root of πόλις
Posted: January 31st, 2012, 4:49 am
Mounce lists the root of πόλις, -εως as "πολς", but doesn't this word have a consonantal iota in its root? I thought it would be "πολι" instead.
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See Smyth §268ff. (http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/phil ... monographs = http://tinyurl.com/83h83pc)Jesse Goulet wrote:Mounce lists the root of πόλις, -εως as "πολς", but doesn't this word have a consonantal iota in its root? I thought it would be "πολι" instead.
Yes, it should be πολι instead. Mounce gets other i-stems right, so this appears to be a typo. Unfortunately it is not listed on his errata sheet: http://www.teknia.com/basicsofbiblicalgreek/errata .Jesse Goulet wrote:Mounce lists the root of πόλις, -εως as "πολς", but doesn't this word have a consonantal iota in its root? I thought it would be "πολι" instead.
Homer mixes up the dialects; most of our Homeric text has Aeolic and Ionic forms, but there are even a few Dorisms (e.g. πότι for πρὸς). Homer sometimes uses πόλι for the dative, sometimes πόλει. (See Smyth:http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/phil ... smonograph)Mark Lightman wrote:My two favourite Greek morphologists are Bill Mounce and Homer. Take a look at how Homer (according to Benner) declines πόλις
πόλις
πόλιος (πόληος)
πόλει (for πόλιι; cf. Θέτιι!)
πόλιν
πόλιες (πόληες)
πολίων
πολίεσσιν
πόλιας (πόληας, πόλῑς, πόλεις)
Homer is wonderfully regular, except when he is not
the phonological principle here (ηο --> εω) has been called "quantitative vowel metathesis"Mark Lightman wrote:I read recently—I forgot where—an “explanation” for how we got the familiar irregular πόλεως from the perfectly regular gen sing πόλιος. πόλιος became πόληος and then the eta was shorted to epsilon while the omicron was lengthened to omega. With explanations like that, who needs mysteries! The does at any rate “explain” why πόλεως allows an accent on the antepenult with a long ultima.
This is really a very useful thing to know; it works with consonant-stems too -- including proper names: ὦ Σωκρατες, ὦ ῥῆτορ, ὦ Χάλκαν (for Χάλκαντ-) -- but it must also be remembered that there are only four consonants that can stand at the end of a Greek word: ν, ρ, ς, Ψ, ξ -- and of course the last two are really instances of ς.Mark Lightman wrote:To remember the “root” of πόλις just memorize the vocative.