----- Original Message ----- From: "James Christian" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Cc: "b-hebrew" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2010 3:47 AM Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Generation grammar and b-hebrew
> Hi Eric, > > in my honest opinion there is no such thing as a free word order language. > Yes. It is true that when we compare English word order with that of Koine > Greek then the Koine Greek does exhibit more 'freedom' in its word order. > But just what exactly do we mean by 'freedom'. Were the composers of Koine > Greek documents just randomly throwing out declined noun phrases? Hardly! > There are clearly patterns which are more dominant and patterns which are > less dominant and guided decisions were made when these documents were > generated. We even see similar phenomenon in English, a language we > consider > to not have free word order. Consider the following: Both ancient Greek and Latin display certain combinations which rarely vary, such as postpositive particles and prepositional phrases, in the case of Greek, the placement of the article with regard to attributive or predicate positions. Latin has a fairly fiixed (about 60 % of the time) prose word order subject-predicate-verb. Greek doesn't really do this, but individual authors will often have a preferred order. The result is that a great deal can be done with word order in terms of stylistic emphasis. N.E. Barry Hofstetter Classics and Bible Instructor, TAA http://www.theamericanacademy.net (2010 Savatori Excellence in Education Winner) Mentor, TNARS http://www.tnars.net http://my.opera.com/barryhofstetter/blog http://mysite.verizon.net/nebarry _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
