Thins I learned today - 2020-09-20

tseren 

@tseren•18 minutes ago

@Plesioth I am very proficient in Attic Greek and can speak for Koine Greek as well. I don't know modern Greek but can provide a bit of grammatical insight.

Greek has a fairly free word order. The placement of a word in an English sentence is very important. In Greek, a word's case is the major cue for its the role in a sentence. Greek has fairly free word order.

Of course, certain rules and tendencies exist. One of those tendencies is to put the most important topic of the sentence towards the beginning. The focus of the sentence follows the topic. The verb follows the focus, and the remainder follows the verb. The two examples you posted focus on different aspects of what is being expressed.

I'm going to translate your examples from modern Greek into ancient Greek because I don't want to say something incorrect regarding the modern form of the language.

  • Κρᾶσιν τὸ νεαρὸν ἔκαμες.
  • Wine the water you worked.
  • You worked wine into the water.
  • The topic of the sentence is wine. The thought that is being expressed focuses on the water.

The insertion of “into” is purely for creating a smooth English sentence that carries the meaning of the Greek.

  • Κρᾶσιν ἔκαμες τὸ νεαρόν
  • Wine you worked the water
  • You worked wine into the water
  • The topic of the sentence is wine. The thought that is being expressed focuses on the action worked.

OK, I can't talk about emphasis in modern Greek. I can tell you about a shared grammatical construction: the double accusative. Both κρασί/κρᾶσιν “wine” and νερό/νεαρόν “water” are in the accusative case. This marks them both as the object of the verb's action. This way of speaking occurs in both ancient and modern Greek. The double accusative structure indicates that the verb is ditransitive. That is, the idea expressed by verb applies to two things.

I love the topic of valency



tseren 

@tseren•2 minutes ago

For the curious: the original ancient Greek ὕδορ “water” has been completely displaced except in compounds. Hurrah for semantic change!

The Attic Greek νεαρός “young, fresh, new” is an adjective. The Byzantine Greek form is νερός. The Byzantine grammatically neuter form νερόν came to be used as a noun, probably due to the idea of “fresh thing” → “fresh (potable) water” → “water”.

I kept the word as νεαρός in my previous post because… actually, I can't justify it other than being poetic for Attic Greek and perhaps a transitional usage for some stage of some local dialect of Koine Greek.

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