A little Greek is good for the soul

In this case, a lot of Greek. There has been an interesting kerfuffle in the biblioblogdom world this week. It all started when Bill Mounce, of Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar fame published a post on emphatic pronouns. Hardly a topic to excite most people. But, it did excite a few, well at least two :)

Steve Runge responded, followed quickly by Mike Aubrey. Both are linguists and make very good points. I personally believe they demolish Mounce's arguments.

But, lest this urban legend spring to life again, Steve took up the challenge of educating us all about pronouns today. If you read Greek, or even if you don't but are interested in how pronouns work, read it! Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

Quality pronoun, you like, you buy!

I have a number of pronouns lying around, so I have decided to sell them to earn some cash for vacation this next summer. Took this picture last summer when we took the pronouns to the beach for exercise. As you can see, they are fine specimens.

All of the pronouns come with a basic morphology: case number and gender. For a little extra, I will throw in a “demonstrative” add-on kit that enables deictic reference to near and far things.

Besides the morph and potential deictics, the use of the pronouns is almost limitless, but you begin with an empty bucket. It has no reference until you assign it to something. My pronouns are suitable for bi-directional usage, either pointing back to an antecedent, or forward to something that you want to highlight and draw attention to...

...But if you want a little free advice, I would not suggest trying to make something emphatic that isn’t, it will only end in heartbreak. Invest the time and energy to learn about what brings about emphasis, and beware of those trying to sell you something that ain’t real. Emphatic pronouns cannot be bought, they are made using a combination of reference and context.

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Great use of humor to illustrate a basic linguistic truth :)
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