ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Stephen Carlson
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: June 9th, 2020, 10:39 am
Stephen Carlson wrote: June 9th, 2020, 9:54 am And how is κόσμῳ in John 1:10 ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ ἦν not salient?
If John always uses the article in this phrase, the question may not be relevant here.
I think an idiolectal hypothesis is a hypothesis of last resort. John wrote in Greek and understood by those who spoke Greek, so it’s best to assume that his Greek is ordinary Greek until shown otherwise. To be sure every author has his quirks, but this behavior has never been identified before as a Johannine quirk. On top of that, a lot of Johannine scholars don’t think that John and 1 John were written by the same person. This road unfortunately takes us nowhere.
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by Stephen Carlson »

MAubrey wrote: June 9th, 2020, 4:38 pm May I make the suggestion that it could be a dialectal feature with also some spread across.
It’s possible, but I’m not aware of any evidence identifying intra-Koine dialects or dialectal features. Even getting a handle on register is difficult. I’d rather go there only if I had something (indeed quite a bit) to characterize these putative (sub?) dialects further.

If I had picked a different monadic noun and (1) John wasn’t so consistent, would we even have this issue?
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by Stephen Carlson »

nathaniel j. erickson wrote: June 9th, 2020, 10:45 am
I haven't looked at the contexts in which each of these phrases occur yet, but it seems obvious that the Johannine uses in this list all contain the article. Outside of the Johannine writings, we're left with this:

Phil 2:15 φαίνεσθε ὡς φωστῆρες ἐν κόσμῳ
Col 2:20b τί ὡς ζῶντες ἐν κόσμῳ δογματίζεσθε
1 Tim 3:16 ἐκηρύχθη ἐν ἔθνεσιν, ἐπιστεύθη ἐν κόσμῳ, ἀνελήμφθη ἐν δόξῃ
Given that 1 Tim 3.16 is in a highly structured "hymnic" section, it seems like the question of why it is anarthrous is intimately related with larger structural concerns of its immediate context. If it were to have an article here, it would be rather awkward.

Of course, this doesn't give the reason why the whole set is anarthrous. For example the next prep. phrase in the verse, ἐν δόξῃ, is articular 10x and anarthrous 9x in the NT. But, it seems like for this instance the explanation for why ἐν κόσμῳ is anarthrous would actually be found by explaining why ἐν σαρκί is anarthrous and then appealing to "poetic" style (or that the same reason holds for all 5 prepositional phrases in the "hymnic" section).
Strong versions of the hymnic hypothesis in Paul are on their way out (see the article by Edsall and Strawbridge in the Jan. 2015 JSNT), though the article is known to be less used in poetry. (Here, however, 1 Tim 3:16 may be poetic only under English free verse standards since it doesn’t really scan in a proper meter.) So there could well be genre effects, though it would be nice to get a better understanding of why and how they exist.

Hoyle actually comments on this verse and he contends that these prepositional objects are salient because they are contrastive. That more or less works for me.

It’s the first two examples where the salience idea doesn’t work for me, since the other substantive should be more salient. If we rewrote Phil 2:15 with a genitive instead of a prepositional phrase as φαίνεσθε ὡς φωστῆρες κόσμου, we would just say that κόσμου is simply following Apollonius' Canon. No problem there. I wonder if the Canon--or more precisely the behavior that gives rise to the observations of the Canon--works for (certain kinds of?) prepositional phrases as well.
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by MAubrey »

Stephen Carlson wrote: June 9th, 2020, 6:20 pm
MAubrey wrote: June 9th, 2020, 4:38 pm May I make the suggestion that it could be a dialectal feature with also some spread across.
It’s possible, but I’m not aware of any evidence identifying intra-Koine dialects or dialectal features. Even getting a handle on register is difficult. I’d rather go there only if I had something (indeed quite a bit) to characterize these putative (sub?) dialects further.

If I had picked a different monadic noun and (1) John wasn’t so consistent, would we even have this issue?
I would still encourage you to seek out H&G's discussion. English has dialectal variation from noun to noun, but there's an established pattern across dialects for how definiteness in prepositional phrases function with highly accessible/inherently definite nouns.

I'd like to see a dissertation one of these days that examined definiteness in PP's at some point.
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by Stephen Carlson »

MAubrey wrote: June 9th, 2020, 10:15 pm
Stephen Carlson wrote: June 9th, 2020, 6:20 pm
MAubrey wrote: June 9th, 2020, 4:38 pm May I make the suggestion that it could be a dialectal feature with also some spread across.
It’s possible, but I’m not aware of any evidence identifying intra-Koine dialects or dialectal features. Even getting a handle on register is difficult. I’d rather go there only if I had something (indeed quite a bit) to characterize these putative (sub?) dialects further.

If I had picked a different monadic noun and (1) John wasn’t so consistent, would we even have this issue?
I would still encourage you to seek out H&G's discussion. English has dialectal variation from noun to noun, but there's an established pattern across dialects for how definiteness in prepositional phrases function with highly accessible/inherently definite nouns.
(I think you meant H&P.) I'm aware of the literature, but I'm not sure it really applies to a monadic noun like κόσμος. None of your main examples of school, hospital, jail are monadic, and they have plausible generic readings or promote activity readings reminiscent of noun incorporation (the ones I've noticed in Greek usually have a bare accusative right before the verb). The earth/world example is lexical, which is also not the case here.
MAubrey wrote: June 9th, 2020, 10:15 pm I'd like to see a dissertation one of these days that examined definiteness in PP's at some point.
Same here. I suspect that if we get the usage of the article right, it should basically fall into place, except for a set of more or less fixed adverbial expressions (an exception recognized by Bakker). But I haven't examined enough cases to be confident.
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote: June 9th, 2020, 10:55 pm
MAubrey wrote: June 9th, 2020, 10:15 pm I'd like to see a dissertation one of these days that examined definiteness in PP's at some point.
Same here. I suspect that if we get the usage of the article right, it should basically fall into place, except for a set of more or less fixed adverbial expressions (an exception recognized by Bakker). But I haven't examined enough cases to be confident.
If we can define syntactic searches, I'm happy to do this. I have done an initial integration of Levinsohn's features, and it kind of works but is painfully slow right now. Over the coming weeks and months I should have something that can do syntax + discourse reasonably well. And I will be adding other datasets.
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: June 10th, 2020, 9:34 am If we can define syntactic searches, I'm happy to do this. I have done an initial integration of Levinsohn's features, and it kind of works but is painfully slow right now. Over the coming weeks and months I should have something that can do syntax + discourse reasonably well. And I will be adding other datasets.
I don't think the hard part lies in defining the syntactic search but in dealing the fact that they are so many of them. So far (and I've just started poking around in them), I've been choosing a particular lexeme as the object of a preposition and see if I can account for its arthrousness (articularity?).

One idea could be see if there's a prepositional analogy to Apollonius' Canon, where instead of a genitive, we look for a prepositional phrase.
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by MAubrey »

Stephen Carlson wrote: June 9th, 2020, 10:55 pm
MAubrey wrote: June 9th, 2020, 10:15 pm
Stephen Carlson wrote: June 9th, 2020, 6:20 pm
It’s possible, but I’m not aware of any evidence identifying intra-Koine dialects or dialectal features. Even getting a handle on register is difficult. I’d rather go there only if I had something (indeed quite a bit) to characterize these putative (sub?) dialects further.

If I had picked a different monadic noun and (1) John wasn’t so consistent, would we even have this issue?
I would still encourage you to seek out H&G's discussion. English has dialectal variation from noun to noun, but there's an established pattern across dialects for how definiteness in prepositional phrases function with highly accessible/inherently definite nouns.
(I think you meant H&P.) I'm aware of the literature, but I'm not sure it really applies to a monadic noun like κόσμος. None of your main examples of school, hospital, jail are monadic, and they have plausible generic readings or promote activity readings reminiscent of noun incorporation (the ones I've noticed in Greek usually have a bare accusative right before the verb). The earth/world example is lexical, which is also not the case here.
True. I'm just not sure monadicity is a (pardon the pun) defining element here.

Also: the earth/world example is lexical, but its relevant because both words together subsume a portion of the same semantic space of κόσμος.
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by Stephen Carlson »

MAubrey wrote: June 11th, 2020, 7:05 pm True. I'm just not sure monadicity is a (pardon the pun) defining element here.

Also: the earth/world example is lexical, but its relevant because both words together subsume a portion of the same semantic space of κόσμος.
I guess I'm not seeing the relevance of your examples to the verses at hand then. Can you expand upon them?
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Re: ἐν (τῷ) κόσμῳ

Post by sethknorr »

Might Colossians 2:20 be because Paul was trying to indicate it was not previous reference, similar to John 1:1 with καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος.

1:6 τῷ κόσμῳ I would understand as earth.
2:8 τοῦ κόσμου I would understand as universe.
2:20 τοῦ κόσμου I would understand as universe.
2:20 ἐν κόσμῳ I would understand as earth.

This might be a weak argument but since it appears so close in proximity maybe Paul was trying to express the spiritual powers encompass a larger scope than just our earth.
Seth Knorr
I always wondered what Greeks think when they see that commercial "λέγω μου Ἐγὼ"
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