Greeting Hails

[Grsartor at AOL.COM]

A small discovery about the "hails" construction:
 
remember that it occurs twice, in Mark and in John:
 
 
hails þiudan Iudaie - Mark 15:18 - Hail, [o] King of the Jews.
hails þiudans Iudaie - John 19:3 - Hail [the] King of the Jews.
 
I wondered why John's version did not seem to have "king" as a vocative,  
and thought it might be due to carelessness. In a sense there was 
carelessness:  my own. If I had bothered to check the Greek in John's version I should 
have  seen that it says
 
hail (chaire - an imperative) the king of the Jews.
 
But whereas John had the king word in the nominative (basileus) Mark had it 
 in the vocative (basileu) and with no definite article. It therefore looks 
as if  Wulfila was faithful to the material he translated, and the two 
lines given  above have been correctly transmitted to us.
 
Incidentally, I wondered about the correctness of the Greek here, since the 
 language the New Testament was written in is said to be often poor -  
"impoverished and crippled" as a former Bishop of Birmingham put it, though I am 
 not myself advanced enough to notice its deficiencies. I checked Mark's 
version  in Vincent Taylor's Greek Text of Mark, and reproduce below part of 
what appears  there, without pretending that I fully understand it:
 
chaire, basileu corresponds to the Latin greeting Ave  Caesar. The 
vocative, which admits the royal right... is 'a note of the  writer's imperfect 
sensibility to the more delicate shades of Greek idiom',  Moulton, i.71.
 
Gerry T.

 
 
In a message dated 01/06/2012 04:00:06 GMT Daylight Time,  
r_scherp at yahoo.com writes:


Hails!

Well, the opinions vary. I think we also have to  distinguish between 
adjective and noun. In 'Verit heilir' the word clearly  appears as an adjective. 
In German, however, 'Heil' seems to be used primarily  as a noun that calls 
for the dative: 'Heil dir'. The examples Gerry posted  seem to indicate a 
similar usage, but with an accusative instead of dative. Is  that a valid 
interpretation?

Randulfs
--- In  gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Thomas Ruhm <thomas at ...>  wrote:
>
> In other languages greetings and other frequently used  expressions with 
not much meaning the singular can be  generalized.
>




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