B-Greek: The Biblical Greek Forum

Stephen Nelson wrote: ↑August 17th, 2019, 6:17 pm
Also, I gleaned some interesting facts about the famous "Parade Analogy" in "The Greek Verb Revisited" (Christopher Thomson's aritcle on "What is Aspect", pg. 13-80). I highly recommend you get that book, BTW.

Stephen Nelson wrote: ↑August 17th, 2019, 6:17 pm The analogy was originally invented by a Russian linguist named Alexander Isachenko, and was applied to the Russian language. I have a degree in Russian and I was not familiar with Isachenko's work, nor had I ever heard of his analogy before I started studying Greek. I've emailed some of my former Russian professors to see if anyone can dig up the original text for me, because I can't seem to find it via Google. This kind of blew my mind because Russian is a highly aspectual language where nearly all verbs have perfective and imperfective forms - and ALL of the finite forms of verbs semantically encode TENSE in Russian (albeit secondary to aspect, just like in Greek).

Anyways, according to Thomson, Isachenko compared perfective verbs to watching a parade from the stand (with a view of the beginning and end). And he compared imperfective verbs to being a participant in the parade (without a view of the beginning or end).

RandallButh wrote: ↑August 17th, 2019, 8:01 pm The parade is a poor analogy if it misses the point. Are the end points and the whole in view (perfective) or not (imperfective)? Whether accomplished from a helicopter or bleacher is a distraction and irrelevant. Again, this shows how metaphor/picture can mislead and trip people up if not careful.

The author's counter to that was an appeal to Porter and his tenseless Greek verb theory. So, according to him, κατὰ καιρόν establishes some kind of eschatological context, and therefor the aorist can be timeless or prophtetic/proleptic; but not necessarily past time (or not likely past tense). He uses this to draw a fringe conclusion - that Paul did not believe that Christ's death, burial and resurrection had happened yet in his lifetime.

Daniel Semler wrote: ↑August 17th, 2019, 10:08 pm https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/25e9/2 ... 25048b.pdf refers to his paper, likely in Russian so not much good to me but you'll be ok I'm sure.

Isacˇenko, A. V.1960Grammaticˇeskij stroj russkogo jazyka v sopostavlenii s slovackim—Cˇast’vtoraja: morfologija[The Grammatical Structure of Russian in Comparison with Slovak—Part Two: Morphology]. Bratislava: Izdatel’stvo akademiinauk.

Instead, a suggestive correlation has been made by the Russian scholar Isachenko, which is adopted here.
Let me draw the picture of a parade. If I am a television correspondent in the BBC helicopter flying over the parade, I view the parade or process in its immediacy from a vantage outside the action as "perfective," i.e. in its entirety as a single and complete whole.
If I am a spectator sitting in the grandstand watching the parade pass by in front of me, I view the process immersed within it as "imperfective," i.e. as an event in progress.
And if I am the parade manager considering all of the conditions in existence at this parade, including not only all the arrangements that are coming to fruition but all of the accompanying events that allow the parade to operate, I view the process not in its particulars or its immediacy but as "stative," i.e. as a condition or state of affairs in existence.

We'll try to clarify the essence of the general semantics (grammatical meaning) of Slavic (verbal) aspect with a clear example. When describing a process using imperfective aspect (for example, “I was rewriting”, “I am rewriting”), it's as if the speaker is within the unfolding of the process itself. He sees neither its beginning nor its end; and therefore cannot express this process as a closed, overall event.

The speaker’s point of view in this case can be compared to the point of view of a participant in the May Day Parade. This participant is moving along with the crowd. He see neither the beginning nor the end of the procession.

Expressing the process with perfective aspect (for example, “I rewrote”), the speaker stands outside the process, expressed by the verb form: therefore, he observes the process as a whole.

The speaker’s point of view in this case resembles that of the people standing on the podium during the May Day Parade: they see the beginning and end of the procession. So the parade leaves an overall impression on them. Graphically, both approaches to the tangible process could be depicted as follows:

Imperfective Aspect:

——————— x ————————
the speaker
is located as if within the process

Perfective Aspect

—————————————————
 {—————— v ———————}
           the speaker
is located as if outside the process, overlooking it as a whole

The above comparison, like any other comparison, can only be accepted with strong reservations. We will not hold to it rigidly. The semantics of verbal aspect, of course, lack the kind of concreteness that any graphic image could convey.

1. Straightforward instances where aorists are in the apodoses of conditional sentences with a future reference in the protases. These are subdivided into 2 categories:
   a. Proleptic aorists with an explicit condition (used with εἰ or ἐάν clauses)
   b. Proleptic aorists with an implied condition (used with participles, relative clauses, or ἵνα clauses)
2. More ambiguous instances where aorists are in a statement that, by context, seems to point to the future, i.e. “as if it were already done”.
   a. LXX futuristic aorists - It is speculated that, since this usage is prominent in the Septuagint, that it may be the result of ‘mechanical’ translation of futuristic Hebrew perfects (sometimes understood as “true past tenses”), which were rendered into Greek with a variety of tense-forms; frequently in aorist.
   b. NT futuristic aorists – Even though these idioms supposedly occur sometimes in standard, non-Semitized Greek, they supposedly occur more frequently in the NT (especially in prophetic writing). This is explained as New Testament authors mimicking the style of scripture in Greek translation.

Stephen Nelson wrote: ↑August 22nd, 2019, 2:15 pm Bringing this back to the theme of my OP - having surveyed more of the literature on this topic and having analyzed several Greek examples (below) - it seems as though the majority of non-past aorists in the bible are traditionally translated into English with either present perfect or simple present tense constructions; not with future tense constructions. This seem to call into question the idea of the aorist's "spacial remoteness" (but I won't get into that).

Stephen Nelson wrote: ↑August 22nd, 2019, 2:15 pm
[*]More ambiguous instances where aorists are in a statement that, by context, seems to point to the future, i.e. “as if it were already done”.
[/list]

Paul-Nitz wrote: ↑January 30th, 2020, 2:49 pm About a week ago, I was talking to my colleague in Greek. I told him how I had been busy and worrying about a big meeting. I was preparing hard at the time. Then I wanted to say something like this, "But before the meeting, I will have everything prepared." Mind you, I was not thinking this in English. I had a thought like that in mind and found that the Greek wasn't coming out of my mouth. I struggled a few seconds and said "πρὸ τοῦ ἀρχεσθαι συναγωγὴν ἡτοίμασα." Now, I'm not sure if that's good Greek, but it felt like it to me.

Megan Spencer wrote: ↑January 28th, 2020, 7:17 am

Stephen Nelson wrote: ↑August 22nd, 2019, 2:15 pm
[*]More ambiguous instances where aorists are in a statement that, by context, seems to point to the future, i.e. “as if it were already done”.
[/list]

Setting aside the question of "spatial/temporal remoteness" for a minute, asserting the aorist is used to suggest "as if it were already done" is essentially equivalent to suggesting the aorist implies an action that is looked upon as "complete" or "has been achieved" (as opposed to "in progress"). The context is what suggests the action as future. (or in the traditional model, forces us to depart from the default grammatical understanding).

I wonder if people make too much of the "spatially/temporally remote" thing. It seems to me that Campbell uses this as an analogy to communicate his understanding of the aorist. I don't think he intends to suggest that its literally "spatially/temporally remote" it is more of an analogy to communicate an idea. I could be wrong though.