Barry Hofstetter wrote:I'm not sure how this turned into a discussion on deponents. My concern is to explain to the student the difference between τύπτει τὸν στρατιώτην and τύπτεται ὐπὸ τοῦ στρατιώτου. If I'm not allowed to call them active and passive, how can I describe them? And what about τύπτεται τὸν στρατιώτην? What am I allowed to call that?
Barry, nobody is holding a gun to your head and telling you that you must teach your classes a new account of the ancient Greek voice system. You are in an overwhelming majority of those who continue to teach the traditional account. I taught the traditional account myself when I taught first-year Greek before I retired twelve years ago -- but I would not teach it now. I might add that, although I used to compare Greek constructions with Latin constructions back when I began teaching in the 1960's, I don't think that the languages are as analogous as I once thought.
The specific points I was attempting to make with my comments on Stratton Ladewig's dissertation and Dionysius Thrax and on Latin deponents as middle-voice forms were intended as responses to your claim that the ancients understood Greek voice exactly as traditional pedagogy teaches it and that Latin translators understood Greek voice-usage in the same terms as traditional pedagogy teaches it. I can see that what I wrote was not clear and probably eve misleading: I wasn't intending to discuss deponency as such, but rather to suggest that the great number of so-called "deponent" verbs in Latin is beter understood -- as Basil Gildersleeve understood -- in terms of middle-voice morphology.
With regard to your pattern sentences, you are "allowed" to say whatever you prefer to your classes. For my part, I would say:
(1) τύπτει τὸν στρατιώτην has a verb in what is traditionally called "active" morphology, that the verb is transitive, active in meaning and takes στρατιώτην as its direct object or objective complement;
(2) τύπτεται ὐπὸ τοῦ στρατιώτου has a verb in what is traditionally called "middle-passive" morphology, that the verb is transitive,passive in meaning, and that ὐπὸ τοῦ στρατιώτου is formulated in the standard construction for indicating the agent responsible for an event;
(3) τύπτεται τὸν στρατιώτην has a verb in what is traditionally called "middle-passive" morphology. As τύπτειν is a transitive verb, one might expect to understand τὸν στρατιώτην as a direct object of τύπτεται -- but the construction seems rather anomalous, as the subject is not indicated other than through the 3rd-person termination. It looks like a middle meaning is intended, but the phrasing seems somewhat elliptical; if we had something like ὁ στρατηγὸς τύπτεται τὸν στρατιώτην, then the sense might be "The commander strikes his own soldier,." That's somewhat odd, however. It needs a context, like discipline meted out by a sergeant to a buck private who has deliberately disobeyed an order. That is to say, the usage of τύπτεται should be understood as reflexive, and in this snippet of a phrase, it doesn't seem very clear.
I believe that students can learn to read and understand Greek texts with the various voice usages without analyzing the constructions. Perhaps it doesn't matter that much what we call the forms in terms of morphological terminology; I do think that inconsistencies arise when we assume and teach that μαι/σαι/ται;μην/σο/το forms are fundamentally passive or that θη forms are fundamentally passive. What i think needs to be brought into grammatical explanation of voice usage is that the ancient-Greek voice system is built upon a polarity of "standard" (traditionally "active") voice forms and "reflexive" (traditionally "middle-passive" voice forms -- RATHER THAN on a polarity of "active" and "passive" with a "middle" usage of which students never quite understand what's "middle" about it.