Sometimes looking at how a give noun is used to produce other words in a fascinating exercise. These are all from LSJM, though the glosses are modernized: μάχαιρα - knife/dagger μαχαιρᾶς - knife merchant μαχαιρίδιον - small knife μάχαιριον - shaving blade μαχαιρίς - butcher's knife μαχαιροδέτης - sword belt μαχαιροθήκη - knife case μαχαιροκ[οπέω]... Continue Reading →
The source of SOURCE Expressions: Embodiment
When we talk about prepositional meaning, we have focused on the usage of prepositions in constructional contexts. We have not talked about ἀπό or ἐκ meaning CAUSE, for example, but rather ἀπό and ἐκ being used in a CAUSE expressions. This is an important distinction.
Accents matter.
Take the time to learn Greek accents. Just at a basic level of grammar, the nature of Greek propositions is predicated on its accentual system: the move from old/assumed topic to new/asserted focus wholly relies upon accentuation. If you don't learn accents, then you don't learn the basic language internal structure for interpreting and understanding... Continue Reading →
ἐκ and ἀπό with temporal expressions in the papyri
One question asked at the Greek Prepositions Workshop at Tyndale House was about the use of ἀπό and ἐκ in temporal expressions beyond the corpus we used, specifically in the papyri.
Five usage-types for ἐκ and ἀπό
The following is an essay encompassing the analysis and data that we will be presenting in our paper on ἐκ and ἀπό at the Greek Prepositions Workshop at Tyndale house in Cambridge this coming Friday, June 30th. It is a compilation of the short pieces that we have posted over the past week.
Types of ἐκ and ἀπό constructions: Cause
We find a strong “experiential correlation” (Tyler and Evans 2003, 32) between actions and the consequences that result from those actions (i.e. cause and effect): Causes are understood to precede their consequences. If one event immediately precedes another, it is only natural to conceive of the former as the cause and the latter as the effect.
Types of ἐκ and ἀπό constructions: Time
Temporal constructions shift the landmark and the trajector source expressions out of the physical plane and reconceptualize them as events. The trajector is an event conceived as moving away from the landmark viewed as a temporal reference point. Fundamental to temporal expressions with ἐκ and ἀπό are distance and separation, which are then applied to the temporal plane.
Types of ἐκ and ἀπό constructions: Partitive
Partitive constructions with ἐκ and ἀπό fall into two general types: entity partitives and set partitives.
Types of ἐκ and ἀπό constructions: Origin
Yesterday, we examined SOURCE expressions with ἐκ and ἀπό . Today, we are examining ORIGINS. The Greek Prepositions Workshop is next week. Following Luraghi (2003), we take origins as being an abstraction of the source. Prototypically, origins still involve a physical landmark and a physical trajector. There is no motion, however, only an “abstract notion of providence”... Continue Reading →
