From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 15:23:43 EST
At 2:03 PM -0600 12/20/99, Steven Craig Miller wrote:
>To: Edgar Foster,
>
>Brown [1982] gives three grammatical interpretations (which I present below
>with slight modifications) of (PERI TOU LOGOU) THS ZWHS.
>
>(a) It could be an appositive genitive meaning: "about the word which is
>life."
>(b) It could be a qualifying genitive meaning: "about the life-giving word."
>(c) It could be a objective genitive meaning: "concerning the word about
>life."
>
>But Brown's translation merely gives: "about the word of life."
And rightly so! What's useful about the term "connective" or "pertinentive"
genitive and the recognition that it is only a structural, not a semantic
case is that one comes (hopefully) to realize that most of the
sub-categories of the grammars such as the above are strategies for
conveying the Greek construction into a target language and have nothing to
do with the "meaning" conveyed by the Greek; these categories show how we
in English (or others in other languages) make semantic distinctions that
the Greek, so far as we know, wasn't ever thinking about.
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
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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