Re: Words/Particles with De-Focusing force ?
Posted: June 15th, 2013, 2:37 pm
It appears that GE intensifies the preceding word rather than downshifts the following. MONON may do that in some contexts. These kind of discourse particles do not correspond across languages, so we can rarely say that a particular particle in one language corresponds to a particular one in another language.Peter Streitenberger wrote:Dear Jonathan,
So the entrance question remains: how would Koine-Speakers downshift the following Information. Is it agreed to consider GE depending on context? Or MONON ?
Yours
Peter, Germany
The German one you are looking at corresponds somewhat to our Danish "bare", My dictionary gives a number of options: nur, bloss, schon, doch, eben. (But it is only one of the senses of eben that fits here.)
When I looked at where we used "bare" in our Danish translation, I noticed that we had used it 76 times in the NT. Then I compared with the Greek MONON which occurs 73 times, but in only 10 places could I detect that MONON had been translated by "bare". A native speaker will put these particles in depending on context, not by looking at dictionary explanations. In most cases where we used "bare", there was no particular Greek word it translated.