From: Jonathan Robie (Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com)
Date: Sun Jul 15 2001 - 13:35:42 EDT
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At 08:14 PM 7/14/2001 -0700, Glenn Blank wrote:
>Let's define the notion of "definiteness" more specifically. My
>understanding is that the "definite" article is used when the speaker
>assumes that the audience knows specifically which referent within a class
>of referents the speaker has in mind. The audience would know this in one
>of two ways: either (A) the referent was previously introduced within the
>discourse, [!!! SNIP !!!]
>or (B) the class of referents represented by the noun has only one member,
>as in
>
>THE sun
I think that many cases fall into one of these two classes, but I think you
may be overgeneralizing here. Consider the parable of the sower:
Luke 8:5 EXHLQEN hO SPEIRWN TOU SPEIRAI TON SPORON AUTOU...
Why is the sower hO SPEIRWN? I'll take a swing at it, trusting that others
will correct me if I am wrong. In this case, we have an article with a
participle, and there are two interpretations for that - it might refer to
the entire class of sowers, or to the sower on a particular occasion, as in
this parable. The definiteness in this case is that there is one specific
(and hypothetical) sower who is portrayed in the parable. I wonder how
similar/different hO SPEIRWN is to the phrase SPOREUS TIS - it feels
similar to me, but I'd like to hear from those with more experience.
Most English translations say something like "a sower went out to sow some
seed". If this were translated "the sower went out to sow some seed", that
would feel funny to me. So I think this is one case where translating the
Greek definite article with an English indefinite article is the right
thing to do.
Jonathan
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