translation/syntax question

[lategr8bon]

I am having trouble understanding the following sentence:

? δὲ πλοῦτος ἡμᾶς, καθάπε? ἰατ?ος κακός, πάντας βλέποντας πα?αλαβὼν τυφλοῦς ποιεῖ.

i don't know if it's an issue of syntax or idiom or what, but even though i can identify the words and the forms that they are in, i can't seem to put it all together.

any help would be great.
thanks,
Dave

[Hu]

"But wealth makes us blind, just like a bad doctor does when he recieves those who see."

It's a comparison between wealth and a bad doctor. καθἀπε? ιατ?ὸς κακὸς is a subordinate clause of comparison. ῆμᾶς and βλ?ποντας are the objects of ποιεῖ. Πα?αλαβὼν is an active particle that modifies πλοῦτος (and ιατ?ὸς in the comparison).

Let me know if you need more specific help.

Edit: I really need to learn how to use Greek Polytonic.

[GlottalGreekGeek]

It makes sense to me, though I did have to read it more than once.

Maybe rearranging the word order will help?

? δὲ πλοῦτος, καθάπε? ἰατ?ος κακός, πα?αλαβὼν πάντας βλέποντας ποιεῖ ἡμᾶς τυφλοῦς.

EDIT : I didn't see Hu's post ... I agree with him. I would also like to add that the verb ποιεῖ has a double accusative in this case - ἡμᾶς and τυφλοῦς.

[lategr8bon]

thanks for your help guys. perhaps this would be a good opportunity to sort of dive into the syntax of this a bit more. or at least what i think is syntax. certainly changing the word order helped me understand this a bit better. but of course if you're at the point where you can change the word order, you probably already understand the original sentence. so in particular, my question is this:

so ποιεῖ affects ἡμᾶς, even though they are pretty far apart, geographically i guess you could say, in the sentence. i guess what i'm getting at is that i had a hard time recognizing that. is there a sort of internal process that you guys go through in trying to see this, or clues that you look for, or is it just a lack of experience with the language that is making this difficult?

and not for nothing, i think it's a pretty tricky sentence even in english. anyway, i'm still kinda trying to formulate what my specific difficulties are here, but im hoping this is a good starting point.

thanks again for the help,
dave

[IreneY]

latergr8born have you tried analyzing the sentence? You know, step 1 hunt for the verbs (there's only one here) and then start asking questions like "Who does" "Does to whom" "What does it do" etc?

[GlottalGreekGeek]

This sentence follows the most common word order in Greek, which is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). Technically, ἡμᾶς may not be the direct object of the verb. But the sentence starts as ? δὲ πλοῦτος ἡμᾶς , announcing a clear subject and a clear direct object, and following the SOV order thus far. Since these are the first words of the sentence (and the first subject and the first object), I was inclined to think that these were the key nouns/pronouns of the sentence's actions.

[lategr8bon]

thanks again for the help, i really appreciate it. i havn't come across this SOV explanation before. at least not in such a direct succint form. that seems to clarify things alot. hopefully that will help me see things first time around going forward. i realize this must be pretty obvious to you all who are good with greek, but i'm still pretty new to this, so sometimes i miss these things.
thanks again!
dave.

[GlottalGreekGeek]

i realize this must be pretty obvious to you all who are good with greek, but i'm still pretty new to this, so sometimes i miss these things.

It certainly wasn't obvious to me when I was starting Greek Persistence will improve your Greek greatly, no doubt. Good luck!

[Hu]

so ποιεῖ affects ἡμᾶς, even though they are pretty far apart, geographically i guess you could say, in the sentence. i guess what i'm getting at is that i had a hard time recognizing that. is there a sort of internal process that you guys go through in trying to see this, or clues that you look for, or is it just a lack of experience with the language that is making this difficult?

Hemas (I don't feel like bothering with Greek text input) could be either the subject or the object on first appearance, but the fact that it follows the nominative ploutos and that Greek word order is usually SOV would strongly indicate that it's an accusative. In many instances, though, these sorts of ambiguities are the kind of thing you'll just have to remember as you read the sentence.

In English, as you read "But wealth makes us blind", you naturally don't understand the whole meaning of the sentence until you're finished reading it:

But
But what?

wealth
Okay, wealth is doing something in this sentence. Doing what?

makes
Alright, it makes something. What does it make?

us
But wealth makes us. The phrase "makes us" is usually used in English with a predicate noun that modifies "us": What does wealth make us?

blind
Ah! But wealth makes us blind. A complete thought.

The thing to remember is that the exact same process holds for Greek, only you're more used to seeing the verb before the object:

Ho de
But the (masculine thing). So a masculine-gender thing is doing something in this sentence.

ploutos
So the subject is wealth. Keeping in mind that Greek word order is SOV, you shouldn't think "Wealth does what?", but "Wealth does somethingto whom?" The "does something" will come later.

hemas
But wealth does something to us. What does it do to us?

tuphlous
But wealth us blind something. Wealth is doing something to us that results in us being blind. The only logical verb to expect is "makes".

poiei.
Makes! "But the wealth us blind makes." It's exactly the same as in English, only you have to learn to comprehend different parts at different times.

Don't go looking for the verb when you have the subject in mind, because that's not Greek, it's English. Learning another language means learning to think about things differently, such as learning how to process different parts of speech at different times.

[IreneY]

Don't go looking for the verb when you have the subject in mind, because that's not Greek, it's English. Learning another language means learning to think about things differently, such as learning how to process different parts of speech at different times.

Errr it is the Greek way. Definitely. Having the subject in mind can be a bit tricky in ancient Greek can't it? I mean is it the subject or the predicate? What about the subject of the infinitive? And for me, such sentences where not much as another language since, bar the use of the participle, the rest of the sentence could very well be structured in exactly the same way. I'd still go for the verb if I couldn't understand what it was saying though.

[Hu]

Errr it is the Greek way. Definitely. Having the subject in mind can be a bit tricky in ancient Greek can't it? I mean is it the subject or the predicate? What about the subject of the infinitive? And for me, such sentences where not much as another language since, bar the use of the participle, the rest of the sentence could very well be structured in exactly the same way. I'd still go for the verb if I couldn't understand what it was saying though.

Is modern Greek SVO?

lategr8bon said he had a hard time recognizing that ποιεῖ affects ἡμᾶς, as (I assume) he's not used to the verb coming last. That's one of the things you have to get used to in a language that orders its parts of speech differently, and can be confusing for a beginner.

What I was referring to is the idea (commonly taught in universities here) to find the main verb first of all in the sentence, then the subject, etc.. so that you read the sentence in a back-and-forth manner without any regard for how the writer thought. The Greeks would have expected the object to come after the subject. Learning to do the same, and comprehending Greek that way, is essential to learning Greek.

[IreneY]

Modern Greek, as ancient Greek is SOV, SVO, OVS, whatever

Now I understand what you are saying by the way (ok I am a little dense to begin with and heat has melted what passes for a brain in my case)

I prefer a sort of combination. First you read the phrase as a whole, if that doesn't work or you are not sure you just remove the obvious parenthetical sentences and if that doesn't work either you do a word by word analysis. I'm afraid I am a traditionalist when it comes to the analysis and go for the verbs first. It works better for me at least but I won't deny that this isn't the only way to do it or claim it is the best. Whatever works is the best.

[hyptia]

Word order used to confuse me something awful. Still does sometimes. When I first encountered a sample of Herodotus' description of how Egyptians regard crocodiles, I was baffled by the sentence τοῖς μὲν οὖν Αἰγυπτίων ἱεροί εἰσιν οἱ κροκόδιλοι, τοῖς δὲ οὔ, ἀλλ' ἅτε πολεμίους περιέπουσιν. Since then, I have tried considering reading a clause to be like a game of fill in the blanks; when one encounters an accusative, put it in the blank that says "direct object" and so on. (Although in practice, I tend to read the whole clause, identify each noun and the finite verb, and then look to see which nouns are in what case and what person and number the finite verb is in.) By now, that sentence presents no difficulty to me.

Another tricky construct is when the words alternate between 2 different functions in the sentence. Take for instance "τίς σε ἀνθρώπων ἔπεισε πολέμιον αντὶ φίλου ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν μου στρατεῦσαι;" One who has been exposed to this kind of wording knows to take the first 2 accusatives together (the third being the object of the infinitive), but taking the partitive genitive with the nominative rather than the accusative is not obvious (to me anyway).

[GlottalGreekGeek]

When I read a sentence in Greek, I generally just keep reading it over and over until it makes sense. Of course, what I really do is glean images from the words as I read them in order, try to put all the images together in my brain into a composite image, and then read the sentence again and see if the syntax is consistent with my composite image, and I keep on re-reading the sentence until my composite image is consistent with the syntax. In other words, I use context to figure a lot of this stuff out. Of course, much of this happens in the sub-concious - I really don't analyze the Greek I read unless constant re-reading *simply* doesn't work.

EDIT : And if I'm doing a cold-reading - that is, read without any aid (lexicon, grammar, etc), I usually don't re-read either.

[IreneY]

hyptia if it works for you (as it obviously does) then, as I said before, it's perfect. However I do have a question: an accusative is most of the times the direct object, granted, but it can be other things too. How do you cope with that?

Φυλάξαντες ἒτι ν?κτα ?χώ?ουν ?κ τῶν οἰκιών.

Ἀ?χήν δε ο? π?έπει θη?ᾶν τἀμήχανα.

Σκοπει πῶς ἂν βέλτιων τήν ψυχήν γένοιο.

are some examples I just took from a textbook.

[Hu]

I prefer a sort of combination. First you read the phrase as a whole, if that doesn't work or you are not sure you just remove the obvious parenthetical sentences and if that doesn't work either you do a word by word analysis. I'm afraid I am a traditionalist when it comes to the analysis and go for the verbs first. It works better for me at least but I won't deny that this isn't the only way to do it or claim it is the best. Whatever works is the best.

Certainly whatever helps you most. After all, you have to have some idea of what all the words are doing in the sentence to identify each one. My advice was based mainly on my annoyance with the teaching at my university, which I feel is reprehensible in its notions of how to read Greek and Latin.

[annis]

Modern Greek, as ancient Greek is SOV, SVO, OVS, whatever

Such languages are called "nonconfigurational" (that is, the S, O and V roles don't depend on word order, nor do they have preferred slots), and in the case of ancient Greek, "radically nonconfigurational." Various attempts to make Greek fit into the SOV/SVO/VSO, etc. typology fail. No statistical measure shows a clear winner, so I don't think we should use such terms to describe Greek word order. Latin is SOV. Greek is not.

is there a sort of internal process that you guys go through in trying to see this, or clues that you look for, or is it just a lack of experience with the language that is making this difficult?

Practice, practice, practice, especially with wild (i.e. non-textbookified) Greek. The ultimate goal is to read Greek in the given order, and without internal translation, but when I cannot figure a sentence out I do drop into a more analytical mode (more like IreneY's than Hu's). But after you figure the sentence out you must go back and reread it a few times to make sure you can grasp the meaning in the original word order.

[hyptia]

[mraig]

Here is a very interesting piece on the difference between hunting and pecking through a sentence for subject/verb (on the one hand) and reading in the order the words come (one the other) - long, but worth a read:

http://www.bu.edu/mahoa/hale_art.html

It's about Latin, not Greek, but there's no reason that what it says wouldn't also apply to Greek.

And about word order - as Annis called into question above, is there any word order in Greek which can be called to some extent 'normal'? Certainly SOV is 'regular' (inasmuch as there can be such a concept) for Latin, but I wouldn't think that this would prove to be true for Greek.

If anything, I find that Greek word order tends to match English much more often than Latin does - but I wonder if anyone knows of a study on the frequency of different patterns of word order in Greek?

[annis]

If anything, I find that Greek word order tends to match English much more often than Latin does - but I wonder if anyone knows of a study on the frequency of different patterns of word order in Greek?

Several, but they don't agree.

First, a quote from Helma Dik, Word Order in Ancient Greek, p.6

In the domain of the clause, syntacticians and word order typologists try to determine the `basic' order of clausal constituents, while still abstracting from the actual order of single words: 'S(ubject) - O(bject) - V(erb)' or 'SVO' (or...)?, that is the question they try to answer, regardless of the fact that the majority of clauses, like those in the first sentence of Herodotus, do not even have all three of these constituents. Others have argued that the one certainty we have in Greek word order is the Mittelstellung of the verb. Surprisingly, these views do not belong to the past.

She then lists several studies in a footnote:

The question 'VSO, SVO, SOV, or all of the above?' is posed by Cervin (1990). Devine & Stephens (1994:382) call Classical Greek 'basically a subject-object-verb language'. Dunn (1988) gives 'statistical rules'; Meier-Brügger (1992: I.112) follows Kiecker's (1911) general rule of Mittelstellung. Mithun (1987) presents pertinent criticism of this misguided line of research.

Cervin is a dissertation at U. of Illinois. The D&S is their Prosody of Greek Speech from OUP. Dunn (Graham) "Syntactic Word Order in Herodotean Greek," Glotta 66: 63-79. M-B. is Griechische Sprachwissenschaft (2 vols). Mithun is Is Basic Word Order Universal?, pp.281-328 from a larger book edited by Tomlin, Coherence and Grounding in Discourse.

So, several papers, some directly related to the question in Greek, some on the general SOV/SVO/VSO matter.

[annis]

A word order thread has appeared on classics-l, which already has more references than I knew of before.

http://lsv.uky.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=in ... &S=&P=1015

[mraig]

Thanks!