Welcome aboard, reader of Homer! It’s good to have you join in our Homeric dialogues.
I certainly agree Homer’s audience (and the audiences of Homeric rhapsodes) would not have consciously analysed it like this, and nor would most of Homer’s hundreds of thousands of readers over the course of the next centuries. They had no or little need to, just as English-speakers normally have no need to consciously analyse the utterances they hear or the texts they read.* But when we are asked (or ask ourselves) to analyse a construction, or to elucidate the function of its various constituents, we can set about doing it, and the greater familiarity we have with ancient Greek in general and Homer in particular, the more successful we’re likely to be.
An experienced reader of Homer (such as Paul Derouda) takes a sentence like this in her/his stride, without having to think about it, but a beginner like Outis might appreciate some guidance on how to approach it, especially when Beetham seems to have led him astray, and that’s what we were trying to provide.
Personally I don’t think Homer goes in for sly asides. And I wouldn’t say there was any ambiguity here (or anywhere in Homer?), it’s simply a matter of how best to characterize a construction such as this, which is actually perfectly ordinary, and in no way “loose.” I have no substantial quarrel with Paul’s formulation, and I’d hope he has none with mine.
Homeric verse tends to move line by line, and it’s a common pattern to have the first verse potentially complete and then expanded by a participle kicking off the next. The beginning of the Iliad is an example: μηνιν αειδε … | ουλομενην …. In much the same kind of way, as I look at the beginning of Od.5, |λαῶν οἷσιν ἄνασσε in v.12 picks up οὔ τις (yes, Outis 
) in the previous verse, 19 |οικαδε νισομενον expands 18, and so on.
Incidentally, Outis, I seem to remember there was an earlier thread on 5.29. —Yes, http://discourse.textkit.com/t/odyssey-book-5-line-29/13631/4
- But the grammarians among them had the means of doing so, just as we do with English sentences. They would probably have labeled the construction απο κοινοῦ, meaning that κήδεα πόλλ᾽ Ὀδυσῆος was common to both λεγε and μνησαμενη.