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Polybius 2,56,14
- To: B-GREEK@virginia.edu
- Subject: Polybius 2,56,14
- From: BTHURMAN@unca.edu
- Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 10:13:30 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: University of North Carolina at Asheville
I think it was Ken who asked about this citation.
Polybius 2,56,14
There can't be anything resembling an indirect object anywhere in your
sentence. Even if some translator had something like 'for this' it would have
to be understood unlike interest and more in a 'because of' sense of 'for'.
You could have talked to some of my beginners 50 years and they would never
have seen the difference between for in "Jo did it for Bu." and for in "Ti was
hanged for murder." But let's rethink the structure of your sentence by putting
it into English word order:
eav tic apxwv adikwv xeipwv na0h touto, kpivetai nenov0evai dikaiwc
ean tis archon adikon cheiron pathe tuto, crinetae peponthenae dicaeos
if any ruler (anyone in high office) of unjust hands (wicked practices) should
suffer this (what has just been described), he would be judged (thought) to
have suffered [it] justly.
Especially when I held seminars in Thucydides only one or two of my students
were ever able to penetrate the Greek quickly enough mentally to translate it
in class without rewriting the Greek into English word order. If your teacher's
too inexperienced to know exactly where you're missing it from listening to
your English (no matter how free it is -- freedom not being a synonym for
vagueness), such a teacher could surely tell what's happening in your mind by
reading your recast of Greek words into English word order. And, if the teacher
can't do that much, for goodness sake get another teacher.
Your English reflects two likely misunderstandings. In class I never start a
critique dogmatically, but thus. You seem not to have noticed that the accent
of adikwv groups it mentally with xeipwv and negates taking it as participle.
Did you really not see na0h as active subjunctive 2 aor. with direct object
touto? In a seminar I would not have jumped to the upshot of the thing so
directly, but would have probed more gradually, so that the student might think
about not having thought through the sentence in Greek.
Except for manuscriptal or editorial errors, where literate material (unlike
Ogr!) like Polybius is in question, if you understand a sentence, every single
part of it will be perfectly lucid. You will not find yourself in a fog.
Plenty of so-called 'adverbial accusatives' can be seen as means, but there is
certainly not one in your sentence.
In grammar any phenomenon can be shown to be equivalent to a seemingly infinite
number of other phenomena & therefore, since human communication will have been
rendered thereby impossible, scil. since all things equal the same thing, the
Eternal has to work a miracle every time a thought passes from mind to mind.
shalom,
bearded bill of asheville <bthurman@unca.edu>
unca not having approved either whom or thereof.
P.S. Of course my Thucydideans were not required to recast them all, but only
the ones they'd stumble over and waste the other students' valuable time.
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