Ἐὰν ἔχει ἡ κιβωτὸς ὀπὰς, ἠκούσθη τὰ ἔντομα ἄν…
νυκτὸς βραδὺ διαγενομένης ἠγρύπνησεν ὁ ἀδελφὸς ἐκεῖνος. Πρῶτον μὲν κατεκλίνη πρηνὴς ἐλλογῶν πόσα ἐνέχειν τὸν θησαυρὸν, ἐπεῖτα δὲ ὕπτιος τὰ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ. τέλος δὲ θωυξάσων τῶν μελιττῶν ἐμαινετο καὶ ἀνασταθεὶς προσὲδραμεν πρὸς τὴν θήκην καὶ ἀνέῳγεν αὐτήν.
Here is another small composition :
ἄνθρωπός τις πλούσιος ἦν, ὃς εἶχεν δοῦλον λεγόμενον Ἰωάννην. Ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν μιᾷ τῶν ἡμερῶν ὁ πλούσιος ἐνέπαιζον Ἰωάννην καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ, “Ῥακά, ὁ θεός μισεῖ σε ὅτι ἐποίησεν σε εἶναι δοῦλον.”
καὶ παραχρῆμα ἔτι λαλοῦντος , ἰδοὺ ἄγγελος Κυρίου ὤφθη καὶ ἐστάθη παρά Ἰωάννῃ, καὶ εἶπεν τῷ πλουσίῳ, τί δὲ κατακαυχᾶσαι τῷ ἄλλῳ ? ἤδη εἶ ὑπὸ κρίσιν, ὅτι ἐγένου πλούσιος ἐν δόλῳ.
ἀλλά ἐποίησεν ὁ θεός Ἰωάννην πρὸς καιρὸν μικρὸν εἶναι δοῦλον σοῦ ἵνα γνῷ τὴν δοκιμὴν αὐτοῦ, εἰ πιστός ἐστιν. καὶ ἰδοὺ ἐδούλευσεν σοι ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ τοσαῦτα ἔτη. διὰ τοῦτο, ὁ θεός ἀγαπᾷ αὐτὸν .
Translation: There was a certain rich man who had a slave called John. It so happened that one day he mocked John and said to him, “ Idiot, God hates you because he has made you to be a slave..”And while he was yet speaking thus , behold an angel of the Lord appeared and stood by John, and he said to the rich man, “why do you boast against another man?” Already you are under judgment, because you became rich by deceit.
But God made John to be your servant for a little while in order that he might put him to the test, to see if he is faithful. And behold he has served you in righteousness all these years. Therefore, God loves him .
Lumping chunks is a composition strategy. There are composition phrase books with chunks of Greek from different authours that can be lumped together into one’s own writing to produce compositions. Their strength is that they are examples of idiomatic Greek, while their weakness is that they give the impression that all the phrases are set phrases.
The only other text where I can find the phrase ἐν μιᾷ τῶν ἡμερῶν is John of Damascus, Vita Barlaam et Joasaph. You?
For a structurally similar phrase, in the Library, Apollodorus says of Hercules returning from killing the Nemean Lion,
Hercules said to wait for 30 days, so the “on the τελευταίᾳ (day)” would be on the last day of a set period of time.
The idiomatic expression of causation is something that needs practice in a new language.
There are verbs in the δοῦλος family of words to express causation. καταδουλόω implies “to somebody”, which in this context of master-slave and of your theme of καταφρονεῖν is the master - the one speaking. If you were to write out explicitly who he was enslaved to, then δουλόω might be better.
I like it:
@Isaac: Note that ἐμπαίζω (normally) takes the dative and that κατακαυχάομαι (normally) takes the genitive.
A minor, minor quibble:
ὁ θεὸς ἀγαπᾷ αὐτόν.
But again, more to the point, I really like your comp, both the form and the meaning.
I’d like to hear you read one of your pieces out loud (slowly please!) posting the link here.
εὐτυχοῦ.
Markos,
What you suggested flows very elegantly indeed:
ἀλλ’ ἐδούλωσέ σοι ὁ θεὸς Ἰωάννην πρὸς καιρὸν μικρὸν ἵνα γνῷ τὴν δοκιμὴν αὐτοῦ, εἰ πιστός ἐστιν.
I’d like to hear you read one of your pieces out loud (slowly please!) posting the link here.
Certainly. Here’s my reading of “the old man and his two sons” (corrected for errors using your suggestions):
An elegant elephant perhaps.
The syntactic pattern is too heavy for that verb. This δουλόω contains in itself both an actual meaning and the omicron suffixed causal element. Adding past tense, perfective aspect, number, person, indirect object, subject and direct object makes a total of 9 morphosyntactic elements. 5-7 elements is more normal.
To be more idiomatic in your use of that type of causative, you could use a middle-passive form to reduce the valence (syntatical elements around the verb) by 1, OR you could split the meaning, by using a preceding phrase to describe a context from which the elements of meaning that you want to associate with ἐδούλωσέ could be implied.
The middle-passive valence reduction strategy might result in ἐδούλουτο αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰωάννης. Depending whether God is meant personally or the natural force of fate, ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ could be added or not. The context creating splitting strategy might result in something like ἐποίησεν ὁ Ἰωάννης πᾶν τὸ διαταχθὲν (αὐτῷ), διότι ἐδούλωσε αὐτὸν ὁ θεὸς
Thanks ἑκηβόλος, that is high register Greek indeed . Would a “commoner,” that is, a relatively uneducated Koine speaking person such as a shepherd, a fisherman, a farmer etc. of the NT era have easily understood such a statement if it was repeated to him ?
Unless somebody is trying to mock somebody, or to socially exclude them, there is generally an assumption that what people are saying makes sense. Even if it doesn’t make sense to the listener, it is assumed that it made sense to the speaker. Your question seems to suggest that there is a binary choice between understandimg and not understanding the thought. That binary logic is probably not the best way to conceptualise the question of understandability.
Beyond the question of whether (or how much of) the utterance was understood, there is the much more interesting question of what was understood. In your composition, your calque of “went to sleep” was unlikely to have been understood by a period language user as meaning κατακλίνω. They would more likely think that the person travelled some distance to be able to sleep (undisturbed perhaps). For these two sentences ἐποίησεν ὁ Ἰωάννης πᾶν τὸ διαταχθὲν (αὐτῷ), διότι ἐδούλωσε αὐτὸν ὁ θεὸς.
If by register you mean a type of speech that conforms to the formal constraints of a partucular genre, then which genre are we discussing? The split sentence structure way of writing Greek is a cross-genre feature and is not characteristic of the language that can be used to measure the degree of conformity to genre.
As for those with either no (or only a rudimentary) education, they, as we do, might understand from the first phrase that John was not acting according to choice. For the second phrase, understanding might depend on their conceptualise how or in what way a god makes a man become a slave. Perhaps it might be taken as “devotee”, perhaps that he was owned by the temple. Fatalistic and voluntary social stratification might be being expressed in Philipians 2:6-11. The relationship between the two phrases is expressed implicitly as well as explicitly (using grammar).
Thanks for your thoughts ἑκηβόλος. Please continue with your contributions in this thread. You make some provocative points.
Very well done. 1. It is easy to understand. 2. It is pleasant on the ears. 3. It’s probably pretty close to how a Semitic Koine speaker would have pronounced it. There is not much more one can expect from a Greek reading.
Can you explain this a bit. What do you mean by “heavy?”
That is a good question as far as it goes, but keep this in mind: You and ἑκηβόλος have very different writing styles. I love them both because reading both of them improves my overall reading fluency in Ancient Greek. Having ἑκηβόλος paraphrase your simple Semitic-Koine into a more Attic like register is very helpful to me pedagogically, regardless of any other considerations.
ἀληθὴ λέγεις. (ἀλλὰ νομίζω ὅτι ἔδει σε γράψαι τὸ Ἐὰν εἶχεν ἡ κιβωτὸς ὀπὰς…) νῦν οὖν τοῦτο λέγει. θαυμασίως Θεὸς τὰς μελίσσας ἔσῳσε.
εαν εχει, “corrected” to εαν ειχεν. You are both forgetting that with εαν the subjunctive is used. And did none of you see anything amiss with πῶς μὴ ἐπνίγοντο αἱ μέλισσαὶ ἄν;? Don’t you think you should have “internalized” these things by now?
Just popping in, and now I’ll as quickly pop back out.
I thought ἔχει was a way of writing the subjunctive. Not the ordinary way, but a supposed alternative that I used because I didn’t know how to type the iota subscript of ῃ on my friend’s Windows computer.
If the box exists itself but the story is in the past, does the form of the conditional get mixed, like I was trying to do?
I think it is helpful to categorise wrongly composed Greek into 3 types - mistakes, errors and ignorance. In assigning somebody elses “wrong” Greek to one of those categories, there is a fair ammount of guesswork, and the authours may have a better idea of which type it is than the person correcting does.
Let me try with some examples from the compositions here in this thread:
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Markos surmised that what appeared to be the present tense ἔχει should have been the imperfect εἶχεν in the conditional. I actually believed that that was an alternative spelling of the subjunctive. It was an error, but not the one he thought.
Now, back to what Michael said. If nobody can see anything wrong with πῶς μὴ ἐπνίγοντο αἱ μέλισσαὶ ἄν; then it is ignorance, and a new concept or set of concepts needs to be introduced or learned.
I have no idea why it is wrong.
ἔχει has never been an alternative way of writing ἔχῃ, except perhaps for the occasional scribe who didn’t know Greek that well. One might have written ἔχηι…
I over-extended the rule for the second person singular present and future middle and passive forms.
Thanks Marcos..You’re right about ἐμπαίζω (normally) taking the dative. In the GNT , when ἐμπαίζω is an active verb it always takes the dative. Examples:
καὶ πλέξαντες στέφανον ἐξ ἀκανθῶν ἐπέθηκαν ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ καὶ κάλαμον ἐν τῇ δεξιᾷ αὐτοῦ, καὶ γονυπετήσαντες ἔμπροσθεν αὐτοῦ > ἐνέπαιξαν αὐτῷ > λέγοντες Χαῖρε, Βασιλεῦ τῶν Ἰουδαίων,
Matthew 27:29
Even with infinitive,
ἵνα μή ποτε θέντος αὐτοῦ θεμέλιον καὶ μὴ ἰσχύοντος ἐκτελέσαι πάντες οἱ θεωροῦντες ἄρξωνται > αὐτῷ ἐμπαίζειν
Luke 14:29
etc.
There is not enough evidence in the GNT that κατακαυχάομαι normally takes the genitive , but I have no reason to doubt that what you’re saying is true as you have read much more Greek literature than I have. So I will amend my composition by taking these corrections into consideration:
ἄνθρωπός τις πλούσιος ἦν, ὃς εἶχεν δοῦλον λεγόμενον Ἰωάννην. Ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν μιᾷ τῶν ἡμερῶν ὁ πλούσιος ἐνέπαιζον > Ἰωάννῃ > καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ, “Ῥακά, ὁ θεός μισεῖ σε ὅτι ἐποίησεν σε εἶναι δοῦλον.”
καὶ παραχρῆμα ἔτι λαλοῦντος , ἰδοὺ ἄγγελος Κυρίου ὤφθη καὶ ἐστάθη παρά Ἰωάννῃ, καὶ εἶπεν τῷ πλουσίῳ, τί δὲ κατακαυχᾶσαι > τοῦ ἄλλου > ? ἤδη εἶ ὑπὸ κρίσιν, ὅτι ἐγένου πλούσιος ἐν δόλῳ.
ἀλλ’ ἐδούλωσέ σοι ὁ θεὸς Ἰωάννην πρὸς καιρὸν μικρὸν ἵνα γνῷ τὴν δοκιμὴν αὐτοῦ, εἰ πιστός ἐστιν> . καὶ ἰδοὺ ἐδούλευσεν σοι ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ τοσαῦτα ἔτη. διὰ τοῦτο, ὁ θεός ἀγαπᾷ αὐτὸν .
Here’s my reading of it:
There is sufficient evidence:
Rom 11:18 μὴ κατακαυχῶ τῶν κλάδων· εἰ δὲ κατακαυχᾶσαι οὐ σὺ τὴν ῥίζαν βαστάζεις ἀλλʼ ἡ ῥίζα σέ
James 2:13 ἡ γὰρ κρίσις ἀνέλεος τῷ μὴ ποιήσαντι ἔλεος· κατακαυχᾶται ἔλεος κρίσεως
Both BDAG and LSJ give τινος indicating that the word takes the genitive.
While it is a pretty and neatly composed phrase on your part, I don’t think that the verb is simple enough to be surrounded by so much information.
Marcos, What do you make of this? Perhaps you could share some of the thoughts you have had so far about how you understand what I am saying, then we could discuss from there.
Thanks Barry for James 2:13, which gives us one example of this verb taking the genitive. Is this sufficient evidence that the verb just takes the genitive ?