Of Persons and Peoples

There wasn’t much left to Lesson 5 after we’d given everyone the masculine definite article at the end of L4; just a bit of explanation of a few of the different uses Greek has for the article. Most of this went without a hitch, but a small misunderstanding from last week’s homework was revisited when I used the sentence below as an example of how articles follow the number, gender and case of the nouns they describe:

ὁ ἀποστολος γραφει τοις λαοις τους νομους του Κυριου.

The apostle writes the laws of the Lord to the people.

Oh-oh! I’d used the dreaded “people” word!

The problem with λαος arose when everyone translated “τῳ λῳ” in last week’s homework as “to a person”, rather than “to a people”. When someone emailed asking why it wasn’t “person”, I made a fairly lengthy reply and, true to form, managed to muddy the already murky waters of confusion even more by saying, at one point, something along the lines of “in English the plural of people is peoples”. So, when I used the above sentence and translated the plural “τοις λαοις” as “to the people” rather than “to the peoples”, I was immediately called to account.

Now I’m going to try to clear the whole mess up. I’ve just investigated the matter thoroughly and have come up with the following:

I was wrong the second time!

Whenever a form of the plural λαοι is used, then the translation should be “peoples”. So the above translation should be “The apostle writes the laws of the Lord to the peoples.” And since that’s not what I intended to say, I should change the Greek—well done Trish for spotting that one and to Larry for goading me into checking. I stand corrected.

However, in the homework, the translation of “to a people” stands as the correct one against everyone’s “to a person”. And, just in case anyone’s tempted to argue that the general “to people” should be allowed, I’d just say that, well, if it’s singular...no, forget it, I’ll pick that one up another time.

Right.

Okay, back to business. In the last blog, I’d mentioned I’d be making a special announcement on Sunday. Well, I made it—we’re having our first test!

YIPPEE!!!

Okay, nobody actually said, “Yippee!” out loud, but I could tell everyone was stoked….no, really, I could…everyone…stoked…yes, they were…!


God bless,
Ἰακωβος

(P.s. The latest Why Learn Greek has also been added. jk)