Negator – οὐ ‘no’

ObjectivesLearning objectives

• The syntax and semantics of the interjection ἰδού and the preposition ἐνώπιον
• Forming yes-no questions in Greek
• The morphology and semantics of the negator οὐ ‘no’

VocabularyVocabulary

Noteἰδού

Interjections (abbreviated intj) do not have a syntactic function within the clause, but they say something about the entire clause itself. To illustrate, look in Look, Luke is going through a hard time right now is not a command to physically look at Luke or something he is doing (as if we are to look at Luke losing a wrestling match), and deleting look from the sentence does not alter the description about Luke. Rather, look is a signal to the hearer to pay careful attention to what is being said in the description as a whole. The interjection ἰδού in NT Greek is a very common interjection that functions in a very similar way. This is evident by its common use in narrative where the narrator cannot be instructing the reader to look at an event that has already happened. In such a context, ἰδού must be a signal to the reader to pay attention to what is being said:

Noteἐνώπιον

The preposition (abbreviated prep) ἐνώπιον ‘before’ takes the genitive case and often refers to someone or something that is physically in front of someone else:

NoteGeneral Greek: Yes-No Questions

Yes-no questions in Greek look identical to normal declarative sentences except for the semicolon at the end indicating it is a question. There probably was a difference in intonation as well (such as a rising pitch, as we have in English), but this cannot be seen in the text itself. Although there are some different kinds of yes-no questions that do have special words associated with them (see 45.4.3.1), the most common way to ask a yes-no question is just to read the sentence like a question.

MorphologyMorphology: Negator – οὐ ‘no’

• οὐ is a proclitic.
• The form of οὐ may change depending on the sound that immediately follows it.

SemanticsSemantics: Neg – οὐ (Predicate Negation)

If you recall, the predicate is the part of the sentence that describes who the subject is, what he or she is doing, or a property he or she has (see 5.4.4.2). Most of the time, this is just the verb. In the simplest case, a negative statement says that the predicate is not true of the subject. For example, when we say ἡ νύμφη οὐκ ἐσθίει, it means that the action of eating is not true of the bride. We call this predicate negation, and we introduce other kinds of negation in 50.1.3.