ἄκριτος, ἄκριτον is introduced in this unit as an adjective. I can see that there is concord between the noun πολίτας and the adjective ἀκρίτους in the sentence. But the sense seems to me to be adverbial with ἀκρίτους ἀποκτεῖναι being considered as a unit, rather than πολίτας ἀκρίτους being considered as an atributive adjective with noun.
I’ve seen translations like “being killed indiscriminately,” “being killed without giving them a trial,” etc. for ἀκρίτους ἀποκτεῖναι.
ἄκριτος, ἄκριτον undecided; unjudged, without trial p.212
So the citizens are put to death “unjudged” . If you are “unjudged” you have not received a trial so they are put to death “without a trial”. It is just a normal adjective.
You are trying to map an English translation onto to the Greek and this will not help you to explain the Greek syntax. Perhaps things might have been a little clearer if the definition given by M. was “untried” rather than “unjudged”.
LSJ has:
unjudged, untried, of persons and things, ἀκρίτους κτείνειν, ἀποκτεῖναι without trial, Hdt. 3.80, Th. 2.67, cf. Lys. 19.7, D. 17.3; ἄ. ἀποθανεῖν Antipho 5.48, cf. Th. 8.48, etc.; πρᾶγμα ἄ. cause not yet tried, Isoc. 19.2, cf. Pl. Ti. 51c:…
My first impression was that it was simply an adjective, just separated from its noun by the verb. But then I started to doubt myself, mainly after looking at the LSJ references that you give!
Anyway, you’ve put my mind at ease about this.
The placement of the adjective after the verb I guess gives emphasis to the unjudged aspect.
I would say it’s predicate position rather than attributive (just like the recent thread on the Koine forum). They are put to death untried rather than the untried citizens were put to death.
Yes, that was my initial problem. If I put the adjective back adjacent to its noun, then I got: They killed the untried citizens.
In that case, the adjective was clearly attributive, but disconnected from the verb.
So in that case, the adjective could be anything, like, for example, old. They killed the old citizens.
It didn’t seem to make sense to have: They killed the citizens old.
I’m sorry but this is ridiculous. They do not “become untried’ during the act of being killed!! They were killed “untried,” i.e. without having been tried. It’s really quite straightforward.
In particular: “In Greek, attributive words accompanying a noun that has the article are restricted to a couple of positions, but an attributive word accompanying a noun without the article is less restricted.”
Sorry to have been so curt. I was too busy to explain just then. I skipped the NT thread, as I skip most NT threads, but glancing through I’d agree that αγιου is best taken as attributive there, qualifying πνευματος (which surely needs it) and acquiring some salience from its deferred position. Be that as it may, in the Mastronarde sentence ακριτους is clearly to be read as predicative. It’s not “They were so unjust that they killed untried citizens” but “They were so unjust that they killed citizens untried”—a stronger and much more natural thing say in Greek. The predicative/attributive distinction is fundamental, and here (despite what Hylander quotes from CGCG in the other place) the word order is decisive.
I was trying to find a structural analogy in order to rationalize the predicate position idea.
In my mind, if an adjective is predicative, then I should be able to isolate the predication in the sentence. Is this always true?
So that is why I did a thought experiment to see if I could fit the sentence into the two-accusative example given on page 143. Of course, saying that the killing causes the citizen to be untried is ridiculous. But it seemed to me that the untriedness of the citizen was only of relevance at the point of execution, and so I made a leap. The scope of being untried seemed to be from the point of execution onwards, at least in terms of its relevance to the executioners who are being judged by their indiscriminate actions.
This was obviously not a good idea, but at least the structure of the sentence was exactly parallel.
I personally think that katalogon was on the right track with his questions. The answer, as I understand it, is that predicative adjective moves some of the meaning of the adjective up to the sentence level rather than leaving it at the substantive level. Like a preposition gives a substantive sentence-level adverbial force, the predicative adjective gains something almost adverbial.
Taking the examples from Smyth 1168
ατελει τηι νικηι ανεστησαν they retired with their victory incomplete
ψιλην εχων την κεφαλην with his head bare
τας τριηρεις αφειλκυσαν κενας they towed off the ships without their crews
This sentence-level effect is the force of the adjective on the verb. The ατελει says something about the retiring as well as about the victory. The ψιλην says something about how he goes into battle as well as the head. The “untried” in this thread’s example says something about the citizens, but also about how they are being put to death. This effect is always present in the predicative position whether or not we have a nice way of saying it in English or not.
And while I couldn’t work up the effort to reply to Hylander’s post in the Koine thread, I think that mwh’s objection here is very reasonable and deserves an answer. However, I disagree with him following pretty much the argument that I’ve just laid out. In Matt 1:20, one important effect of the αγιου is on the sentence level. Saying that the the child is born out of spirit is not really enough to allay fears of cuckoldry, even if a spirit specifically associated with God. I hardly need to cite ancient examples among the pagans for this. But the αγιου part is predicative in order specify an adverbial “above-board” sort of force to the act of generation in Matt 1:20. It’s nice expressive Greek. And again, whether or not we have a pat way to say it in English or not doesn’t affect the Greek meaning. (We’re somewhat trapped with the gloss “holy”. Change it to a different gloss and it becomes much easier to see: “…for what was in her was conceived out of spirit morally pure.”)
This is getting a lot closer to the source of my interest in this example from Mastronarde. What amazed me about the sentence was that an odd-appearing adjective (without trial) was being used to effect an extremely powerful and concise adverbial expression.
When I said in my initial post that I did not understand how to categorize this, I should have said as a literary technique, not as simply grammatical.
What I see happening is this process:
start with a transitive verb, κρινω
generate an alpha-privative adjective, ἄκρινος
use this adjective as a concise and powerful adverbial with certain verbs, such as ἀποκτείνω
Does this process have a name? Is it used a lot?
So then we have a powerful and concise way of saying “to put to death without allowing a trial.”
The adverbial expression “without allowing a trial” is powerfully and concisely just one word - an adjective applied to the victim.
Notice the examples I gave from Smyth. They violate both 1. and 2. of your proposal already. But look up predicate position for adjectives in a grammar.
They “towed off the empty ships” versus “they towed off the ships without their crews.”
Very much like the untried example. Predicate position gives emphasis to the manner of towing.
All three examples have the adjective in predicate position as can be seen from the adjectives being outside the article-noun group.
In the untried example there is no article. Can anything be said about predicate versus attributive if there is no article?
In English I would say noun-adjective means predicative and adjective-noun means attributive.
Rooms Available is predicative; Available Rooms is attributive.
But in Greek that ordering rule does not apply.
The separation of the noun and the adjective by the verb seems to me to mark predicative.
I don’t know if that would be the rule or not. However anything that could not normally occur between the noun and its article makes me wake up. I think it might be useful to compile a lot of examples.
From reading 1 Peter over the weekend, I see that 1Pe 2:12 and 4:8 are easy to spot as predicative, as they have the article:
Ι finally stumbled across what I think may be the grammatical term for this, which is what has eluded me for so long. I’ve been studying Sanskrit for a while. On page 105 of Complete Sanskrit by Michael Coulson (2010), a Teach Yourself book, there is a section on what is called “predicative accusatives”, a term which I had not seen before.
“In sentences such as ‘he likes his curry hot’, ‘they drink their martinis dry’ much of the burden of statement is carried by an adjective (‘hot’, ‘dry’) syntactically dependent upon a subordinate element (‘curry’, ‘martinis’)… Such an adjective is ‘predicative’ in rather the same way as is the adjectival complement of a nominal sentence: the sentences are, in fact, closely similar in meaning to ‘the curry he likes is hot’, ‘the martinis they drink are dry.’ In Sanskrit, too, the object of a verb may be qualified by such a predicate.”
So if I look at the example sentence “…they put citizens to death untried”, and re-arrange to emphasize the predicative accusative, I get “citizens they put to death are untried”, in which ‘untried’ is clearly predicative even though there is no definite article involved and the usual test of falling outside the article-noun unit cannot be applied (M. page 64 sect. 5).
Hi, I’ve just seen this thread. The “predicative” bit is right, but not the “accusative”: this is not specific to a particular case. It’s a predicative adjective.
I gather from your first post that you understand practically how this is working, but just can’t find an earlier reference to the grammatical label for this in Mastronarde, or a specific grammatical treatment of it (i.e. it seems to you that Mastronarde has used a word in a way not specifically explained in earlier pages): no surprises there, I vaguely recall that several other concepts are used in Mastronarde without foreshadowing. One can only introduce so much when presenting a language in bite-sized pieces: other aspects of the language will need to be picked up in different ways (e.g. raising a question as you have done in this thread).
But I wouldn’t change “…they put citizens to death untried” to “citizens they put to death are untried”: these are separate propositions. It’s a slightly different case (and a different language), but for a good explanation of “predicative”, check out (by way of analogy) how Woodcock explains predicative vs attributive participles in Latin in sec. 91 of his new Latin syntax, and how they would be translated:
Thanks, cb, for correcting me with this. I think that “predicative accusative” is a term that applies to verbs of making, naming and choosing and so is not relevant to my example.
The lesson that I’ve learned from the “put citizens to death without a trial” example is that I was confused by first looking at the English translation and seeing that “without a trial” looked adverbial.
I should have looked at the Greek sentence first and realized that the predicative position at the end was for emphasis.
Main conclusion:
get the meaning of a sentence from the Greek; do not allow any accompanying English translation to confuse things.