Sentence first enclitics

[modus.irrealis]

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 γαÏ￾ 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?

[Bert]

That is an interesting question. I don't have a lot of time right now (seeing that it is bedtime) but my first thought is that it might be because τις is the same word as τίς. The accent indicates that the intonation is different but still, it is the same word. If this is indeed the reason then words like πώς, ποτέ and πού should occur first in a sentence as well. Anyone know if that happens?

[modus.irrealis]

...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?

Scratch that -- that's the kind of "explanation" I don't like since it's little more than a restatement of the fact (if fact it is). But I'm still wondering if this something that only (or mostly) occurs when the enclitic is followed by something like δε or γαÏ￾.

[Bert]

Looking in Smyth (187) I found that enclitics retain their accents if (among other things) they are first in a sentence. The examples given all have a post possitive following so it does not prove anyting, it just gives some confirmation that your question is valid.

[modus.irrealis]

That is an interesting question. I don't have a lot of time right now (seeing that it is bedtime) but my first thought is that it might be because τις is the same word as τίς. The accent indicates that the intonation is different but still, it is the same word. If this is indeed the reason then words like πώς, ποτέ and πού should occur first in a sentence as well. Anyone know if that happens?

That's a good point -- I did a quick google search for "ποτὲ δὲ" and I found from Wisdom of Solomon 16:18-19:

ποτὲ μὲν γὰÏ￾ ἡμεÏ￾οῦτο φλόξ, ἵνα μὴ καταφλέξῃ Ï„á½° á¼￾π᾿ ἀσεβεῖς ἀπεσταλμένα ζῷα, ἀλλ᾿ αá½￾τοὶ βλέποντες ἴδωσιν, ὅτι Θεοῦ κÏ￾ίσει á¼￾λαύνονται· 19 ποτὲ δὲ καὶ μεταξὺ ὕδατος ὑπὲÏ￾ τὴν πυÏ￾ὸς δύναμιν φλέγει, ἵνα ἀδίκου γῆς γεννήματα διαφθείÏ￾ῃ.

which seems to have enclitics coming sentence first.

[modus.irrealis]

Looking in Smyth (187) I found that enclitics retain their accents if (among other things) they are first in a sentence. The examples given all have a post possitive following so it does not prove anyting, it just gives some confirmation that your question is valid.

Thanks -- I did look it up in Smyth but I seem to have missed that part (c) but it does answer part of my questions. I guess we can see the τινες δε in the NT without a corresponding τινες μεν as a fairly straightforward development of the Classical usage, and I guess this does sort of eliminate the ποτε example I found. Maybe then moving to other postpositive conjunctions is not so unnatural either? But if this postpositive hypothesis is correct, then that would leave examples like 1 Tim 5:24 even stranger (and probably doubly so because they don't involve τινες). Maybe this is a colloquialism. Hmm...

Edit again to add that this still seems quite odd, and self-contradictory, behaviour for enclitics, even the example from Classical Greek.

[annis]

Edit again to add that this still seems quite odd, and self-contradictory, behaviour for enclitics, even the example from Classical Greek.

When thinking about enclitics I often find it helpful to make a clear distinction between enclitics that are mostly syntactic or pragmatic (μέν, γε) and those that fit into other categories (nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs). All the words in Smyth 187 are non-syntactic.

With one exception — δή in Homer, especially δὴ τότε — I have never encountered or even heard of enclitic conjunctions (δέ, τε) or discourse markers (ἄÏ￾α, τοι) coming first in a clause.

[modus.irrealis]

That makes sense, to distinguish them that way. But are μέν and δέ enclitics in the strict sense, since they don't seem to form accentuation groups with the words that precede them?

Part of the difficulty for me is that I'm trying to figure out what enclitics actually were in ancient Greek -- and comparing to the modern languages I'm familiar doesn't offer any help -- I may be wrong but the Greek enclitics (at least those you've labelled non-syntactic) seem to be "phonological enclitics" in that syntactically they're free but they form single accentuation groups with words that precede them, whereas in the languages I know, enclitics are also "syntactic enclitics" in that their position is rigidly determined even if in general the word order is very free (these might be a good parallel to your syntactic enclitics). (I guess I could rewrite that in term of clitics in general instead of just enclitics.)

I'm wondering now if these uses (in the ~ μεν ... ~ δε construction and so on) could be relics of when these words had full accentuation? I know, e.g., that some of the prepositions were fully accented at one point with things like ἔπι in Homer.

Another part of the difficulty, now that I think of it, is that in your average Greek sentence so many words can lose their accent completely (unless the grave accent means something else), so why couldn't an enclitic word start a sentence if say λαὸς can? Was there any real phonological reason keeping these words from first position?

Anyway, just some rambling thoughts that are not so close to my original question.

[annis]

That makes sense, to distinguish them that way. But are μέν and δέ enclitics in the strict sense, since they don't seem to form accentuation groups with the words that precede them?

D'oh! I have a bad habit of muddling up the distinction between enclitics and postpositives.

Meter gives some hints about how tightly μέν and δέ a linked to the word they follow (i.e., caesura patterns) but it's ambivalent.

[Bert]

syntactic, pragmatic, non-syntactic.

Do you mind giving a short description or explanation of these terms?

[annis]

syntactic, pragmatic, non-syntactic.

Do you mind giving a short description or explanation of these terms?

I'm being a little loose, but simply...

By syntactic I mean conjunctions but also things like μέν when used with δέ.

By pragmatic I mean things like γέ, ἄÏ￾α, δή — all those troublesome little words that so often get called "emphatic" in our grammars; the particles operating at the "presentational" and "interactional" levels as defined by Ptolemaios in this post from so long ago.

By non-syntactic I meant what we'd normally call "content words" (but that phrase upsets me — all words have content of some sort): verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, καὶ τὰ λοιπά.