Pronomen Abundans and Pronomen Coniunctum. A ... - DWC

PRONOMEN ABUNDANS AND PRONOMEN CONIUNCTUM 21
on the word À.éOVTt. The answer, however, mayalso be negative: noticing
how many more cases are found in the Koine than in Ancient Greek - the
difference in number being so great indeed that a comparison between
the two seems almost ridiculous -, one has to admit that in the Koine
something else is going on. The idiom has spread so far that one, while
reading certain texts, can hardly avoid the impression that at that time
people had the idea that each verb had to be supplied with an object
and each noun with a possessive genitive, especially when the actual
object or possessor was placed at the beginning ofthe sentence. Apparently
people were not able any longer to span great distances in a sentence
and thus put close together everything that belonged to each other,
even when this only could be reached by repetition. Another cause,
closely connected with the preceding one, may have been the shift in
wordorder which began during the period of the Koine. A treatise on this
subject, however, would lead us too far 51.
Let us now return to our question whether this kind ofresumpt. pronoun
and the pronomen alJundans are in some way correlated. Blass-Debrunner
associate the two idioms with each other, for they say, speaking of the
pronomen abundans 52 : "Verwandt ist das pleonastische Pron. pers. nach
einem Ptz., das einem Relativsatz gleichwertig ist", mentioning as one
of their examples Apoc. 2.17 and 17 up Vl"WVTt, M)(J()) avnp. It does not
make any difference, I think, whether the first word of the sentence is a
participle or a noun. It is important that both of them are nouns, standing
at the beginning of the sentence. And thus we see two idioms: in the one
the senten ce begins with arelat. pronoun, in the other with a noun,
both of them being resumed by a pers. pronoun. The two look very similar,
and yet people living at that time do not seem to have seen a correlation
between them. How do we know that? The answer can be very simpie:
if they had seen a correlation between the two, why does the number of
51 See Hjalmar Frisk, Studien zur griechischen Wortstellung, Göteborgs Högskolas
Ársskrift 39 (1933,1). In this study Frisk shows by means of statistical tables that
in the Koine the wordorder object.predicate was preferred, whereas in Ancient
Greek this was exactly the opposite. In classical authors Frisk found for the sequence
predicate-object percentages ranging from 23,9 to 51,6%, but in Polybius 50%
and in Matthew even 77,8%. One of the consequences of th is shift may have been
that, when in the Koine for some reason or other the object, instead of being placed
af ter the verb, was put at the beginning of the sentence, people were inclined to
repeat this object af ter the verb by means of a pers. pronoun. There is reason to
think that this supposition is correct, but we cannot be sure until the wordorder
of more Koine-texts has been studied. It is a fact that in texts of the 12th and
following centuries the sequence predicate-object as weIl as the repetition of the
object by means of a pers. pronoun (in cases where the other sequence is chosen)
appears to have become a rule instead of a tendency. For the situation on this point
in Modern Greek see Tzartzanos, § 84,2, and for the phenomenon in general, Bakker,
Ontwikkeling, pp. 170-1.
52 Blass-Debrunner, § 297.