ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Biblical Greek morphology and syntax, aspect, linguistics, discourse analysis, and related topics
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

Robert Crowe wrote: July 12th, 2017, 12:59 am
Necromancy was an important feature of the Greek mystery religions. We have scant knowlege of the actual rituals, but the objective was surely to seek information from the dead.

A main man here is the eminent classical scholar Arthur Woolgar Verrall. He and his wife were keen necromancers. He claimed he could clarify obscurities in Euripides' because he was in touch with the maestro himself.

[*]Euripides has just told me that ἀλλά in IA 1239 is an expletive meaning mais oui. Iphigenia's sole joy will be the memory of her father's smile.

[*]OR was it Verrall? Anyway, didn't sound like his wife.
Robert,

That is hilarious. TODAY, 2017 this guy would be mainstream on the west coast, San Francisco or Seattle. Check out the two award winning novels the new millenial author Meg Elison from San Francisco published by 47North Seattle. This is NOT a recomendation.

More later.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
RandallButh
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by RandallButh »

because the grammarians talk in a code which I have refused to learn.
Clay, good for you.
The signals within the language were never processed by Greek users as "1st class, 2nd class, etc." The real language signals in the text need to be internalized and processed by a reader/speaker/writer as the signals are/were.
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

RandallButh wrote: July 13th, 2017, 2:11 am
because the grammarians talk in a code which I have refused to learn.
The signals within the language were never processed by Greek users as "1st class, 2nd class, etc." The real language signals in the text need to be internalized and processed by a reader/speaker/writer as the signals are/were.
Randall,

I think we agree on this. What makes conditionals a real pain in traditional grammar is the multiple layers and complex structure of the meta language. It isn't as simple as the case system, which is bad enough. Being removed more than one level from the surface struture isn't just twice as bad. The absraction seems to grow exponentially and it isn't a simple herirachy, the network has connections both horizontal and vertial. At this point you are not reading at all, your doing math. We don't process our native language that way. Which is whole point of reworking how learn other languages.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Stephen Carlson
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by Stephen Carlson »

With conditionals, I think there are actually two different traditional analyses and they are intended to work with Latin as well. I've always disliked the old explanations because they gloss them with 19th century (or earlier) English renderings that seem obsolete in contemporary English.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

I took a closer look at Paul’s opening lines in 1Cor 9. The passage is exegetically challenging. A.Thiselton (1Cor NIGTC) gives an outline of the exegetical history starting with F. C. Baur.

1Cor. 9:1 Οὐκ εἰμὶ ἐλεύθερος; οὐκ εἰμὶ ἀπόστολος; οὐχὶ Ἰησοῦν τὸν κύριον ἡμῶν ἑόρακα; οὐ τὸ ἔργον μου ὑμεῖς ἐστε ἐν κυρίῳ; 2 εἰ ἄλλοις οὐκ εἰμὶ ἀπόστολος, ἀλλά γε ὑμῖν εἰμι· ἡ γὰρ σφραγίς μου τῆς ἀποστολῆς ὑμεῖς ἐστε ἐν κυρίῳ.


ἀλλά (γε) in the apodosis appears to be independent of conditional categories. Cooper claims that ἀλλά marks the apodosis as a barely acceptable alternative.
“The feeling is usually that the apodosis idea is a less or minimally acceptable alternative and this comes out even more strongly when γε is added to a following word giving ἀλλά ... γε.” [1]
The cryptic note “classical” in BDF 439.2, 448.5 and the commentaries[2] doesn’t take into consideration that a “classical” idiom appearing in Koine cannot be assumed to be semantically equivalent to something from Euripides.

[1] Guy Cooper, Attic Greek Prose Syntax, 1:65.9.0.W, v2, p1071.
[2] A.Thiselton, 1Cor NIGTC, 2000, p674 n60.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Robert Crowe
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by Robert Crowe »

Stirling Bartholomew wrote: July 15th, 2017, 6:19 pm The cryptic note “classical” in BDF 439.2, 448.5 and the commentaries[2] doesn’t take into consideration that a “classical” idiom appearing in Koine cannot be assumed to be semantically equivalent to something from Euripides.
Denniston describes the classical idiom under the heading Special uses of ἀλλά.
In the apodosis of a conditional (sometimes of a causal) sentence. ἀλλά contrasts the ideas expressed in protasis and apodosis: 'if . . . on the other hand' : 'even though . . . still'.
–––
In post-Homeric Greek, there is a tendency to limit the use of apodotic ἀλλά to cases in which a negative protasis precedes, and the apodosis gives a more or less inadequate substitute for what is left unrealized in the protasis: 'at all events', with a notion of pis aller.
[The Greek Particles pp11-12]

He cites IA1239 as an example.

While the usage may well have changed in Koine, the detractors don't appear to have a convincing alternative.
Tús maith leath na hoibre.
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

Robert Crowe wrote: July 16th, 2017, 5:26 am
Stirling Bartholomew wrote: July 15th, 2017, 6:19 pm The cryptic note “classical” in BDF 439.2, 448.5 and the commentaries[2] doesn’t take into consideration that a “classical” idiom appearing in Koine cannot be assumed to be semantically equivalent to something from Euripides.
Denniston describes the classical idiom under the heading Special uses of ἀλλά.
In the apodosis of a conditional (sometimes of a causal) sentence. ἀλλά contrasts the ideas expressed in protasis and apodosis: 'if . . . on the other hand' : 'even though . . . still'.
–––
In post-Homeric Greek, there is a tendency to limit the use of apodotic ἀλλά to cases in which a negative protasis precedes, and the apodosis gives a more or less inadequate substitute for what is left unrealized in the protasis: 'at all events', with a notion of pis aller.
[The Greek Particles pp11-12]

He cites IA1239 as an example.

While the usage may well have changed in Koine, the detractors don't appear to have a convincing alternative.
Robert,

I am not arguing with either Denniston or Cooper who adds his own spin. There is however a known tendency for BDF to assume that formal features of Attic that are found in Koine carry the same significance in both. This isn't always the case. Formal features undergo change over time, nobody argues with this. It is a matter of demonstrating by observation of usage that the Attic idiom has deteriorated or shifted over time. There are KJV English idioms still extant in the english used by millennials but they no longer mean what they did in 1611. Roughly the same temporal distance from Euripides and the New Testament.

I know you know all this. I am not really arguing with you.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Robert Crowe
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by Robert Crowe »

Clay,

It's remarkable that you were able to find a parallel structure in the GNT so readily. Being so rare. As you say, we should be cautious about it having a similar meaning to what we think it had five centuries earlier. We know this, as you point out, by comparing Jacobean English with our own. Shakespeare's 'still' no longer means 'always'. Our knowledge of ancient forms can sometimes be a hindrance.

My own stance is that there is much that defies analysis. We are using language to define language. No system can objectively define itself. Even so, it's important to try.

The more we do, the more we can be blamed for. The more we say, the more we can be misunderstood. But it's still important to try.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
[Closing words of The Great Gatsby]
Tús maith leath na hoibre.
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

Stirling Bartholomew wrote: July 12th, 2017, 2:05 pm
MAubrey wrote: July 11th, 2017, 7:49 pm
Anyway, it sounds like you should try to locate a copy of Gerry Wakker's monograph on conditionals in Ancient Greek. I don't know whether or not he deals with this particular text, but He certainly spends significant time discussing the ordering of the protasis & apodosis. It's out of print, but excellent. I'd look it up myself, but a friend is currently borrowing my copy.

http://amzn.to/2tGaZVD
I put in an ILL order for it. Certainly worth looking at. I get very impatient with reading our standard reference works on NT Grammar. Conditionals have always given me headaches. Simply because the grammarians talk in a code which I have refused to learn. Main reason being that the code isn't consistent.

I did a worldcat search to see who had it. U of Wash has it but they don't deal with my library. It will probably come from UC Berkeley or Stanford. McMaster has it, wonder who ordered it. DTS (Dallas) has it.
Gerry Wakker's monograph[1] has arrived from Hillsdale College in Michigan. He presents useful statistics on the question of ordering the protasis and apodosis in Greek conditionals. Noteworthy that in Homer and Tragedy there is no statistical preference for putting the protasis first.

Postscript: Linguistic Frameworks

Walkker's monograph is set within functional linguistics (Simon Dik, 1989). There is notable tendency for works on Ancient Greek that use a 20th century or later linguistic framework to allow the framework to devour the subject. The MIT frameworks and Amsterdam frameworks are both susceptible to this. Helma Dik avoids this at least in my opinion she shows remarkable restraint in not letting her subject matter take second place to her theoretical system. I not sure that Walkker has escaped this. It seems that he is taking a rather heavy handed approach to applying what is now a 35 year old (early 1980s) set of ideas to his greek authors. His research was completed in the very early 1990s. Reading this now, I find myself wondering if Simon Dik's Functionalism is really that useful for discussing the topic at hand.

[1]Conditions and Conditionals: An Investigation of Ancient Greek (Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology) 1994.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
RandallButh
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Re: ἀλλὰ in the apodosis - memory of the dead

Post by RandallButh »

wondering if Simon Dik's Functionalism is really that useful for discussing the topic at hand.
Yes and no.

Yes--because it integrates and shows how pragmatic decisions of an author and language system interact with basic syntax in a principled system.
[[This is a watershed distinction from Chomskian Generative grammar which ignores and removes all pragmatic syntax from the syntax proper. Dik insists that pragmatics must be included in a syntax because it directly affects the formation of sentence word orders.]]

and sometimes No--because Dik 1989 brings in many "etic" [not meaningful in a language] functional distinctions beyond the basic "topic" [contextualizing constituent] and "focus" [specially signaled salient information] that were better ["emic" meaningful in the language system] in his 1980, 1981 works.
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