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Passages with Historic Present

Posted: September 10th, 2012, 7:38 am
by Alan Patterson
I've seen a few of the members out here that have the ability to run a program that spits out a lot of examples. Can some post passages in which the Historic Present is used? Thank you in advance if this is possible.

Re: Passages with Historic Present

Posted: September 10th, 2012, 8:53 am
by Stephen Carlson
I don't know how a computer program can distinguish between ordinary and historical presents from among all the verbs tagged as present indicative.

One approach is to use the lists of them that people have complied. One of them should be out of copyright, by J. C. Hawkins, Horae Synopticae, though I think it only does the synoptics.

Stephen

Re: Passages with Historic Present

Posted: September 12th, 2012, 4:39 am
by dwalt
Here's a work around if you have Accordance software. Search for all "presents" in the GNT. This will give you all the verses with the presents highlighted. Choose an English NT (ESV, etc) as a parallel version. Copy and paste your results into two columns (one for the Greek and one for the English) in a DTP or word processing program. Manually tally up the times the English translates the Greek with a past tense. There are over 5k pres inds so it's not easy, but it can be done. If anyone knows an easier way to do it, feel free to share.

Re: Passages with Historic Present

Posted: September 12th, 2012, 6:38 am
by Alan Patterson
Is a Present Tense Indicative verb considered a Historic Present IF the Present Tense verb is concurrent with the contextually developed Deictic Center? That is, the HP is Present Time in relation to the DC (whenever this takes place in time). In searching the archives, this question was raised but I could not find a definitive answer.

Re: Passages with Historic Present

Posted: September 12th, 2012, 6:59 am
by Stephen Carlson
dwalt wrote:Manually tally up the times the English translates the Greek with a past tense.
If I recall correctly, there used to be an edition of the NASB that marked with an asterisk (*) those historical presents translated with the preterite.

Re: Passages with Historic Present

Posted: September 12th, 2012, 7:00 am
by Stephen Carlson
Alan Patterson wrote:Is a Present Tense Indicative verb considered a Historic Present IF the Present Tense verb is concurrent with the contextually developed Deictic Center? That is, the HP is Present Time in relation to the DC (whenever this takes place in time). In searching the archives, this question was raised but I could not find a definitive answer.
I think you need to specify independent clauses for the HP, becasue dependent clause usually take as their deictic center the time of their governing (or matrix) independent clause.

Re: Passages with Historic Present

Posted: September 12th, 2012, 2:22 pm
by Stirling Bartholomew
dwalt wrote:Here's a work around if you have Accordance software. Search for all "presents" in the GNT. This will give you all the verses with the presents highlighted. Choose an English NT (ESV, etc) as a parallel version. Copy and paste your results into two columns (one for the Greek and one for the English) in a DTP or word processing program. Manually tally up the times the English translates the Greek with a past tense. There are over 5k pres inds so it's not easy, but it can be done. If anyone knows an easier way to do it, feel free to share.

That method assumes that the translations are somewhat mechanical which they are not.