Work in progress
In Greek, the verb forms typically include information about the subject within the verb ending itself. This is known as verbal inflection or conjugation. However, there are instances in the Greek New Testament where the pronoun is added even though the information is already contained in the verb. This linguistic phenomenon is known as pronominal redundancy.
The use of pronominal redundancy in the Greek New Testament serves several purposes which may have exegetical consequences.
Some typical reasons for pronominal redundancy:
Clarity and Emphasis: Adding the pronoun reinforces and emphasizes the subject of the sentence to avoid ambiguity. By explicitly stating the subject as a separate word, the author can ensure that the intended meaning is clear.
Stylistic Variation: The authors of the New Testament employed various stylistic devices and added variety to their writing. Pronominal redundancy may give the text a more poetic or emphatic quality and make it more engaging to the reader.
Theological Significance: In some cases, the use of pronominal redundancy can have theological implications. It can highlight the identity or importance of the subject, particularly when referring to God or Jesus.
Consequence of copying by scribs: The Greek New Testament has been transmitted through handwritten copies over the centuries. Scribes, who copied the texts by hand, sometimes added or modified words unintentionally or intentionally for clarity or emphasis. This could explain why pronominal redundancy occurs only in certain manuscripts or versions of the text.
The rough idea is to check phrases with function object for inclusion of a personal pronoun. If possible, number and person information can be validated against each other.
%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2
# Loading the Text-Fabric code
# Note: it is assumed Text-Fabric is installed in your environment
from tf.fabric import Fabric
from tf.app import use
# load the N1904 app and data
N1904 = use ("tonyjurg/Nestle1904GBI", version="0.4", hoist=globals())
Locating corpus resources ...
| Name | # of nodes | # slots/node | % coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| book | 27 | 5102.93 | 100 |
| chapter | 260 | 529.92 | 100 |
| sentence | 5720 | 24.09 | 100 |
| verse | 7943 | 17.35 | 100 |
| clause | 16124 | 8.54 | 100 |
| phrase | 72674 | 1.90 | 100 |
| word | 137779 | 1.00 | 100 |
# The following will push the Text-Fabric stylesheet to this notebook (to facilitate proper display with notebook viewer)
N1904.dh(N1904.getCss())
This code will produce .....
.....
Thanks to Prof. Willem van Peursen (VU) for pointing me to this interesting issue by mentioning:
In Muraoka’s Why Read the Bible in the Original Languages,1 I found the following examples:
Pronouns (e.g. Mt 3:1 “I (emphasis) baptize you with water, but…”
1 Muraoka, Takamitsu. Why Read the Bible in the Original Languages? (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2020), 69.
The scripts in this notebook require (beside text-fabric) the following Python libraries to be installed in the environment:
tabulate
You can install any missing library from within Jupyter Notebook using eitherpip or pip3.