Re: Pater Noster (purely linguistically)

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 18:40:35 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
> The Greek has:
> hagiasthe:to:                             to  onoma sou.
> made-holy-AORIST.PASSIVE-3SING.IMPERATIVE the name of-you
>
> Greek, unlike Latin, has subjunctive, optative and imperative moods for
> 3rd person.
True for Attic Greek, undoubtedly, but how productive was the optative
mood in the Koine that the New Testament was written in?

If the optative was nearly never used (instead being substituted by, I
presume, subjunctive or imperative), then a morphological imperative
is no longer so clearly-cut a syntactical one.

> _hagiasthe:to:_ most certainly does not express a wish - 'may your name be
> made holy' 'I want your name to be made holy' etc. That is expressed in
> Greek with the optative mood.
Even in NT Koine?

> > *** The Greek word _epiousion_ here is problematic: it's not the usual
> > word for 'daily', and appears only once outside the Lord's Prayer.
>
> Yes - the word is extremely rare. But there can be no real doubt that it
> is derived from 'epi' (preposition = "on" in a very wide range of meanings)
>   plus iont- the stem of the present participle of the irrgular verb
> _ienai_ "to go, to come" (depending on direction of movement) and the
> formative suffixes -io-n (the last is the accusative singular). The
> adjective _epiousios_ is thought by most to be derived from _epiousa: (he:
> mera:)_ "the coming day". That is: "give us bread for the coming day" -
> whether that is today or tomorrow will depend up whether the prayer is
> said in the morning or the evening  :)
Interesting; I was not aware of that. Thanks!

> > Pre-Vulgate translations rendered it as _quotidianem_ 'daily';
>
> _quotidianum_
I've also seen "cottidianum" -- spelling mistake? alternate spelling?
different root?

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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