MAubrey wrote:Obviously. But that was your own fault. You can't just arbitrary swap voices between verbs with casuative actives and then talk about transitivity without causing confusion. I need to know what data you're looking at if I'm going to follow the discussion and different voices = different data.Stephen Hughes wrote:Perhaps because I changed voice in the verbs, that confused you.
Joking aside, listing the form of a transitive verb in the active - either infinitive or first person indicative - implies that one means the verb (in all its permutations), wile listing it in the middle - either infinitive or first person indicative - implies that it is deponent - limited in its forms to the middle. Listing a particular form in the context of a discussion that makes it clear that only one voice is under discussion is dependent on the situation. Generally speaking, ἀναπαύειν is a shorthand way to write all the forms including the active (transitive) and the middle. Ideally, there might have been a convention where ἀναπαύειν as representing all forms were written with something to mark that is a lemma, rather than an individual form, but none has been handed down to us. If someone were to introduce a convention, then the biggest effect would be confusing people when they read older works. It would be unidiomatic English simply to use the word "the" in front of the verb, as a way to concreting the imagined full conjugation of the verb into one word. What is the difference between "causing confusion" and "your own fault" on the one hand, and "relying on others familiarity with the language, and their appreciation of context to overcome the inherent ambiguity in what we read" on the other? Probably emotions.Stephen Hughes wrote:Perhaps cause and spread are close synonyms in this situation.MAubrey wrote:causing confusion
The listing of the middle in a discussion of a verb represents a subset of the entire conjugational system. The listing of the active is either the active at the exclusion of the middle or the representation of the entire conjugational system. If ἀναπαύειν and παύεσθαι are compared, then according to simple logic, the only way that the comparison can word is to say that "while I recognise that ἀναπαύειν has a full conjugation - both active and middle-passive - I want to look at the way that it corresponds with the middle of παύεσθαι - a subset of παύειν. ".
There is a basic assumption in dialogue that even if we don't understand what somebody has said, that they both understood what they wanted to say, and thought that what they had said was meaningful and adequate. In an ideal world, some (or all) of the middle forms of some verbs should be listed and treated separately (in some of their meanings), when they differ from the active in syntactic function, even if the general meaning is unchanged, but they are not. An active format, then is a short-handed for active and middle, and a middle is just middle, either a selection from out of an entire system, or being the only possibility in a deponent verb (one limited in form to the middle).
[We know pretty clearly that in the places where the noun ἀνάπαυσις is used that the middle meaning of the verb is implied (if the noun had been used). That is shown both from context of the Sabbath commands etc. and from the collocation of the verbs that require action on the part of the person themselves; εὑρεῖν or ζητούν. ]