Translation practice (into Greek)
- Thread starter Pacifica
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Does "for us" actually take genitive here? Is that even possible?
How bizarre. I thought that the idea of something/an action being "for" someone (i.e. for their benefit, or opposite thereof) was really the basic sense of the dative.* Could one just use dative in this sentence and leave out the preposition?
*In Latin, that is, of course; but I'd assumed (maybe wrongly) that Greek kept this, since dative is also the case of the indirect object in Greek.
Pro in latin takes the ablative, not the dative (well, no Latin preposition takes the dative anyway, but if we followed your reasoning, some should).
Hmmm, true. Silly illogical prepositionsPro in latin takes the ablative, not the dative (well, no Latin preposition takes the dative anyway, but if we followed your reasoning, some should).
I suppose genitive in the Greek phrase makes some sense, since "for the benefit of us" is implied. But the logic behind pro taking ablative in Latin escapes me.
Greek prepositions (at least the handful that I've learned so far) do seem to be categorized more logically than Latin ones, I must admit.
Greek prepositions (at least the handful that I've learned so far) do seem to be categorized more logically than Latin ones, I must admit.
I think you're thinking too Englishly here. There isn't any ellipsis like a word meaning "benefit" (in the dative...?
 Tongue.gif "(1) Tongue out :p")
) implied.I suppose it has originally kind of a locative sense, since the most basic meaning of pro, etymologically speaking, is "before, in front of".
Ah, I've never noticed that. Can you give me some examples of what you mean by that?
It's more that I'm thinking of how certain verbs take genitive with a sort of implied (but not stated) noun, e.g. ἀκούω + gen (used with a person) = "I hear (the sound) of so-and-so (speaking, or whatever)..."I think you're thinking too Englishly here. There isn't any ellipsis like a word meaning "benefit" (in the dative...?
Mostly how accusative = to/into a place, dative = in/on/at a place (no motion) and genitive = out of/away from a place.
Hmm, I suppose that may be the case with some verbs, but with prepositions, I don't think so.
Yes, that's neat. The lost cases of Indo-European seem to have been perhaps better redistributed in greek when it comes to expressing relations to places (since in Latin ablative and locative were englobed in the same case (ablative), but they were kept separate in Greek (genitive and dative)).
It's also interesting how even in English we say "out of". I wonder if other inflected languages also tend to stick this sort of thing in genitive as well, or it's just a coincidence...
Couldn't there have been originally, though? However prepositions arise (not that I have any clue how they do, and I'm not sure anyone does) could it have been through ellipsis of a word/phrase like this, that more "logically" takes a particular case?
I don't think this has anything to do with a genitive: "of" originally meant "from", and it still seems to be what it means in that sort of expressions.
One thing that seems common to a few languages, though, (because it's rather logical) is to replace the genitive with prepositions meaning "from", like "of" in English and "de" in the romance languages.
I don't know enough languages to tell you how many use the genitive with an ablative meaning, if that's what you mean. So far I know only Greek that does so.
I really don't think so. Have a look here for the, I think, commonly accepted theory concerning the origin of prepositions.
I didn't know that -- very interesting, actually.
Incidentally, in Germanic languages the distinction between "of" and "from" tends to get blurred as well. E.g. "von" in aristocratic German last names literally means "from" a place ("von Sachsen", "von Brandenburg" and the like) but also with some connotation of one being "of" a particular family/people/bloodline. (Or, for example, "Ludwig van Beethoven"...)
So I wonder if there's something about these two senses that tends to naturally get amalgamated/overlap.
In French it's simple, there's simply no difference. Only one word exist for both, "de", which englobes the Latin de, ex, ab, and the genitive case.
There most certainly is. You can feel how both meanings are somewhat close, right? E.g. something that comes from someone can belong to that person, and vice versa... I physically come from my parents, and I am my parents' daughter; I am from Belgium, and I "belong" to Belgium as a citizen; if you have a book that belongs to me, it comes from me... it starts like this and then extends until the words meaning "from" come to mean also "of" and replace (more or less completely; completely in the Romance languages, less completely in English) the genitive.
Yes, true. Which makes me really wonder why the sense of "from" ended up in ablative case in Latin, and not genitive (which seems to be a far more common/automatic way of thinking...) I wonder whether it was that for some reason the Romans didn't feel the two concepts were that closely related; or conversely, they felt they were too closely related and so confined the physical/movement sense of "from" to an entirely separate case from (the more abstract) "of" ("belonging/related to"); or whether it was just a weird linguistic evolutionary fluke somewhere down the line that got passed on.