Lesson 8.4 · The rest of the sentence
Word order
Why the order is free, and what it still tells you when it moves.
You have been reading sentences that do not run the way English does — the verb first, the object before the subject, a "the" floating away from its noun. That is not a quirk of this language. It is the order the Bible was written in, kept exactly, word for word.
agapata tos theos ton kosmon
literally: loved — God — the world (John 3:16)
Why the order is free
Because the endings already say who does what, the order is not
needed for that job — so it is free to do a different one:
emphasis. A word moved to the front is being
stressed. When John writes theos ate tos logos with
"God" first, he is making a point that word order alone can carry.
How to read it
- Find the verb. It is the word with a person letter in it, and it can be anywhere.
- Find the
-s. That is who is doing it. - Find the
-n. That is who it is done to. - Then read the phrase in English order in your head. It gets faster quickly, and after a while you stop rearranging at all.
In the Greek — nothing was moved
This is one of the places where Biblang is at its most literal: one word for every Greek word, in the Greek's own order, with nothing rearranged and nothing inserted. An English translation has to reorder — that is what translating is — and in doing so it quietly loses the emphasis the order was carrying.
Greek's default order is loosely verb-first, but any word can be fronted, and the New Testament does it constantly. Reading in the original order is the single thing you get here that no translation can give you.