21st Century Classical Greek -- special topic 1

I have been turning this part of my blog into a regular handbook by going through Goodwin, pages 196-347, sections 890-1619, and examining the grammar of the examples. As you saw in the summaries, I already reduced conditionals (pp. 294-304, sections 1381-1424) to about 1 page. From what I see, the section on final and object clauses (pp. 290-294, sections 1362-1380) and indirect discourse (pp. 314-322, sections 1475-1504) are as full of mirages, inaccuracies, and bad examples as anything I already discussed on this blog and that's another 11 pages that can be eliminated because there's nothing in them that I can't explain through use of aspect and modality. Occam's Razor says there's no use multiplying hypotheses.

So then I turned back to the earlier material, which I left room for but didn't examine, and I've already found my first mirage. It's the "accusative adverbial"; first, it misuses the term "adverbial" and, second, one of Goodwin's examples wouldn't be there except for a mistranslation.

An adverb modifies a verb, adjective, or other adverb. Goodwin says (page 225-226, sections 1058-1061) that the "accusative adverbial" can modify nouns or whole sentences as well as verbs, adjectives or adverbs. That right there should tell you that somebody got their doctorate through a fallacy called redefinition. A high redefinition restricts a word from its ordinary meaning when the author has no other support. A low redefinition broadens the meaning of a word to bring under its umbrella things that it normally doesn't included. Then the author can glom onto a fad in scholasticism. I have several blog posts on redefinition, which is a form of strawman argument.

Goodwin says that the -ous case can be the predicate of a verb and limit the action of the verb in some way: being on, depending on, being about a topic, being “in terms of” some feature. This resembles the -on case (genitive) used with a noun in a limiting way. One of the examples, Xenophon V 5.14, shows that Goodwin relied on a source, which created the notion based on a translation that is inaccurate. LSJ supports a translation that takes a direct object without any issue of limitation.

ἀλλὰ μὴν κἀκεῖνο οἶμαι ὑμᾶς θαρρεῖν, τὸ μὴ παρημεληκότα με τῶν θεῶν τὴν ἔξοδον ποιεῖσθαι: πολλὰ γάρ μοι συνόντες ἐπίστασθε οὐ μόνον τὰ μεγάλα ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ μικρὰ πειρώμενον ἀεὶ ἀπὸ θεῶν ὁρμᾶσθαι.

“But truly this I think encouraging for you, the fact that by my not disregarding the gods, making this departure: for you, being much with me, know that not only the great but also the small [things] I attempt ever beginning from the gods.”

The translation Goodwin uses says "in [terms of] great but even in small things", and that's a strawman argument and an example of how misleading Grenglish is. So the first thing to do with any examples you have, is look them up on the Perseus site and examine every word in the Word Tool. Make sure to look up the verbs using the LSJ link. If it says that "c.acc." with this verb always includes one of the ideas Goodwin lists (being on, depending on, being about a topic, being “in terms of” some feature), then that's a normal issue of having an accusative predicate and not something outside the normal grammar. There's no use multiplying hypotheses.

This is one of my complaints about saying "a verb of category X takes a predicate in case Y". The truth is that the verb means X when it has a predicate in case Y; with a predicate in case Z the verb might mean something quite different. That's why I also say to wipe verb categorization out of your brain.

A translation is a strawman argument for analysis, grammatical or otherwise. It has historically produced terrible analyses of the Bible, mostly because the majority of English translations owe a heavy debt to the horrible Septuagint. I have several blog pages about how horrible the Septuagint is.

Likewise Goodwin’s source created a mirage by pretending that the “in” of the translation is inherent in the Greek. It is not. It’s something that the translator read into the material and, since the grammarian mistakenly believes translations are exactly equivalent to their sources, he got a doctorate under the false pretense of finding a new point of grammar. 

If your Greek grammar has sections on the accusative adverbial, look up all the citations and see if LSJ supports that they too are normal accusative predicates of the verb. If you're taking a class in Classical Greek, ask the professor for citations that he relies on and examine those. Otherwise, I would say wipe this concept out of your brain. 

So 15 pages of Goodwin's 151 are not reliable due to mirages, mistranslations, and other misbehavior, or the paradigm shift to aspect and modality makes them unnecessary. I think that's pretty cool.