From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 01 2001 - 19:41:48 EST
At 1:29 PM -0800 2/1/01, Alex Kyrychenko wrote:
>Dear List-members,
>
>During the lesson on the participles I was to translate the following
>English sentence into Greek:
>"I saw him after he had believed in the Lord." My suggested
>translation, EIDON PISTEUSANTA EIS TON KURION, was corrected into
>EIDON AUTON PISTEUSANTA EIS TON KURION. I did not think that the
>personal pronoun was necessary since the participle already contained
>all the information. Could you please comment on that and refer me to
>a good grammar? Thank you.
In this case a pronoun is certainly required so that one can know who it
was that had believed; of course it's also true that the AUTON must refer
to someone previously named (the problem with translating simple sentences
is that they are always outside of a context, and a context is essential if
we're going to have pronouns and connectives). The personal pronoun is not
required for a SUBJECT of a verb, but in this instance the participle has
to be connected to an accusative object of EIDON. You might have had a
substantive participle in a sentence like EIDON TON PISTEUSANTA EIS TON
KURION ("I saw the one who had believed in the Lord") but that's different;
in your sentence PISTEUSANTA needs a noun or pronoun object of EIDON to
accord with.
--
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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