Re. The aorist!
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Nov 23 08:47:32 EST 1998
At 7:47 AM -0500 11/23/98, Paul F. Evans wrote:
> List,
>
> Help me out here. I am really afraid to ask this question for fear of
> striking up a re-ignition of the great aspect discussion of '96!
> However, I am interested in an opinion.
>
> In taking basic first year Greek I was told that the aorist was a
> punctilliar (spelled correctly?) tense signifying past action completed
> in the past. However, after many years of NT study (I should know more),
> I have come across many grammars that bill the aorist as the generic
> tense which says nothing particular about the action it describes. The
> theory seems to be that if the writer wished to say something special
> about the action of a verb he would choose a tense other than the aorist.
> Obviously I have discovered that the aorist is only a past tense in the
> indicative or imperative moods. If the aorist is a a punctilliar tense,
> describing past completed action, it would be little different from the
> prefect, because obviously done is done and the results would persist.
>
> My question is whether the aorist is a sort of generic tense which
> describes nothing special about the action of the verb, and whether it is
> true that a writer would choose another tense when he wanted to specify
> something specific in that sense.
>
> If this is a dumb question forgive me! Only, I come across a
> significant body of literature that makes much about the use of the
> aorist for its theology and others who discount such (I am interested
> only in discussing the nature of the aorist here).
Actually I think this is a pretty good question, but one, alas, on which
QUOT HOMINES TOT SENTENTIAE (roughly, "opinions are one to the customer").
I'll offer one opinion; no doubt differing and diametrically opposed views
of others will follow ;-) Isn't it nice to be talking grammar instead of
theology--although some may defend their grammatical perspectives as
territorially as if they were actually theological perspectives?
Two notes, accompanied by a forewarning that some would hold that the long
view of Greek grammar is more or less irrelevant and that it--Greek
grammar--should be considered exclusively from the synchronic perspective.
Obviously I disagree:
(1) I was astounded only two years ago to learn what should, upon
observation and reflection, have been obvious: that the so-called
"secondary" endings of the Greek verb are mis-labeled; in fact, the simple
'basic' endings of the Greek verbs are what traditionally have been called
"secondary":
-M -MEN (-MES)
-S -TE
-T -NT
This would appear to be the 'unmarked' set of endings, in distinction to
which the three other sets are 'marked':
(a) MP "secondary"--marked (partially, at least) by addition of -O
to 'basic' endings:
-MHN -MEQA
-SO -SQE
-TO -NTO
(b) Active "primary"--marked (partially, at least) by addition of
-I to 'basic' endings:
-MI -MEN
-SI -TE
-TI -NTI
(c) MP "secondary"--marked (partially, at least) by addition of -AI
to 'basic' endings:
-MAI -MEQA
-SAI -SQE
-TAI -NTAI
I don't know whether the conclusion follows with necessity or not, but at
least the conclusion suggests itself (m/reflexive?) to me that at some
point in the prehistory of Greek the aorist and imperfect active were
'basic' indicative verb forms (Robertson even suggests at some points that
aorist and imperfect forms were not very sharply differentiated--e.g., is
EFUN, EFUS, EFU(T) Imperfect or Aorist?
(2) What "most" (I hesitate to say more than tentatively what the majority
ever thinks about anything!) grammarians agree upon is that an aorist
indicative, far more often than not, states a past action/event as a fact.
Where many grammarians differ is over the question whether this is a
temporal reference that is inherent in the aorist indicative morphology or
whether it simply represents far and away the most common usage of a form
that may, under the right circumstances (depending on the nature of the
particular verb and other indicators such as adverbs or particles) refer to
a present, future, or past prior action/event. What's usually said is that
the Augment on an indicative aorist or imperfect always indicates reference
to past time, but this very point, while it IS usually said, has been
disputed by some, not without some justification.
(3) (This is really my second point; the preceding was lagniappe.) With
reference to your last statement, Paul: "If the aorist is a a punctilliar
tense, describing past completed action, it would be little different from
the perfect, because obviously done is done and the results would persist,"
I would add that there's SOME evidence that the Aorist and the Perfect are
losing their differentiation in the period during which the NT is being
written. Even much earlier the Aorist functioned regularly to indicate
prior past (pluperfect) acts/events and there are exceedingly few real
pluperfects in the GNT. In Latin the fusion of the Perfect and Aorist
tenses happened in the prehistoric phase of the language; certainly such a
fusion is far from full realization in the Greek of the NT period. One of
the things I have been intending to explore, when I have sufficient time,
is whether there is evidence to show that the Aorist regularly indicates
completion of action in NT Greek while the Perfect tense(s) are used rather
to indicate the stative consequences of completion.
"My 2 cents."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad at yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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