David Lim wrote:Thanks for the references, but I think they still do not answer my question adequately. As I said, I am not concerned with the meaning of John 4:7 but with the more general question of why it is not considered to be an adjective there. I mentioned that adjective "ιουδαιος" simply as an example of a word that seems to function as either adjective or noun, and also because it does not have what you consider criteria for typical adjectives. Also, the word that Smyth mentioned, "ρητωρ" is used as an adjective in "ρητωρ λογος" according to LSJ. So why should I not also classify other words as adjectives when their context demands? Why is it not possible that these words are actually somewhat like adjectives in the minds of the speakers? And must they really follow the regular declension patterns? What about "αιωνιος"? What is its comparative and superlative? I do think that whether an adjective has the comparative and superlative degrees depends on its semantic meaning and is not an underlying feature of adjectives.
It is fruitless to use semantic criteria to distinguish between Greek nouns and adjectives. Adjectives can act as noun when they take an article, and noun can act as adjectives when they are used in attributive apposition. You have to use syntactic criteria, and the prototypical adjective inflects for gender and degree. Not all adjectives have degree, of course, but if it doesn't inflect for either gender or degree, then you don't really have a reason to call it an adjective -- and how you translate into English is irrelevant.
To get to your specific examples, you've misread LSJ on ῥήτωρ. It merely says there is a sense where it is used "
as adj." That doesn't mean it
is an adjective, since nouns can be used as adjectives when in attributive apposition. LSJ is a guide to meaning, not grammar, and in fact its grammatical theory is about a century and half old.
Your other example αἰώνιος is inflected for gender, so it's an adjective, though it can be used substantively like a noun. In addition, contrary to your intuition, its comparative form, αἰωνιώτερον, is attested in Greek literature, so there's no issue there. But, even if they weren't, it doesn't need to have
every distinctive syntactic feature of the prototypical adjective to be an adjective under linguistic prototype theory, just enough of them to distinguish them from nouns. In the case of Σαμαρῖτις, you have not given any syntactic reason that it is not a noun.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D. (Duke)
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Faculty of Theology, Uppsala