From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 06 2000 - 19:59:16 EDT
At 6:13 PM -0400 4/6/00, Dmitriy Reznik wrote:
>Dear friends,
>
>Does the word KATARGOUMENWN in 1Cor 2:6 have passive or medial voice?
>NASV has "who are passing away". I wonder if there is any rule that
>could be used to determine the exact answer.
I will put in my usual assertion here: unless a middle/passive form can be
shown to be passive by some clear indication of passive sense (such as a
hUPO + genitive or instrumental dative indicator of external efficient
cause), it ought normally to be understood as a middle voice form. This
doesn't mean, of course, that it should be translated with a reflexive
force in English; such verbs are often simply intransitive. I'd say that
NASV translators who converted KATARGOUMENWN in 1 Cor 2:6 as "who/which are
passive away" have pretty clearly indicated that THEY understood this as
middle. And so would I.
BUT several reference books (and the same ones are not necessarily
consistent) tend to tag middle/passives as passive--as if it were somehow
easier on the understanding to suppose that the phenomenon of voice in
verbs is fundamentally a matter of active-passive polarity, whereas I think
it would be nearer the truth to say there's an active-middle polarity, and
that middle forms can, in some verbs regularly, in other verbs only
occasionally, assume a passive usage.
--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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