Hey, I’m trying to translate:
Ὠς οὐδὲν ἡ μάθησις, ἄν μὴ νοῦς παρῃ = Learning… mind is missing. I just don’t get how this sentence is structured: where is the subject and where is the object? what is the role of Ὠς οὐδὲν?
Another question - what is the genitive form of μάθησις ?
This is a “general” conditional. ἄν (with a subjunctive verb παρῃ, negated by μὴ) is the usual contraction of εαν. εστι is understood as the verb of the apodosis, Ὠς οὐδὲν ἡ μάθησις.
“Learning/knowledge [is] as nothing if mind/intelligence is not present.”
Genitive of μάθησις: μαθησεως, acute on η.
It’s the πόλις/δύναμις declension, or whatever word your grammar uses as an example of paradigm. Dialectally -ις-words are inflected in slight variance; here we are in the Attic.
ἀπόλλυται
I think hylander’s version was more idiomatic English. Do we still write be not present as a translation of the subjunctive? It seems to me wholly wrong translate a subjunctive in Greek or any other language with an English subjunctive which has no idiomatic contemporary use. It smacks of pendantry.
Perhaps my current Pisan surroundings are making me a little lax.
Wouldn’t νοῦς παρεῖναι mean “to pay attention”?
That would be προσέχειν τὸν νοῦν
My aim wasn’t to provide a definitive translation, but rather to explain the structure of the sentence and give a general sense of the meaning, with some suggestions as to the range of possible English words that might correspond to μάθησις and νοῦς, so that godingly wouldn’t be locked into a specific translation.
This is one of the many pithy little proverbs neatly cast as iambic trimeter one-liners that are found in various ancient anthologies and attributed (almost certainly wrongly) to Menander and others, but mainly to Menander. Beginning Greek texts give these to their students to illustrate various grammatical points because they’re good examples of actual, real Greek. I think we looked at one of these not too long ago, maybe this very one. As I recall, mwh took me to task because I suggested it might be from Stobaeus, who actually provides whole passages of Greek verse, preserving parts of many poems by major poets that would otherwise have been lost.
Trite and banal commonplaces like this, wrenched from any context if there ever was a context, aren’t exactly profound masterpieces of ancient Greek literature that cry out for elaborate exegesis.
ἀπόλλυται
Here is the thread Hylander alluded to.