MAubrey wrote:Also, I think chapters 3-4 of my thesis are relevant here...just to throw that out there.
cwconrad wrote:Mike, you really mean "throw it in here", don't you?
MAubrey wrote:If you prefer, then, sure.
If there's any interest in this, it probably should be a new subtopic, and maybe there's a better word than "vectorial."
I wasn't really trying to be flippant in my question to Mike; I think there's a real difference in perspective expressed by language indicating that a topic under discussion is extraneous to or within one's current purview.
"Come" and "go" in English, like
kommen and
gehen in German and
venir and
aller in French ordinarily imply movement toward and movement away respectively from the locus of the speaker. Isn't it the case, however, that Greek ἔρχεσθαι/ἐλθεῖν and ἰέναι lack that specific "vectorial" character? I haven't really explored this -- perhaps I should have done it before thinking "out loud" here -- but when I start thinking about ancient Greek verbs of locomotion, what come to mind is βαίνειν/βῆναι, which really means basically "stride" or "move one leg/foot away from the other", ἁγειν (and its compounds, like the common Koine παράγειν), which seems to mean "go forward" (transitive or intransitive), ἐλαύνειν, which seems to mean "move forcefully ahead" (transitive or intransitive). I recall the banter from Aristophanes'
Frogs where Aeschylus and Euripides quarrel over whether the phrase ἥκω τε καῖ κατέρχομαι involves synonymous expressions or whether κατέρχομαι is different, in the sense "come back, return." At any rate, here's another of those grab-bags of expressions calling for differentiation or taxonomic manipulation, the sort of exercise to which Stephen Hughes is especially given over.