At 12:04 PM -0500 4/5/98, dalmatia@eburg.com wrote: >I apologise for my linguistics illiteracy. My grasp of the technical >language is terrible, and I'm misusing a lot of terms. I'll try to >just speak plainly. Your linguistics illiteracy is about the same as mine; I haven't taken part in these discussions of aspect primarily because I'm not content as yet that the terminology is being used consistently by everyone talking about it or that I understand that terminology. But neverthless, I think I understand something about how the Greek verb works, and I think that your description of it, while not altogether wrong, is seriously wrong in some respects. There is a virtue in simplification so long as simplification does not result in elimination of important factors and putting things that are different into the same category. I rather think that you are skewing the facts here and oversimplifying the reality of the Greek verb. >When Greek wants to indicate past action, it prefixes an E to the verb >root. KALEW, I am calling, becomes EKALON, I called. When it wants >to indicate future action, it suffixes a S to the root, becoming >KALESW, I will be calling. When the word EKALESA then shows up, it is >hard for me, from a simple commonsensical perspective, not to see past >and future indicators in the E and the S. The root, KAL(E) [root = >____ ] is augmented by them. [I hope 'augment' is not a technical >term that will stumble me here!] I'm afraid that 'augment' is indeed a technical term, and you will find it consistently used in grammars to refer to the alteration made at the beginning of an indicative past tense, specifically in the imperfect, the aorist, and the pluperfect; it ONLY appears on indicative forms and although it may be a prefixed E-, it may, if the verb begins with a vowel or diphthong, simply be a lengthening of that initial vowel or diphthong. BUT the term 'augment' is not used for those elements which expand a root verb form so that it constitutes a verb stem; we don't speak of the -S- added to form a future stem as an 'augment,' nor do we speak of the -S(A)- added to most verbs to form an aorist stem as an augment; it ought to be noted, moreover, that addition of -S(A) is only one of the ways in which an aorist stem is formed in Greek, that although it is the most common way, those aorist stems that are formed in other ways are no less aorist and don't bear any different sort of meaning because they have different stem forms: HKOUSA and EIDON and EGNWN are each of them aorist active indicative first singulars--and despite the difference in their forms each refers to past action. >E____ON ____SW E____SA Shows the progression: past, future, >aorist, where the aorist has both E and S augments. You're talking about "past" in a confused and confusing way here; I think you may mean "imperfect" when you say "past"--if so, that's part of your problem, because you don't realize that imperfect and aorist are both (in the indicative) past tenses. In fact, your chart is oversimplified because for the verb BALLW we have an imperfect E-BALL-ON and an aorist E-BAL-ON both formed by that first pattern of yours; E-BALL-ON is imperfect ("I was throwing/putting") whereas E-BAL-ON is aorist ("I threw/put")--but there is no form E-BAL-SA. >This is, to my poor man's myopic eyes, a blaring feature of the >E____SA form of the aorist. So what is that A then indicating? It >does seem to be a connecting vowel, sometimes absorbed in vowel >endings, yes? And when we wish to give a noun an abstract quality, it >is given an A. BASIL is given an A to become the abstract BASILEIA. >[King becomes Kingdom] Likewise the effect of an action is given an >abstract quality by provicing it with an A. DOULEIA is slavery, an >abstract of the verm 'to slave', and denotes the fact of slavery >without pointing to any particular instance of it. > >So these three little single letter augments, E____SA simply >transliterate into Past-Future-Abstract. I'm afraid that what you've presented here is without any substance that I can recognize in Greek grammar. You appear to be assigning some mystical value to the vowel -A- that it simply does not have; to be more precise, there is absolutely no relationship between the -A- that appears in sigmatic aorist stems and the -IA that appears in certain kinds of first-declension noun stems. Most historical Greek linguists believe that the -A- in aorist tense stems derives originally in Greek from vocalization of the first-person singular -M and third-plural -NT secondary active endings when they followed upon a consonant such as -S- or -K-, whereas the first-declension feminine nouns in -IA derive from an ancient Indo-European type of noun-formatives. >Now the word 'Aorist' itself carries the meaning 'without horizon'. >If a horizon were in sight, then there would be a boundary, and if a >boundary, then a definiteness. There is no horizon, hence no >difiniteness, hence the 'indefinite' or 'abstract' meaning. > >Having no W ending [1st person] nor K in the suffix, it is neither >incomplete nor complete. So it simply has to occupy an indefinite >present that includes past and future, abstractly. A 'timeless' >present, so to speak. When I say "I write" as such an indefinite, I >include ALL instances of writing, past, present and future, plus both >completed and incompleted states of those instances. eg I wrote >yesterday, I was writing yesterday, I am writing right now, I will be >writing tomorrow, I will have written tomorrow, etc. 'I write' does >not select any one of them, yet includes them all... Abstractly... >Indefinitely... It's about as close as English gets to the E____SA >Greek form. I'm sorry to have to say this, but I think that your notion of what "aorist" means is pretty much speculative etymologizing. "Aorist" is probably best not translated into English, but it comes closest to "Indefinite" and so far as time is concerned the term "Past Indefinite" as used to refer the French forms "j'ai donnŽ" (Greek EDWKA or EDOSA) or "j'ai vu" (Greek EIDON) comes closest. And the paragraph immediately above just simply misses the boat about what a verb form with that configuration means: ELUSA will mean "I untied," or "I unleashed," or even "I exploded" (in the right context) but it canNOT mean "I am untying" or "I will untie tomorrow." And to assert that it can bear these meanings is just simply wrong. >This is, admittedly, a simplified understanding for the intellectually >impoverished, yet it seems to work very well in practice. The Rom >8:30 [AV] reads "Moreover, whom He did predestinate, them he also >called; and whom he also clled, them he also justified; and whom he >justified, them them he also glorified." I don't think anyone takes >this translation as it stands in the past tense in all the verms >[aorist]. How much more smoothly it reads as 'whom He >predistinates...He calls...whom He calls...He glorifies.' Other >examples abound.... > >Thank-you again for your response, my friend. My focus here is to >make the Greek more easily accessible, and less arcane, you see, to >'common' readership... Like me. God knows I err in huge chunks, [my >1st 'read' of 1 John1 was a blaring error!!] so that I can 'see' my >errors with my myopic eyes. I am willing to admit that I could be >hugely in error here... But this just makes so much simple sense to >me... I would certainly not want to argue that Greek is a language that demands superhuman intelligence to learn; after all, we have records showing more than three thousand years history of the language and we know that it was spoken by millions over the centuries even if only a relatively small percentage actually read and wrote it. But learning it the way a native learns any language from birth is altogether different from learning it as a second language, particularly in a form that hasn't been spoken for many centuries and that one learns in order to read rather than to speak and to write. It is much more difficult to learn to read ancient Greek for us today, and unfortunately, as Euclid told the prince about geometry, "there is no royal road to learning." Once you learn the language you can see the simplicity and consistency of much of its structure, but your "common-sense aorist," if pursued very far, soon has to issue in a "no-sense aorist." If the process of simplification distorts the realities, it can only create far greater confusion than would the endeavor to make sense of the realities of Greek verb usage which are themselves, in fact, more complex. They will not readily be reduced to a least common denominator. Carl W. Conrad Department of Classics/Washington University One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018 Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649 cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/