Morphosyntactic Contact in Translation: Greek ídios and Latin proprius in the Bible

Abstract

We investigate the possibility that contact with Greek through the translation of biblical texts may have played a role in the development of Latin proprius ‘personal’, ‘peculiar’ into a reflexive possessive adjective. A few centuries earlier, post-Classical Greek witnesses a similar development with the adjective ídios ‘private’, ‘personal’: we determine that in the New Testament this adjective has innovative uses as a reflexive possessive, and we argue that this is a system-internal development triggered by the loss of the reflexive possessive forms of Classical Greek. The comparison between the Greek original and the Latin Vulgata translation of the New Testament furthermore shows that Latin proprius was used, with just one exception, as a translation equivalent of Greek ídios. We conclude that contact through translation acts as a catalyst for a change that, also in Latin, responds to the system-internal pressure created by the loss of an unambiguous 3rd person reflexive possessive.