Plato's Apology - "οτι"

Greek Learning Greek
1

I’m currently on unit 21 in M, but occasionally I “cheat” and look up various classical texts, which provides a pleasant diversion from the exercises found in M, despite the limitations of my knowledge.

Lately, I’ve been looking at Plato’s Apology. I’m struggling to understand how the first sentence ("“ὅτι μὲν ὑμεῖς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, πεπόνθατε ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν κατηγόρων, οὐκ οἶδα…”) can be translated (in Scaife Viewer) as “How you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers, I do not know.”

I know that “οτι” is used in indirect discourse, meaning"that". And I know that a good translator must not be a slave to the vocabulary of the source, and must render the thought of the author in a way that is natural to the target language. But how did the translator arrive at “How you…” from “οτι”?

Thanks to all.

2

ὅτι has two main uses. One is to introduce indirect speech, as you know.

But this is the other. It’s the indirect form of τί “what?”

τί πεπόνθατε; “How have you been affected?” lit. “What have you suffered?” (Direct question)

ὅτι πεπόνθατε οὐκ οἶδα “How you’ve been affected I don’t know.” (Indirect question)

3

Why isn’t it written as ὅ τι (or even ὅ,τι) here in our editions? At least that seems to be my reading of what the LSJ prescribes. I came across ὅ,τι in an old (German?) edition once, and always wondered why Burnett printed ὅτι.

4

ὅ τι would be out of line with the usual way of writing the non-neut.sing. forms, and ὅτι recognizes that it’s a single word. But you can please yourself. It’s not a matter of right and wrong.

The forms can of course be either indefinite relatives (“I despise people who ask trivial questions”) or indirect interrogatives (“I wonder why they do that”). Here the latter.


Having settled hoti’s business, we can move on to properly basing oun.