles, and this cannot be done because there
will always be more of the latter. The best we can do is to say that X morphological
case expresses semantic roles A, B, C and D. If we are going to distinguish an
ablative "case" then why not an "instrumental case" and a "goal case" and a
"recipient case" and an "experiencer case", etc. Of course, a lot of these "cases"
are going to look alike because they are assigned to the same morphological case.
Ronald Ross
UBS consultant
Linguistics Department
University of Costa Rica
Steven Craig Miller wrote:
> To: George Goolde,
>
> << That is why I personally prefer an eight case grammar to a five case
> one. I think it is a strong step in the right direction toward teaching
> students to understand their Bibles. The main idea of the ablative is not
> the same as the main idea of the genitive whether or not we chose to
> identify them as separate cases or uses of one case. >>
>
> I'm not for sure I understand why insisting that there are two separate
> cases, namely the genitive and ablative, allows us to understand Greek any
> better than saying that there is one genitive case with two major
> functions, namely the pure genitive and the ablative genitive. It seems to
> me that they both amount to roughly the same thing.
>
> -Steven Craig Miller
> Alton, Illinois (USA)
> scmiller@www.plantnet.com
> Disclaimer: "I'm just a simple house-husband (with no post-grad degree),
> what do I know?"
>
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