Sentence first enclitics
Posted: Sat Jul 28, 2007 4:59 am
Hi,
I was reading on the B-Greek list and somebody posted a (not so pleasantly worded) "challenge" about Hebrews 3:16 and why some read the τινες γα? as having the interrogative pronoun rather than the indefinite one. That's not the issue I want to bring up here, but it made me consciously realize that there are a number of places throughout the New Testament where what are supposed to be enclitics come at the start of a sentence or phrase, which seems contradictory.
I did a not so thorough search and this only seems to happens with τις and only in the plural forms (mostly τινες but also τινων and τισι in 1 Tim 5:24). And in most of these cases, the context seems to overwhelmingly imply that these are statements and not questions so these have to be the indefinite pronoun. Does anybody know, though, if there are any other enclitics that occur sentence first? I guess it's possible some of those sentence first εστιν are, but since it also has a non-enclitic form, I'm not sure how you could tell.
My other question is whether my assumption that this never occurs in Classical Greek (or pre-Classical) is correct. Are there any examples of enclitics coming first? The places I looked didn't really discuss this too much but it seemed to me that there are no such examples. And so I would guess this an aspect of Koine Greek that could be listed as a new development?
If that's true, then what happened to let this happen? At first I thought maybe they had to be followed by a postpositive conjunction, and that seems to be true for almost all the cases -- the only example I found that wasn't was in 1 Tim 5:24, one of the cases that in my opinion might just barely be seen as a question. Is it the conjunction that allows this to occur, maybe because on some deeper level the enclitic isn't really the first word, but the surface structure is formed by moving the conjunction from first to second position?
Or did these words just lose their enclitic nature? Maybe this says something about the development of the accent in Greek? I couldn't find anything on this anywhere (except the bare mention that it occurs), and quite possibly maybe there's not much to say on this topic, but does anybody have any ideas or comments?
I was reading on the B-Greek list and somebody posted a (not so pleasantly worded) "challenge" about Hebrews 3:16 and why some read the τινες γα? as having the interrogative pronoun rather than the indefinite one. That's not the issue I want to bring up here, but it made me consciously realize that there are a number of places throughout the New Testament where what are supposed to be enclitics come at the start of a sentence or phrase, which seems contradictory.
I did a not so thorough search and this only seems to happens with τις and only in the plural forms (mostly τινες but also τινων and τισι in 1 Tim 5:24). And in most of these cases, the context seems to overwhelmingly imply that these are statements and not questions so these have to be the indefinite pronoun. Does anybody know, though, if there are any other enclitics that occur sentence first? I guess it's possible some of those sentence first εστιν are, but since it also has a non-enclitic form, I'm not sure how you could tell.
My other question is whether my assumption that this never occurs in Classical Greek (or pre-Classical) is correct. Are there any examples of enclitics coming first? The places I looked didn't really discuss this too much but it seemed to me that there are no such examples. And so I would guess this an aspect of Koine Greek that could be listed as a new development?
If that's true, then what happened to let this happen? At first I thought maybe they had to be followed by a postpositive conjunction, and that seems to be true for almost all the cases -- the only example I found that wasn't was in 1 Tim 5:24, one of the cases that in my opinion might just barely be seen as a question. Is it the conjunction that allows this to occur, maybe because on some deeper level the enclitic isn't really the first word, but the surface structure is formed by moving the conjunction from first to second position?
Or did these words just lose their enclitic nature? Maybe this says something about the development of the accent in Greek? I couldn't find anything on this anywhere (except the bare mention that it occurs), and quite possibly maybe there's not much to say on this topic, but does anybody have any ideas or comments?