From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 04 2001 - 12:17:46 EDT
At 8:56 PM -0700 6/3/01, Kenneth Litwak wrote:
> I'm curious about a piece of Luke 4:40
>APANTES (OSOI EICON ASQENOUNTAS
>(if the "official transliteration scheme is different,
>please tell me).
Text of relevant portion: hAPANTES hOSOI EICON ASQENOUNTAS NOSOIS POIKILAIS
HGAGON AUTOUS PROS AUTON.
>I have two questions.
>1. Why not just use APANTES and ASQENOUNTES?
>Why the relative pronoun plus ECW? What is the
>diference in meaning? Is this more loquacious form
>the more "classical" version? It doesn't look look
>like a Hebrew construction.
Ken, the main clause here is hAPANTES ... HGAGON AUTOUS PROS AUTOUS; a
secnd clause, hOSOI EICON ASQENOUNTAS NOSOIS POIKILAIS is a relative clause
dependent upon hAPANTES. An woodenly literal English version retaining the
original word-order might be: "All who had persons-ailing with varios
illnesses brought them to him."
>2. Why isn't ASQENOUNTAS a nominative to match the
>subejct? This looks like a periphrastic to me, and I
>thought that the participle had the same case as he
>subject. Thanks.
You have somehow made the assumption, unwarranted by the Greek text, that
the subject of the sentence is "all who were infirm"--but you've missed the
essential grammatical structure of the two clauses.
ASQENOUNTAS is accusative plural of a substantive participle: "ailing", and
this is the direct object of EICON: that is to say: those who were ailing
did not come to Jesus of their own accord but were BROUGHT to him by
persons who were presumably caring for them.
If there's anything at all awkward about the phrasing here, I'd say it's
the proliferation of pronouns; nevertheless this is not extraordinary
syntax.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
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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