Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 1:46 pmBecause evangelio is not in the nominative. It is in the ablative as part of the ablative absolute, assumpto itaque evangelio. It would be pretty amazing (and barbaric) for the subject of the sentence to be understood to be the same exact noun as what is in an ablative absolute. I have never seen such a thing in Latin, which would be completely unnecessary anyway, since one could so much more easily just put the participle in the nominative to agree with the subject.Secret Alias wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 1:29 pm Why do translators make Mark the subject of the sentence, the 'exemplum' which compels the converts?
This discussion reminded me of something from college that I still think back fondly on. The Greek version of the Latin ablative absolute is the genitive absolute (since Classical Greek has no ablative case). There is, however, according to my professors, also a Greek dative absolute, which is very rare. I myself have never seen one in the wild, and we were told about them "just in case."
Well, my classmates and I in a class dedicated to reading Thucydides once thought that we'd found a dative absolute. The sentence was long and convoluted, as so many of Thucydides' are, and we could see no way of fitting the dative construction into the grammar of the rest of the sentence; hence, a dative absolute! We were pretty excited... until our professor pointed out that the entire construction was modifying a noun in the dative case tucked elsewhere in the sentence. A participial phrase was modifying a noun is not an absolute, since the whole point of an absolute is to stand apart from the rest of the grammar. We were disappointed, obviously, but lesson learned. Languages like Greek and Latin, in which every noun, adjective, and pronoun is declined, can accommodate complex sentences with words and phrases modifying other words or phrases even at some distance.