Imperfect outside the Indicative

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Jul 14 10:13:46 EDT 1998


At 8:12 AM -0400 7/14/98, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>At 05:16 PM 7/13/98 -0400, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>>BUT--the imperfect (indicative) retains one function in Koine that it had
>>in Classical Attic: it is used in both protasis and apodosis of present
>>counterfactual conditions. I've never been able to figure out a good reason
>>why the indicative should function in Greek for a counterfactual
>>condition--but of course the aorist indicative does so in past
>>counterfactual conditions also.
>
>English is weird in a similar way: "If I was going downtown, I would tell
>you.", c.f. "If I go downtown, I will tell you".

But this is the recent form resulting from elimination of the subjunctive
from standard English; older English used "If I WERE going downtown, I
would tell you." There is no evidence that the Greek counterfactual
condition EVER used a subjunctive.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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