Jonathan Robie wrote:Funk 316.3 wrote:There is a second respect in which the general rule must be qualified: the aorist passive (but not the future passive) tense employs active endings even though it is passive in voice. There are historical reasons for the hybrid character of this tense.
What are those historical reasons?
Funk's account of voice morphology, like the accounts in most ancient Greek textbooks of the last century or two, does need to be revised in the light of fresh perspectives on ancient Greek voice forms and functions. The supposed anomaly noted here, that "active" endings appear in the aorist passive although the form is passive in voice, can be better understood in terms of a fundamental distinction of voice between (1) a default voice form that we have traditionally
called "active" and (2) a form that is marked for subject-affectedness that we have traditionally called "middle-passive." The aorist passive, however, which Funk here and most ancient Greek textbooks of the last century or two have claimed to be really passive in meaning, is actually an alternative form of the middle-passive.
This is actually a complicated story, but perhaps it can be illustrated simply by calling attention to the forms of the verb ἵσταμαι. The lexica lemmatize this verb as ἵστημι, although that is the transitive causative form of the verb and means "cause to stand" or "make stand up," while the intransitive verb ἵσταμαι means "come to a standing position" or "rise to one's feet" or "come to a standstill." ἵσταμαι really
ought to be the lemma for this verb. The perfect and aorist forms of this verb are both intransitive and what we refer to as "active" in form, although, as I noted above, this is really the default voice form, unmarked for voice. The perfect-tense forms ἕσταα (older form) and ἕστηκα (later form) correspond to ἵσταμαι and mean "I am standing." The aorist-tense form originally and well into the Hellenistic era was ἔστην, which was beginning to be supplanted in the NT Koine period by the form ἐστάθην. Both forms, ἔστην and ἐστάθην, are middle-passive; both can mean "stood, came to a standstill" or "was established." What is true of the aorist of ἵσταμαι is true of many so-called aorist "passives" that have two forms: ἐβλάβη/ἐβλάφθη, ἐφάνη/ἐφάνθη. These -θη- forms are conjugated as non-thematic aorists like ἔβην/ἔγνων: they are
not passive endings but default endings. Both forms, ἐφάνη and ἐφάνθη, can in context be understood as "appeared" or "was revealed. The story, as I've said, is really complicated, and the little I've said here probably raises more questions than it resolves for newbies, but this is not the time and place to lay it all out.
In sum, then, §316.3 of Funk's BIGHG needs revision. It is accurate enough in terms of older terminology; the apparent anomaly to which it calls attention has been a major focus of a re-formulation of an understanding of ancient Greek voice.