I have all my verbs and nouns and pronouns marked by the way of the visual filter. my question is this. Why isn’t "they" in this scripture marked as a pronoun? And also what is the subject in this scripture?
Thanks
Why isn’t "they" in this scripture marked as a pronoun?
If you look at an Interlinear or a Greek Manuscript of Matt 2:10 (like NA27), you will see the word "They" is not there - it is added into the English translation to make it more of what we are used to reading. The visual filters use the morphology of the original language, hence no Greek "they", no flagging.
what is the subject in this scripture?
This one I am less sure of, but I looked at this in the opentext.org Clause analysis and the Cascadia Syntax graphs, and I do know that both agree there is no subject - again it's implied in the sentence/clause. It's technically a fragment. Example, "The girl was extremely mad at me, trying to figure out how to express it. She seemed to want to tell me to do something. Her face contorted as she finally blurted out the best she could come up with. "Close the door"." In the last sentence, there is no subject.
That's my best analysis, see if the experts disagree...
"they" is interpolated from the Greek verbs for "saw" and "rejoiced".
Like Spanish, Greek doesn't need to include the pronouns because it's indicated by the verb. Of course, the English needs the pronouns, but if it's not there in the Greek, you're not going to get it highlighted in the English. That's my understanding, anyway.
the ἰδόντες (seeing) is a participle - it's plural and nominative and I'm pretty sure it functions as the subject of this clause. The "rejoiced" is interesting because it's passive.
A literal rendering of this sentence could go like this ...
"Those seeing the star were rejoiced with very great rejoicing."
thanks guyes this answers a question i have had about this same thing in other passages. i do simple structuring and a verb and also a subject has to appear in a clause before it is an independant clause
And, I forgot to say, since the context of verses from 9-12 focuses very strongly on the actions of the wise them, the "Those seeing" who are the subject of this verse, are indeed the wise men.
The Greek word ἐχάρησαν is the main verb in this clause. The verb is a 3rd person plural (they); the pronoun is more or less "built in." The Greek word translated "they saw" is ἰδόντες a plural aorist participle functioning adverbially- "they saw" or "having seen" is fairly close. I might English it: After having seen the star, they rejoiced....
Terry Cook
sDg
