spin

I cannot help it if you are a bullshit merchant burnt for trying to sell crud formulae and for trying to explain away syntax marked for apparently no reason--oh, other than for the fact that Greek word order is "flexible", so fucking flexible that you have consistently failed to show any other closely analogous structure in a similar context. This when you mask your communicative inadequacy by fudging context from "introduction" to "re-introduction" then going right off the rails into a pointless tirade about markedness. I might envy you for the library access you have, but I think someone's wasted their tuition fees on you. Pedantry and prescriptiveness is no way to deal rationally with anything. Instead of whinging and waving hands why don't you bite the bullet and show how the syntax of "the brother of Jesus called christ named James" actually reflects how Josephus introduces people (not reintroduces them) in cases where there is no recently mentioned or famous genitive link with which to connect the figure to the discourse.

And your sorry recourse to BJ for examples where Josephus uses "whose name was..." just shows how desperate you are. There seems not to be a single example to be found in the last 10 books of AJ and not one in the entire corpus that reflects the exact structure under discussion (even if we omit the only otherwise chistian attested "called christ" qualifier to the qualifier). You can package your inadequacy any way you like, but you've done a good job of bolstering my case. As you like smileys so much, here's one for your attempted sale of conservative scholarship on this forum:

igsfly:

I don't see why you have come to a rationalist site other than for blood sports. You've shown no interest in analyzing the underpinnings of the prevalent belief system of our culture. You can't say "po" in order to see where it gets an alternative analysis. So what are you doing here?

LegionOnomaMoi

I'm not the one who pretends to know technical linguistic terms, misapplies them, tries to compensate with a google scholar search, and when finally called out, just resorts anything but trying to explain why your usage of linguistics betrays how little you actually know about it.


Yeah! More claims about markedness with nothing to back them up! Which one of those google scholar articles are you using again? The one on children's interpretations of gestures?

Wrong. I repeated showed the preposed reference modifiers typical in Josephus' works. Even with kin:

You could have saved me the trouble and either
1) Answered my questions about your application or
2) Admit you haven't a fucking clue.

I don't pay tuition. I get paid.

No, apparently what one does is refer to a linguistic term and then hide behind the claim that it applies without defending it's usage, despite repeated request and an entire explanation on the development and use of the theory.
I have. What you did is make up some rule about "introduction" and "famous people" (which is just about every fucking person Josephus talks about), ignore quite similar structures throughout Josephus' work, ignore the oddities Josephus has specifically when it comes to referring to people, and then..

[this is the best part]

you used your pathetic grasp of transformationalist grammar and whatever other little bit of functional or structuralist traditions you're clinging to (hard to tell, given the irrelevancy of most of your comments and your refusal to refer to sources) to claim that what we have is not only "marked", and not only that to show it isn't we should look at Josephus (contrary to markedness theories), but furthermore that markedness is anything other than preferred structures which are ignored all the fucking time.

thief of fire

Well for one thing he's shown where your arguments are no good. I don't think you're being rational. You seem to have an emotional attachment to your own argument. You've been trotting it out for at least 8 years (and that's just here), so its understandable you have an emotional attachment to it. One that's hard to let go of.

His examples were pretty good. And the only escape hatch for you to fall back on is that they are not exactly precisely the same, but who is really going to peg everything on something like that. No one.

spin

OK, if you think they're so good, just cite those introductions that have the descriptor (in this case "the brother of Jesus called christ") before the subject (here "James") for no apparent reason.

LegionOnomaMoi

That's the great thing about your method of argument. I can give all the examples in the world:But as long as you can come up with some bullshit reason, like "the person is famous" or "they were introduced before, so somehow that changes things even though it normally doesn't" (although neither of those apply to the two above, so I eagerly await the next bullshit reason why we have the name last) then you can continue to assert that AJ 20.200 is "marked" because...well, you say so. But we should take your word for it. You searched google scholar for "markedness".

spin

I thought LegionOnomaMoi were supposed to be a student of linguistics. His denial here of simple reasons for marked word order--both indicating old information that should be known by the reader--just goes to show that he is peddling more bullshit than content. We can scratch the pretense of scholarship here. Both the reasons LegionOnomaMoi calls "bullshit" are well-known pragmatic issues. Linguistics has long taken notice of old vs new information, old information being what the reader/hearer already knows and the two types I've given are due to fame or recent mention. It is common to lead with the old information, which is what we've seen with some of the examples LegionOnomaMoi dug up, hence we have marked word order to accommodate the old information first. (We can now imagine that LegionOnomaMoi will now go off and construct a text wall about how old information is either outdated in his linguistics or I'm abusing the term. But who cares?)

He has finessed away from the structure we are supposed to be looking at (with a weaselliness that is commendable of a Bill Clinton asked if he had had sex with Monica Lewinsky), hiding behind similarities in the translated form. But let's look at the actual structure:

τον αδελφον Ιησου του λεγομενου Χριστου Ιακωβος ονομα αυτω
the brother of Jesus called christ James his name

It starts with 1) the relationship, here "brother", but usually a son/boy, followed by 2) the genitive relation (plus any descriptor of the genitive relation), ending with 3) who is being talked about.

[αδελφον] [Ιησου (του λεγομενου Χριστου)] [Ιακωβος ονομα αυτω]
[brother] [of Jesus (called christ)] [James by name]

These are our three basic elements. Let's look at BJ 5.474 which you failed to quote completely:

(..) τις υιος Ναβαταιου τουνομα κληθεις απο της τυχης Κεαγιρας οπερ σημαινει χωλος
the son of Nabateius by the name, called from ill-fortune, Keagiras, which signifies "lame"

Well, it's got the parts and then some, though structurally quite different. Plainly we are dealing with a complex phrase with needs outreaching those under consideration in 20.200. The writer has the problem of explaining the name and maintaining coherence of the narrative. The pragmatic solution was to reorder the whole notion so as to allow Keagaris to link to the verb which follows, linking not just Keagaris but all three actors in the subject with the rest of the sentence. Unmarked word order would separate the person from the action so far that the sentence would lose intelligibility.

Keagiras the son of Nabataeus and whose name called after an ill-fortune means "lame"

This would make connection between Keagaris and the following verb difficult. It also separates the name from its definition. Instead, the Greek has taken an approach of bracketing (a frequent Greek pragmatic approach to complicated word order) much of the information between "son" and "Keagiras", thus placing the name close to the end of the complex phrase, in order to allow both coherence of thought and progress of the sentence. So, LegionOnomaMoi has managed to find an example of another reason for marked syntax, but not an analogue for our phrase. Another example of this bracketing phenomenon is this double inclusion:

Μανασσην του των Ιουδαιων αρχιερεως Ιαδδου αδελφον
Manasseh (of the (of the Jews) high priest Jaddua) brother
Manasseh the brother of Jaddua the high priest of the Jews

Such bracketing, of course, is marked word order. The second example, BJ 6.387, is, ironically enough, another example of this bracketing:

τις Θεβουθει παις Ιησους ονομα
a certain (of Thebuthi) boy, named Jesus

As should be obvious this phrase is structurally different. Rather than separating the name from the relationship, they are placed together. [Note how "Jesus" links directly to the descriptive noun, "boy", unlike the structure on AJ 20.200. Consider:

AJ 20.34 a certain merchant, Ananus by name
AJ 20.43 a certain other (of those from Galilee) arrival, Eleazar by name
AJ 20.97 a certain man, Theudas by name
AJ 20.240 a son, Hyrcanus by name

Though this is the common situation, there are a few exceptions, but then, there are other issues with our phrase each of which reflect the exception rather than the norm.]

In the numerous examples LegionOnomaMoi has dug up up to now, he hasn't been considering the structure of the phrases he's tried to present as analogous to AJ 20.200. He's just given vague similarities and is more interested in appearances than reality.

LegionOnomaMoi

And this is where being a student of linguistics comes in handy. You continue to use markedness despite its inapplicability. And after numerous requests for a defense of your use, and an entire thread (which, despite being to short, was according to many actually too lengthy) detailing what markedness actually is, you continue to use it in your argument. But
1) Even if you were right, and this word order WERE marked, that merely means Josephus could have used a word order which is relatively preferable, and nothing more than this .
2) You continue to fail to demonstrate either that it is marked (apart from an assertion that elsewhere Josephus does something different, which ignores the fact that markedness concerns languages, not an author), nor that your application of markedness is based on the work of any linguistic theory or theorist.

Any references? Because I have some, specific to introductions in Josephus, which demonstrate how wrong you are here:

1) I already quoted Shayne Cohen's Jesus in Galilee and Rome. So I won't repeat his descriptions of Josephus' introducing people as if he hasn't already, in other words that, contrary to what you state, Josephus doesn't "[take] notice of old vs new information" in terms of introdcutions. Instead I'll simply quote in addition is footnote on the subject, which refers to "The sloppiness of the Josephan procedure" and that a "complete study of this problem is needed."

2) As I noted in greater detail earlier, Ilan & Price's 1994 paper in The Jewish Quarterly Review deals with this same problem again. Specifically, the note that Josephus "habitually...neglected to coordinate a person's first appearence in the text with the presentation of his full personal details." They all note in great detail the problems with Josephus' methods of referring to people, from his "contradictions and inconsistencies" to his " his omissions".

Now, unlike your bullshit general claims about "linguistics" or "pragmatics" in general, and despite the fact that you fail to refer to a single reference, it appears that Josephus doesn't follow your little "rules" about "old vs new information, old information being what the reader/hearer already knows and the two types I've given are due to fame or recent mention" or that .


There are so many example to choose from, but as I'll get a "text wall bait-and-switch" accusation anyway, I'll limit it to a few.

AJ 6.275:Ἰωνάθης ὁ τοῦ Σαούλου παῖς/Jonothan, the son of Saul
AJ 7.245:Ἀχιμᾶς δὲ ὁ Σαδώκου τοῦ ἀρχιερέως υἱὸς /Ahimaaz the son of Zadok
AJ 1.113: Χάμου τοῦ Νώχου/Ham, son of Noah

and we could go on and on, and still when it comes to patronymics, Josephus doesn't seem to care about fame. What about those introduced before?

We get a nice two for one in AJ 1.143: Σημᾷ δὲ τῷ τρίτῳ τῶν Νώχου υἱῶν /Shem, third of the sons of Noah

Here the relative is both famous and already mentioned, yet still, as with most patronymics, the son comes first.

And we could, again, go on and on, and still find that for patronymics, Spin's "rule" about it being "common to lead" is anything but common (just look at the various people named Eleazar for several examples in which relatives and/or the person talked about is either famous, already mentioned, or both, and yet for patronymics, we still find the son comes first). So what is the basis for Spin's claim that this is the reason for the "exceptions" we found before. Well, he made it up to deal with times that the person's name, the one being introduced, came last. Now, unfortunately for him. Then I introduced examples of times in which Josephus used the "whose name was X" method, and how usually in this case Josephus ends with the name. So Spin introduced a new "rule" into his personal little "markedness" theory about familial relations. But then there are exceptions here as well, where we have both name AND relation, so Spin is forced to introduce more linguistic bullshit with nice little colors seperating "structures" he identifies with more of his personal theory of linguistics/syntax.

The actual "structure" analyzed according to which "structuralist" (or linguistic, grammatical, or syntactic) theory? Your privately developed one?

Which is much the point. With nothing more than a slight of the hand, you've conflated to very different things: patronymics and identification. It's quite true they overlap. But patronymics are common to both Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and in semitic languages in especially the word order for patronymics is far less flexible. By equating patronimcs with any familial identification, you create a false "structural category". Josephus sometimes varies even with patronymics, but far, far less variation is found here than an any other type of identification.

Wow. You can't even get outdated structuralist/transformationalist analyses correct, let alone more modern ones. Not that you are entirely to blame here, as "It will not come as a suprise that no one has tried to formulate syntactic rules to explain word order variation in the NP of a language in which almost every order of NP constituents is possible" (Bakker, S. J., The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek). However, why seperate constituents like this? Doesn't dependency matter for your structuralist/transformationalist "theory"? Even if we go back as far as early X-bar, we find
Specifier
|
|
head & complement

where head and complement (such as the noun governing the genitive) are sister nodes. But let's be more specific, as Leon Stassen covers this (constituency in adnominal genitives, in which he includes "son of" type constructions) in his Predicative Possession (Oxford Univerity Press; 2009): When he discusses this type of genitive possession "in syntactic terms" he notes that "in the Adnominal Possessive the possessor NP and the possessee NP are said to form a constituent" compared to, say, locational possessives in which they "do not form a syntactic unit". Not only that, you have Jesus and the PP genitive modifier as the same constituent/unit because...why? They have the same case? That would mean you screwed up with seperating the accusatives. Or does your syntactic theory not deal with heads, government, or... well I don't know, syntax?




The question is why is it not considered "marked" according to your personal markedness theory?

I see, but AJ 20.200 is not a complex phrase? So why is it "marked"?


This is so great. So "a certain son of Nabateaeus, whose name was called after an ill-fortune, Keagiras, which means lame" is NOT marked, but

"Keagiras, whose name means lame because of his ill-fortune, and who was the son of Nabateaeus" IS marked, or any other variations which would have been possible and still placed the name first (e.g., "Kearigas son of nabateaus, whose name means lame because of his ill-fortune"). This is fantastic.


So why include it? That kind of irregularity is exactly what you call "marked". Why not simply "Keagiras son of Nabateaus"? Is it beacause nobody knew his father? Than why include that?

No, you've bracketed. Josephus describes the name before introducing it. Why not "son of Nabateaeus, by name Keagiras, whose name means "lame" because of his ill-fortune"?

What we have is the introduction "son of, followed by a description of his name's origin, before we even know what his name is! But somehow this isn't "marked". Thanks to some colorful bracketing.

Even more seperation between the introduction and finally getting the name than in AJ 20.200, including a description of where the name comes from before we even know what it is

No, even MORE irregular, yet somehow in Josephus. So...why?


"Of course." Why? How many times are you going to claim what is or isn't marked before you give some basis for your claim? Let me guess: you aren't ever going to give any actual linguistic theory you are using, especially one which is of Greek, but will continue to claim whatever you want about markedness without reference to linguistic research.

But this is not what you said we should see (examples removed): You've been claiming this from the beginning: But now we have MORE exceptions. We still don't have anything other than your own claims (no references to support your use of markedness, claims about greek syntax, claims about Josephan style, or anything else), but we do have more ways in which you can "explain" how other examples which violate your "rule" are ok, but AJ 20.200 is suspect.


You mean, according to your own personal theory of syntax, which is based on...well, who knows... you can bracket things with pretty colors such that somehow your little rule thing still applies?

I think I finally figured out what you mean by "marked". You mean what colors you use to "mark" the structures you make up.

LegionOnomaMoi

Just for the hell of it, let's see how "markedness" is used by an actual linguist in a real paper on ancient Greek word order. I've picked Viti's Genitive word order in Ancient Greek because, as kinship genitives are a topic of discussion, I can use the same paper again.

From her intro: "The label of (un)-markedness satisfies language description, but does not suffice for an explanation of word order variation."

So why on earth is spin not only using it to analyze a particular author, but word order?

"genitive relation." So what does this study (from 2008) say about kinship genitives in greek in general (rather than Spin's confusing patronymics in Josephus)? First, in older Greek (Homer) no preference for kinship relations where the genitive is first or last. However, moving forward from Homer, we find "genitives of kinship" where the genitive comes first increasing. In Herodotus, nearly 80% of the time, kinship relations use the GN word order.

So much for "markedness".

maryhelena

LegionOnomaMoi

Could you please give me your reading, view, of the relevant James passage in Josephus. I'm not able to follow all the linguistics here - so would appreciate your wording for this contentious passage. No explanation necessary.....just the finished product.......Thanks.

angelo

Would be great if we had some originals from Josephus. We haven't. What we do have are copies of copies and all copied by non other than christians themselves. This is the reason Bart Ehrman says that none of these sources are reliable evidence for a Jesus of Nazareth or even christiamity itself. All we have are the gospels which themselves are descredited in my opinion and to anyone else who is honest enough to admit it.