[B-Greek] Question about the third person pronoun in this sentence

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Dec 29 08:54:27 EST 2008


On Monday, December 29, 2008, at 08:40AM, "Mike Noel" <mike at vnoel.com> wrote:
>As mentioned in an earlier posting, I am trying to work through Machen
>and am having problems with some of the exercises.  Here is one that I
>am having difficulty with.
>
>hAUTH BLEPEI TO PROSWPON TOU KURIOU AUTHS
>
>This is what I have so far:
>
>hAUTH is the pronoun "this"  used in feminine, nominative, singular.
>Machen explains that when the pronouns hOUTOS and EKEINOS are used
>without a noun they imply a subject based on the gender and numbe.  So
>I translate hAUTH to "this woman".   Then we have:
>
>BLEPEI TO PROSWPON TOU KURIOU
>
>Which I think is simply "sees the face of the lord".
>
>The final AUTHS is what is confusing me.  It is the third person
>pronoun feminine, singular, genitive.  Since pronouns match the
>antecedent in gender and number I'm thinking that this pronoun has to
>go with hAUTH.  That makes a funny sentence:
>
>This woman's face sees the face of the lord.
>
>This also means that the antecedent and the pronoun are at opposite
>ends of the sentence.  I'm learning that word order in Greek sentences
>isn't as constrained as word order in English but this seems to be
>quite a stretch.
>
>Am I missing something?

I think you are trying to carry the reference of AUTHS too far away. It
normally construes with what it follows (less commonly precedes)
immediately. So here: "sees the face of HER lord." -- i.e. the lord of her.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (ret)


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