I started to send this note back off-line, but I've rethought it hastily
enough (favorite line of Euripides: hAI DEUTERAI PWS FRONTIDES SOFWTERAI!)
that I won't do that. I very much appreciate your note and I want to say to
others who have discussed aspect that I probably made the comment cited
above rather haphazardly and offensively, which was not really my intent--I
wanted to express my own frustration at the discussion of aspect, the
causes of which are quite as have hereabove been described. I thank all who
have contributed something to the discussion of aspect; my problem is
primarily one of (in)digestion as people continue to toss out morsels and
loaves of enlightening information on aspect each in a somewhat different
dialect of English.
I appreciate these bibliographical pointers and shall try to follow them
up. I've often thought that what Aristotle has to say about the way verb
tenses express his concept of entelechy is a very helpful way to talk about
the Greek perfect and present "tenses," and I'm not surprised to see that
someone has endeavored to analyze what's implicit in that. I want to add
also that I've become increasingly aware from careful reading of Sihler's
_Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_ that much of the confusion that a
student cannot avoid in learning to cope with the Greek verb derives from
the intermingling of original Proto-Indo-European stative verbs with PIE
eventive verbs and the development in Greek and Latin of functional
rapprochement between the aorist and the perfect, so that the two tenses
became one in Latin while the perfect tends to evanesce in Greek and the
perfective force comes to be concentrated more in the aorist. Moreover,
even in Homer, the distinction between imperfects and thematic aorists is
often enough unclear. Perhaps I should wait 100 years or so until the dust
settles on all this investigation of aspect until some Gnomic Einstein
comes along and sets forth a "Unified Aspect Theory" wherein all the terms
are used m;onovalently and all of them are unambiguously interrelated in an
easily diagrammable scheme. For the time being, at any rate, I am grateful
for any and every bright light (even if it is no Star of Bethlehem) that
pierces the fog and permits even a slightly improved orientation for one
roaming through the wilderness of aspect.
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/