Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek and Latin

9. Words, Phrases, Clauses: Putting Them Together

155 9 Words, Phrases, Clauses Putting Them Together Even if one is working in a highly inflected language such as Greek or Latin, sentences that express only a single thought are relatively simple. Once one learns the vocabulary words, the case endings, and the indicative verb forms, such sentences are not at all difficult to translate. The complexity comes when Greek or Latin authors combine multiple phrases and clauses, creating long sentences (often much longer than we would be allowed to use in English today) in which students often get quite lost. In this part of the book, I hope to give you some guidance as you develop your skill in navigating a Greek or Latin sentence. I will try to do this in two ways: first (in this chapter) by continuing my discussion of function—if one wants to say this, what are the ways one can do so?—and then (in the last chapter) by suggesting a strategy that you can use for analyzing the words in front of you and determining how the author intended them to relate to one another. How, then, does one go about expressing complicated ideas? In English, the primary way to do so is through clauses. Because English has only a few remnants of a case system, and because it does not often use participles to express ideas, it resorts to clauses containing finite verb forms to express many of its major ideas. You are familiar with independent clauses and subordinate clauses. You are also familiar with one type of subordinate clause, called a relative clause. In addition to these, there are various other kinds of subordinate clauses to indicate different 156 Part 4: Looking at Sentences as a Whole kinds of relations.1 As you know by now, however, Latin and especially Greek are able to express many ideas using phrases that English must express with clauses. Therefore, in this chapter I will not divide my material in terms of kinds of clauses, but in terms of kinds of ideas that need to be expressed. You will need to recognize the Greek and Latin modes for expressing many different kinds of ideas, but I would like to concentrate on five of the most basic and most common. These are purpose, result, time, cause (and its reverse, concession), and condition. As I discuss each of these ideas, I will briefly mention the major way (not necessarily the only way) this idea is expressed in English and will then focus on the various ways one can express this idea in Greek and/or Latin. As I have mentioned above, this will involve overlap with some material I have covered earlier in this book, but this repetition should be beneficial, and this chapter should enable you to recognize more fully the fact that languages can perform the same function in a variety of ways. There is not an absolute standard for how one must express a given idea. Expressing Purpose One thing a sentence must do often is to convey the purpose for which the action of the main clause is being done. In English, we normally express such purpose using an infinitive phrase: “I am studying to do well on the exam.” Of course, we could also say, “I am studying so that I may do well on the exam,” although this is less common in English than an infinitive. In the classical languages, both of these are possible, but the second is greatly preferred. The following are the most common ways to express the purpose of an action in Greek or Latin. In each case, I will deal with how Greek or Latin would express the English ideas “Jesus sends the apostles to preach the gospel” and “Jesus sent the apostles to preach the gospel.” 1. Some of these are temporal clauses, purpose clauses, result clauses, concessive clauses, and causal clauses. As usual, I will not define these terms until we encounter them in Greek or Latin grammar, later in this chapter. Words, Phrases, Clauses 157 Purpose Clause (in Greek or Latin). A purpose clause is a subordinate clause introduced by a subordinate conjunction equivalent to “so that” or “in order that” in English. In Latin the conjunction is usually ut (although it can also be ne); in Greek it may be ἵνα (hina), ὡς (hōs), or ὅπως (hopōs). The verb in the subordinate clause must be consecuted according to the...