Mark 12 : 37

Greek πόθεν and Latin unde are interrogative adverbs of origin ('whence/how'), while the Syriac ܘܐܝܟܢܐ ('and how') is fused with the preceding conjunction into a single token, conflating καί and πόθεν; the sense ('how then is he his son?') is preserved across all three.

Greek and Latin spell out the verb 'to be' (ἐστιν / est) with a separate noun for 'son' (υἱός / filius) and genitive pronoun (αὐτοῦ / ejus), whereas Syriac compresses the clause: ܒܪܗ ('his son', with possessive suffix) followed by the enclitic copula ܐܝܬܘܗܝ. This is a routine Syriac construction collapsing pronoun and copula and reordering son-before-verb.

The interrogative force carried in Greek by the semicolon on υἱός; and represented in the Vulgate by a discrete '?' token has no separate orthographic marker in the Syriac, which conveys the question lexically through ܘܐܝܟܢܐ; the punctuation difference is editorial rather than textual.

Greek deploys the article + adjective ὁ πολὺς ὄχλος ('the great crowd'); Latin renders multa turba and Syriac ܘܟܠܗ ܟܢܫܐ ('and all the crowd'). The Syriac ܟܠܗ ('all/whole') intensifies πολύς into a totalizing 'all the crowd,' a slight semantic shift from 'great/many' toward universality, while the conjunction is absorbed into the prefixed ܘ-.

Greek expresses the durative sense with a single imperfect ἤκουεν αὐτοῦ ('was listening to him'); Syriac analytically constructs the past continuous with the participle ܫܡܥ plus auxiliary ܗܘܐ and the object ܠܗ, a characteristic Syriac periphrasis for the imperfect aspect; Latin uses the simple perfect audivit eum without the iterative nuance.