Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges

COMPOUND AND COMPLEX SENTENCES: COÖRDINATION AND SUBORDINATION

[*] 2160. Coördination produces compound sentences, subordination produces complex sentences. Complex sentences have been developed out of coördinate independent sentences, one of which has been subordinated in form, as in thought, to another.

[*] 2161. Comparative Grammar shows that, historically, coördination was preceded by simple juxtaposition and followed by subordination. Thus the simplest form of associating the two ideas night fell and the enemy departed was νὺξ ἐγένετο: οἱ πολέμιοι ἀπῆλθον (or in reverse order). From this was developed a closer connection by means of coördinating conjunctions, e.g. νὺξ (μὲν) ἐγένετο, οἱ δὲ πολέμιοι ἀπῆλθον or οἱ δὲ πολέμιοι ἀπῆλθον: νὺξ ἐγένετο (or νὺξ γὰρ ἐγένετο), or νὺξ ἐγένετο καὶ οἱ πολέμιοι ἀπῆλθον. Finally it was recognized that one of these ideas was a mere explanation, definition, or supplement of the other, and hence dependent or subordinate. This stage is represented by the complex sentence: ἐπεὶ (ὅτε) νὺξ ἐγένετο, οἱ πολέμιοι ἀπῆλθον or νὺξ ἐγένετο, ὥστε οί πολέμιοι ἀπῆλθον, and so on to express various other relations. Since Greek inherited from the parent Indo-European language both the subordinate and the coördinate sentence, it must be clearly understood that the above examples of the process of development of sentence-building, though taken from Greek, illustrate an earlier period of the history of language than Greek as we have it. Though it may be possible to reconstruct the form of the earlier, coördinate sentence out of the later, subordinate sentence, and though we have examples of parallel coördinate and subordinate sentences in Greek, the subordinate sentence did not in Greek regularly go through the previous stages of simple juxtaposition and coördination. A subordinate construction produced by analogy to another subordinate construction may not be resolved into the coördinate form.