Re: Analogy: cases & prepositions; verbal inflection & adverbs

At 3:14 pm -0500 11/6/00, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>Ed Heil wrote:
>
>> (And since grammaticalizing cases made
>> them necessary, you have to have a case AND preposition -- so that the
>> preposition *refines* the meaning of the case, rather than
>> substituting for it).
>
>In archaic Greek, this was still the case.  The case system bore the
>functional load while particles like _apo_, _para_ etc. refined the
>meaning of the sentence, and were still felt to have adverbial force.
Exactly.

>(I suspect that Homer's Greek was on the way to making prepositions
>out of those adverbs, though, because of tmesis and other things.  I'm
>sure Ray can more fully enlighten us, however!)
IMO it is mistaken to talk of tmesis in Homeric Greek.  This was a
misconception of later Greeks - much later, namely Alexandrian Hellenists
some 500 years later - judging Homeric Greek from the standpoint of their
Hellenistic Greek.  In Homer these particles are, as Thomas says,
essentially adverbs which helped give more precision to the case system;
their position in a sentence was very fluid.

By the classical period we find them used as:
- prepositions (with pitch accent on second syllable of bisyllabic
prepositions);
- or postpositions (with pitch accent on first syllable if bissyllabic);
- a prefixes to verbs.

I suspect that by the end of the Classical period, postpositions were
confined to literature & that prepositions were the norm in speech.

From Hellenistic Greek till the present day, they continue (those that
survive) to be used either as prepositions or as verbal prefixes.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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