This is a good question and one I've long pondered; it has been
investigated and I'm trying to access some of those studies. One pertinent
fact here is reasonably clear: there is a sort of self-projection in these
future tense forms, such as BHSOMAI, AKOUSOMAI, LHYCOMAI, MAQHSOMAI.
Historically all Greek future tenses derived from aorist subjunctives
expressive of a strong will to do something--and I think the exertion of
will itself was evidently felt much more strongly in some kinds of actions
than in others; some such explanation must underline this shift in voice.
Of course it is not something that can be translated into English without
sounding absolutely silly. Some of those verbs of motion are what we deem
intransitive in English, but many of them are middle in Greek. BAINW
(active) seems to mean something like "I stride," while BHSOMAI, the future
(middle) seems to mean something like "I'm going to get myself going
forward." This is a matter of nuances and it is a matter of the
idiosyncracies of particular verbs. The traditional way of dealing with
this phenomenon pedagogically is to say: "These are deponents; they don't
behave the way good upstanding English verbs behave, but you have learn how
they behave--so learn them and don't ask why." There's something to be said
for that approach, and whatever we do to understand the way languages work,
we do come up ultimately to the imponderable question of why something is
this way and not that and we realize we can ask the question but cannot
answer it. I would just like, pedagogically, to push back a bit further
that point where we have to confess what we don't understand. I think we
CAN come to understand more about the way the Greek verb works than the
traditional way of teaching the morphology of the verb endeavors to do.
>I don't argue on the basis of assumption that it must be active...but by
>function?
>
>Is this assumption of the "deponent" (sorry for using it again) :) just
>in the NT greek?
This terminology was used to describe both Greek and Latin, and it became
entrenched in tradition. We do have "reflexive verbs" in Latin, a category
that expands in later Latin immensely and the issues in an immense store of
reflexive verbs in the Romance Languages. The reflexive verbs do almost
exactly what the middle-voice verbs in Greek and Latin did and are also
elements that have to be memorized by the language learner, but since the
use of the reflexive pronoun with these verbs does not actually involve a
difference in inflection, there never was any temptation to call them
anything like "deponents." Moreover, although new learners may like to
think of the reflexive verbs as irregular, most of them are by no means
irregular.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/