Since my Greek class has finished Plato's Apology, our teacher, Dr. Bruce McMenomy, has begun doing grammar review. This class period, he shared with us fascinating information about Greek and Latin cases and how they make sense when viewed in correspondence to the original Indo-European cases from which they arose.
For example, many people who study Latin get confused at the difference between the ablative of agent and the ablative of instrument. The only difference between them, they claim, is that the former uses people and the latter things. But our teacher explained to us that the Latin ablative of agent and the Greek genitive of agent both came from the Indo-European "ablative" case used to convey separation, while the Latin ablative of instrument and the Greek dative of instrument both came from the Indo-European "instrument" case used to convey means. Here is the climax of his point:
"But the point here is that in the agent construction — in both Latin and Greek — the sense feeding into it historically — and probably still there in the conscience of those using the language at the time — is separative. The action implicit is action FROM someone. This is very different from action BY MEANS OF something. Once you really understand that, the ablative of agent in Latin, and the genitive of agent in Greek, both become vastly richer connotatively for you. You understand that there's almost a physical sense of motion underlying every transitive verb. Action comes FROM something and goes TO something."
Wow, I thought. In these differences between cases there is embodied the idea that action comes from someone and goes somewhere. The idea there there is no "just happening" and random acting. That all things come from a specific source, and that they all lead to a definite end.
Grammar has never seemed more important to me.
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