Greek 101 is next year. I picked up a copy of crosby schaffer and will go through that with Athenize next year to cement my understanding. After a cursory examination of the first chapter I have a question.
In latin the Albative takes all of the cases dealing with time when, place from which, et cetera. In greek the same concepts take the dative. Why? If (and I am assuming here) the dative in greek still symbolizes the to or for relationship why are the time when and other relationships symbolized by the dative. Is there a difference between these cases conceptually? Is it possible to trace them both back to a common case which originates in IE or something simillar meaning by with from to for?
Ooh, not exactly. Place from which for Greek is usually in the genitive.
Why? If (and I am assuming here) the dative in greek still symbolizes the to or for relationship why are the time when and other relationships symbolized by the dative. Is there a difference between these cases conceptually? Is it possible to trace them both back to a common case which originates in IE or something simillar meaning by with from to for?
The original IE case system had eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative and instrumental. As each language lost a few of the cases those functions migrated to a remaining case. In Latin the locative and instrumental functions merged with the ablative. In Greek the lost locative and instrumental functions went to the dative, and the ablative to the genitive. So we expect different behaviors in each language depending on where the locative or instrumental (which has a “time within which” significance in Sanskrit, maybe reflecting IE) ended up.
Edit: I forgot to add — both languages have vestigial locatives, and Homer an instrumental.
If memory serves, Sihler in his Comparative Grammar of Latin and Greek indicates that it is considered to be something of a mystery how the locative ended up merging with the ablative in Latin, since there isn’t a whole lot of common semantic ground between the concepts of “from” and “at”.
My feeling is that the merging of the locative and dative makes a lot more sense in Greek – I think about all the languages that use the same preposition for “to” and “at” – e.g., the Romance languages do, and Russian does). On the other hand, I am pretty sure that Greek merged those two particular cases more because they were formally almost identical (both marked with an -i of some kind) rather than because of any semantic considerations.
The merging of locative with ablative in Latin also makes a lot of sense: one can say in English that you make something FROM wood or WITH wood, for instance. As does the merging of ablative (the “from” case) with genitive, which not only Greek but also many other IE langauges do – e.g., the Slavic languages.
thank you BTW where does the byzantine mosaic come from and who is it? it looks remarkably like the mosaic of Justinian from San Vitale that we covered in Art history class. But I’m probably wrong.
poetic datives in -oisi (and by analogy -aisi) are, if i recall correctly, direct survivals of the locative case (sanskrit -esu probably comes from -oisu). i think the same holds for consonant-stem datives in -si. the more standard datives in -ois (and by analogy -ais) are actually instrumental terminations (sanskrit -ais in the pronominal declension). the only dative ending that is historically a dative ending is -i, which shows up in the singular of the vowel and consonant declensions.
those three cases seem to have merged at a very early point, though a separate termination for the instrumental plural of consonant-stems stuck around into mycenaean (-phi, which homer artifically generalizes).