ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Stephen Hughes
Posts: 3323
Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Jonathan Robie wrote:"What kind of bird is that", she asked me.

...

"How does it behave?"

"It flutters down to the bird feeder, sometimes it picks bugs off the grill of the car in the driveway. They hop around a lot, they are good fliers. Why aren't you telling me what kind of bird this is?"

"You already know what kind of bird it is. You are asking what we call this kind of bird. We call it a house sparrow."
In teaching a language there is always a problems with talkng about things that for practical reasons can only ever be imagined, and will never be seen. There are no house sparrows here were I live, in fact it can be months that I don't see any type of bird or hear birdsong. Within her closed world, the realisation that language itself could give rise to thought and evoke images of things and sensations was remarkable. Her world became constructed on the categories that language gave her. Coming to language from experience and from our 5 senses is perhaps easier - especially as children we are sensory beings. But as Helen Keller has shown us remarkably, the loss of a sense or other doesn't preclude the acquisition of language - onluy makes it more difficult.

For most of us who study Greek, we rely only on our senses of sight and (possibly) hearing. For those who self-study it is often just the sense of sight. After thinking about Helen Keller's talk of struggle in acquistion of language I think that hyper-categorisation is (predictable / natural) form of compensation in the learning process for sensory deprivation. The lack of experience leads the learner to mentally create a scene that is just as varigated as they would otherwise have seen.

The other side of sense is interpersonality. We have an innate urge to impress the senses of others and hence communicate our thoughts and feeling to others. That can either happen between people (ideally), with a ball (cf. Wilson) or talking to oneself.

I feel sure that the linguistic isoloation that Paul in Africa and I have suffered give us a similar advantage for our Greek that a writer has if they go up to a cabin in the woods to write (where the need to communicate comes out on paper), or a mediaeval monk or nun that was voluntarily (or forcibly - after a longer time when their unwilling spirit had broken - as is probably in Paul's and in my case) immured and the "senses" could only only come to recognise God in prayer, or in our case in expressing ourselves in Greek and having the natural feeling to "create" a speech community around us.

For us the sensorily deprived, there is still a natural need for a certain ammount of linguistic variation in the world of language that we construct within our minds (following the quote by Keller). It seems to me that most people that feel that need go either of two ways; they either they look for so many grammatical terms and distinctions as Wallace has done or they go deeper into the language and find synonymity, slight differences in meaning between grammatical constructions. You can see from my posts that I have preferred the second path. That was a conscious decision based on the probably end-benefits that either choice had to offer. The problem is, of course, that Greek reference material is not geared up for such an approach to the language. Helen Keller's writings and social activism indicate that she thought deeply about life and considered language and thought as similar, in a similar way to most of us who read the GNT consider the Greek en par with the grammar that describes it. I think that the sensorily deprived life and consequent learning experience of Helen Keller is a good indication of what is possible for most of the students of NTG.

I have taught English to countably tens of thousands of students - mostly in mass classrooms - over these past few years, and there are always a measure of them who compensate for the language learning process by going into research level grammatical analysis in their first or second year - most of them don't emerge again. But mostly they compensate learn the language to some degree or other and move on. It seems that going into categorisation and grammatical differentiation is an accepted "learning stream" for NTG learners, and it is no longer seen as an anomaly, but rather as a desired goal. That still doesn't sit well with me.

Anyway, my reason for introducing these things was to say that Andrew's intrest in grammatical terms and disctinctions seems to me to natural, and I wanted to get his first-hand perception of how he felt at that moment of awakening enquiry - which I now only look back on but can't remember clearly after so many years. It was only a passing though, but now asked can't be un-asked.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Andrew Chapman
Posts: 265
Joined: February 5th, 2013, 5:04 am
Location: Oxford, England
Contact:

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by Andrew Chapman »

May I ask you, Andrew, what you will achieve by doing that? What is the benefit of knowing what name every useage of the genitive has?
One perhaps less important reason is that this system is used not only by Wallace, but by a whole tradition of grammarians, both classical and New Testament. I would like to understand the system fully, before I consider whether to keep, discard or modify it. If several generations have found it useful, perhaps it has some or much value.

Secondly, with regard to 'the language of love' it was a way to engage with what Carl said, because I found myself initially surprised by his classification, and it had occurred to me that I might be reading that expression in a different way from him. So I had in mind to try to tease out what that difference might be. Out of context, the expression kind of swims around in my mind, veering between different types of meaning. For example, in my circles, there are many who find value in Gary Chapman's book on 'Love Languages'. Now I have to admit that I find it hard to conceive of 'quality time' (for example) as a language, and I haven't read the book, but understand that it is about different ways in which husband and wife express their love to each other. I have a hunch that it may not be very helpful to extend the concept of language so far beyond spoken languages as to include touch, gifts etc. Which brings me to the thought that perhaps one could read 'the language of love' in an objective way - the words one may speak that engender love..

I would like to add that I hold a system of classification like this fairly lightly, and am not assuming that these distinctions actually exist, as it were, or to the extent that they do exist, that the traditional scheme is the only way to express them. Smyth was well aware of the limitations of the system which he himself employed, writing the following prior to his presentation of various classes of genitive:
The genitive with substantives denotes in general a connection or dependence between two words. This connection must often be determined 1) by the meaning of the words, 2) by the context, 3) by the facts presupposed as known (1301) [which concerns relationships between persons]. The same construction may often be placed under more than one of the different classes mentioned below; and the connection between the two substantives is often so loose that it is difficult to include with precision all cases under specific grammatical classes.
Andrew
Justin Cofer
Posts: 47
Joined: October 20th, 2012, 12:25 pm

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by Justin Cofer »

I agree with Carl. :)
Justin Cofer
Posts: 47
Joined: October 20th, 2012, 12:25 pm

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by Justin Cofer »

Andrew Chapman wrote:One perhaps less important reason is that this system is used not only by Wallace, but by a whole tradition of grammarians, both classical and New Testament. I would like to understand the system fully, before I consider whether to keep, discard or modify it. If several generations have found it useful, perhaps it has some or much value.
No. Wallace is a different animal. What makes it different from Robertson, Smyth, etc. is that teaches the student to make a half-conjectural translation, and then to (at least implicitly) reason back from English to the Greek. The student never leaves the grid of thinking in English and translating.

Robertson by quoting his teacher warns about this,
The English translation of a Greek aorist may have to be in the past perfect or the present perfect to suit the English usage, but that proves nothing as to how a Greek regarded the aorist tense ... “One of the commonest and gravest errors in studying the grammar of foreign languages is to make a half-conjectural translation, and then reason back from our own language to the meaning of the original; or to explain some idiom of the original by the formally different idiom which is our substantial equivalent.” Broadus was the greatest teacher of language that I have known and he has said nothing truer than this.

A. T. Robertson, A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (Logos Bible Software, 1919), 47.
Stephen Hughes
Posts: 3323
Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Justin Cofer wrote:I agree with Carl. :)
I would be interested to know what part of what he has said that you are referring to and why.

Carl is somebody who doesn't always claim to agree with himself. Do you agree with some of his reasoning or a conclusion of his or both? I find that I often agree with him on either but rarely with both, and even if there is situation in which we seem to agree on both, it is always a little uncertain whether he and I have correctly understood each other in the first place. Undogmatic people are hard to pindown.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by cwconrad »

Stephen Hughes wrote:Carl is somebody who doesn't always claim to agree with himself. Do you agree with some of his reasoning or a conclusion of his or both? I find that I often agree with him on either but rarely with both, and even if there is situation in which we seem to agree on both, it is always a little uncertain whether he and I have correctly understood each other in the first place. Undogmatic people are hard to pindown.
I appreciate the compliment (I think). It's true that I'm more subjective than objective, although, to be sure, I'm more a difficult case than a genitive case ordinarily. I really do strive for consistency, but it eludes me repeatedly. I do like the Euripidean expression: αἱ δεύτεραι πως φροντίδες σοφώτεραι.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Stephen Hughes
Posts: 3323
Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by Stephen Hughes »

cwconrad wrote:I appreciate the compliment (I think). It's true that I'm more subjective than objective, although, to be sure, I'm more a difficult case than a genitive case ordinarily. I really do strive for consistency, but it eludes me repeatedly. I do like the Euripidean expression: αἱ δεύτεραι πως φροντίδες σοφώτεραι.
Compliments are in the ear of the beharkener.

It seems to me that by subjective you might mean that you look at things for what they are in and of themselves rather than applying external standards which appear to be standard not because they are intrinsically immovable, but because being external to the system which they are being used as a standard for, they are apparently immovable because the system underconsideration has no power to move them. A question might arise too about whether by "subjective" you may mean using one's self as the reference for the "consistency" (what others might call "truth" in the philosophical (rather than revelatory or logical) sense of the word) that appears to be the acme to which the struggle for knowledge should be directed towards. In some ways that is true, in that you say that personal engagement with the language is essential for understanding. But then are you (we) the reader actually an objective standard outside the language or an internal part of the system, where language and reader make up an inseperable whole. You show me that I'm a reader and I'll show you that reading is in progress. In calling yourself "subjective" you seem to indicate that you see the reader as internal to the text read, rather than external, and therefore the text and reader move together in understanding, rather than the text bending to the whims of the reader. The text also is not an immovable standard for itself because it is within itself without a fixity and therefore fluid. Perhaps in your conception, the fixity for the system is its origin, the authour. So within the text, the authour is the only immovable reference point, and within the NT and its Greek the numerous authours form a constellation of fixed points rather than either the boundaries of the text or the reader or an external set of criteria brought to the text. Now if the authour is the point of apparent fixity for the text, what is the system within which the authour enjoyed movability? It is the millieu of their time where they were subject to the Zeitgeist, language forms and social norms. So, authours as a point of fixity need to be considered along together with their time and their context. Consistency or definitive answers for questions within a system for which its point of fixity (which for you is origin) is subject to change, is sure to be in many ways ellusive. But that is handled rather well by you, for another thing I see is that for you there are no final answers, but rather a reconsideration of existing questions to try to formulate ever better questions.

Does that nail-head in any way hit the swinging hammer on the ball?
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by cwconrad »

Beharkener? Is that Aussie for one who tries to pay attention? I don't know where I stand with regard to the still point of the turning universe, but I think I'd better quit while (I think) I'm ahead.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Andrew Chapman
Posts: 265
Joined: February 5th, 2013, 5:04 am
Location: Oxford, England
Contact:

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by Andrew Chapman »

'Darling, what does 'the language of love' mean to you?'

'If you do something by word or deed, that communicates your love to me, .. that is the language of love.'

'I thought so, that's the objective genitive.'

Silence. (This 'metalanguage', or this technical grammatical terminology, is evidently not the language of love.)

...............................

But on reflection, I am doubtful that 'language' is a verbal noun at all. 'Speech' corresponds to 'speak', and 'communication' to 'communicate', but I am not sure that 'language' corresponds to a verb at all. Perhaps my wife was saying that love has a language of its own, and this is a possessive genitive.

Andrew
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

Post by cwconrad »

Andrew Chapman wrote:'Darling, what does 'the language of love' mean to you?'

'If you do something by word or deed, that communicates your love to me, .. that is the language of love.'

'I thought so, that's the objective genitive.'

Silence. (This 'metalanguage', or this technical grammatical terminology, is evidently not the language of love.)

...............................

But on reflection, I am doubtful that 'language' is a verbal noun at all. 'Speech' corresponds to 'speak', and 'communication' to 'communicate', but I am not sure that 'language' corresponds to a verb at all. Perhaps my wife was saying that love has a language of its own, and this is a possessive genitive.
I think you are beating your head against the wall needlessly here. English "of" links one English noun to another in the same way that an adnominal genitive links one Greek noun to another Greek noun. Forget about "subjective" and "objective" descriptors here -- they are neither needed nor helpful; in fact they only serve to obfuscate; the "language of love," as you very well know, is the language that lovers speak to each other, while the "love of language" is the passion that philologists, Hellenic or otherwise, share with each other. If you don't grasp intuitively what these words mean -- particularly when you see them used in context -- they you won't ever grasp them.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Post Reply

Return to “Syntax and Grammar”