[] Rev 3:12 Pendent Nominative Chet A. Creider creider at uwo.ca
Thu Dec 29 21:07:08 EST 2005
[] FW: 2 Thessalonians 3:17 [] Romans 2:4 adjective XRHSTON Bert asks about Rev 3:12, hO NIKWN, POIHSW AUTON STULON EN TWi VAWiTOU QEOU MOU. Carl gives TON NIKWONTA POIHSW STULON (without the resumptive pronoun) as what the normal Greek would be, and Elizabethindicates the Semitic nature of the construction. I would like toask Randall or anyone else with a command of Hebrew, Aramaic andArabic for a little more detail. I hope it will be of interest toeveryone. First two bits of background information.1. Linguists, for technical reasons that aren’t immediately relevant,distinguish between two kinds of similar constructions, one withoutand one with a resumptive pronoun:(1) Him I want to see right away (called ‘Topicalization’)(2) Him, I want to see him right away (called ‘Left-dislocation’)Both are quite marginal in English, although the second regularlyappears in unconscious usage when speakers get themselves intosituations where they must relativize into a position which is notallowed by the rules of written English grammar as in (3), whichwas uttered a few years ago by an American scientist on an expeditionin the Canadian Arctic about a meteor which fell near the expedition.(3) It went down over that river that I don’t know where it goes.Relativization into an indirect question is not allowed in writtenEnglish (or French or German, but interestingly is allowed in Spanishand Norwegian).2. A number of years ago the linguist Hagit Borer wrote an articlecontrasting these two types of construction (Topicalization andLeft-dislocation) in Classical Arabic. I don’t have the articleor my Arabic grammars at home, but as I remember, the gist of thearticle was that with one construction, the left-fronted itemwas always in the nominative case whereas in the other, case wasrespected. (Note that in English, accusative case is used inboth cases.) I’m sorry that I can’t remember which was which.So, noting that in the Rev 3:12 example, case is not respectedbut a resumptive pronoun is used, I would like to know if thisusage is found in Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic (is itconceivable that the author of Revelation was ethnically Arab?),and/or Aramaic and more generally if either Hebrew or Aramaicare similar to Arabic in distinguishing between Topicalizationand Left-Dislocation.With thanks,Chet Creider
[] FW: 2 Thessalonians 3:17[] Romans 2:4 adjective XRHSTON