le/wn e)/xei e)nne/a ske/lh

[hyptia]

οὐδεῖς λεόντων ἔχει πέντε σκέλη.
εἷς δὲ λέων ἔχει τέτταρα πλείονα σκέλη ἢ οὐδεῖς.
λέων οὖν ἔχει ἐννέα σκέλη.

Corrections welcome, as always.

[modus.irrealis]

Hi,

First, I feel stupid because it took me so long to figure it out. I was like, I know there's a riddle or something there, but then it finally hit me, but it's clever.

The only correction I can make is the accententuation of ο?δείς, which has an acute for who knows what reason.

Other than that, I think I've read that the contracted form πλείω and the genitive of comparison ο?δενός are preferred, but I don't know how true that is. I'm also not sure if τέττα?α πλείονα σκέλη is idiomatic and I wonder if you use a dative and say something like τέττα?σι πλείω σκέλη. But this isn't based on anything concrete, so my comments aren't worth much.

[hyptia]

Thanks! I remember reading something to this effect (in English) on the internet years ago and decided to take a shot at translating it.

I didn't know of the contracted form, but on looking it up I see it now. However, in Teach Yourself Ancient Greek, page 171 it says that the second member of the comparison must be the same as the first, citing the example Σωκράτης σωφότερός ἐστιν ἢ ἐγώ.

White's book says in #867 that the dative of manner is used to denote the degree of difference. Therefore I think you're right about τέτταρσι; I simply hadn't gotten that far yet in my reading.

[GlottalGreekGeek]

With comparisons, one can either use the [nominative] [comparative adjective] h [nominative] construction, or the [nominative] [comparative] [genitive] approach. Technically, the noun being compared doesn't need to be in nominative, but I kept it that way to make this simpler.