21st Century Classical Greek -- special topic 3, negation

I didn't see this one when I wrote my last post but it's a doozy. I probably wouldn't have found it, except that I was writing this handbook and sequentially trashing whatever Goodwin said.

On page 346, section 1610, Goodwin says that inside a clause that starts with one of several particles, negation is always mi and never ou. This excludes neither...nor clauses with oude...oude... which I found in Xenophon's Cyropaedia; the disjunctive particles surround a clause, they're not inside it.

The particles are ὅπως, ὅτι, ἵνα and ὡς. You probably recognize them as "final clauses" but if you do your homework, you will find that the name is misleading because these clauses are not always in final position in their sentences or sections. If the grammars are going on another meaning of "final", they are responsible for documenting what they do mean. It would be a first.

Well.

Xenophon Anabasis II 4.3

τί μένομεν; ἢ οὐκ ἐπιστάμεθα ὅτι βασιλεὺς ἡμᾶς ἀπολέσαι ἂν περὶ παντὸς ποιήσαιτο, ἵνα καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις Ἕλλησι φόβος εἴη ἐπὶ βασιλέα μέγαν στρατεύειν; καὶ νῦν μὲν ἡμᾶς ὑπάγεται μένειν διὰ τὸ διεσπάρθαι αὐτοῦ τὸ στράτευμα: ἐπὰν δὲ πάλιν ἁλισθῇ αὐτῷ ἡ στρατιά, οὐκ ἔστιν ὅπως οὐκ ἐπιθήσεται ἡμῖν.

“Why are we lingering? Do we not understand that the King would like above everything else to destroy us, in order that the rest of the Greeks also may be afraid to march against the Great King? For the moment he is scheming to keep us here because his army is scattered, but when he has collected his forces again, it can’t be that he will not attack us.

The translation on Perseus “but that he will attack us.” This was probably done on purpose to hide the fact that ouk was used inside the clause that started with [h]opos when all the grammars say that can’t be done. The sign of an authoritarian field is that you never do anything to imply your seniors were wrong; you can even fudge your answers like this to protect their reputations.

Don't tell me this is an unusual case. Goodwin's statement is categorical. He uses the large font that makes his main points. He does not weasel-word with "may use" or contradict himself in his small font in a buried note. When you have one exception to a categorical claim, it is false. Anybody who doesn't know that, knows less than an elementary student in Classical Greek times who studied the trivium.

Check out the categorical statements in your Greek grammar. It is time-consuming but the computer does the hard part. Copy your text into a word processor. Find the first example of whatever you're working with, start your search and replace app, paste that into the Find function and also the Replace function, and set the format of the Replace function to highlight it as with a Magic Marker. Do a replace on the first couple of occurrences to make sure there's more than one, and then do a Replace All. If your word processor can't do this, you may want to switch to one that does, but at the very least, you can find every occurrence of the problem word. Before Microsoft Word could display and manipulate non-Latin scripts, a person could go blind trying to do this, and that's why some contradictions to the categorical claims escaped notice. (Others may have been victims of a scholarly fault and that might be for next week.)

This is why Greek scholars need to take advantage of digitized texts. They have to search for the exceptions to every categorical claim in their grammar books, because it only takes one exception like this to destroy such claims. This one example ruins like 3 pages of Goodwin and everybody else who has the same statement.

And the claims that the grammars weasel-word with "may use", etc., you don't need to memorize. Only the categorical ones that survive, tell you how Classical Greek works.