One Adjective for Multiple Nouns

[Maybells]

In English, an adjective before a set of nouns applies to all of the nouns in the set. For example, "various stories and myths" means that there are various stories and various myths, while "stories and various myths" has a different meaning and the "various" applies only to the myths.

In Ancient Greek, this phase can be translated many ways: ποικίλοι μῦθοι καὶ λόγοι, μῦθοι καὶ λόγοι ποικίλοι, μῦθοι ποικίλοι τε λόγοι, etc.

In which case does the ποικίλοι describe both the μῦθοι and the λόγοι instead of just one of them?

[seneca2008]

You are forgetting the definite article here. I am assuming you are not writing poetry where the rules are more flexible.

So using the attributive position for the adjective The possibilities are:

οἱ ποικίλοι μῦθοι καὶ οἱ ποικίλοι λόγοι or

οἱ μῦθοι οἱ ποικίλοι καὶ οἱ λόγοι οἱ ποικίλοι or Less often

μῦθοι οἱ ποικίλοι καὶ λόγοι οἱ ποικίλοι

If you intend to use the adjective in a predicative sense then you would have:

ποικίλοι ....... οἱ μῦθοι καὶ οἱ λόγοι various ....(are) the myths and stories or

οἱ μῦθοι καὶ οἱ λόγοι ...... ποικίλοι the myths and stories ...(are) various

So your question comes down to can you omit the repeated adjective? The answer depends on what you are trying to say and the context. If you meant both various stories and various myths then you could use τε..καὶ and that would make the sense obvious. But generally omitting a repeated adjective would be understood especially as here it doesn’t really add much.

I think that the distinction you are trying to make in English between "various stories and myths" and "stories and various myths" is more apparent than real. If you wanted to say that there were stories that were essentially all the same and myths which varied in their content then presumably you would want to say that explicitly rather than your second formulation.



Context is always very important and if you provide more I might be able to be specific.