Re: Neither here nor there.

Raymond Brown sikayal:

> >Oddly enough, I can't think of any word that means "to go towards" or "to
> >come," unless its *eiserkhomai, but I doubt that such a word actualy
> >occurs.
>
> It did! it occurs as early as Homer and at least as late as Xenophon.  But
> in litigious-loving Athens it came to be used particularly in a legal
> context: I come into court; I am brought into court.
Huh.  I had never seen eis- used as a prefix at all, and I was under the
impression that it wasn't allowed.  But hey, I'm taking my Classical Greek
Language final tomorrow and not starting literature until next year, so
what do I know?

> I suspect the Hellenistic development is part of the internationalizing of
> Greek as it became the Koine; it was being spoken either as L2 or as L1 by
> bilingual people whose other L1 had separate verbs for 'come' and 'go'.
I fail to see how this would affect the development of Greek for L1
speakers.  English is becoming an international Koine, but I can't think
of any English word or expression whose meaning is influenced by the
mistakes of foreign speakers.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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