Matthew 6:12
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Sep 21 17:43:31 EDT 1999
At 3:13 PM -0500 9/21/99, Joe A. Friberg wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Carl W. Conrad <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu>
>Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 1999 5:37 AM
>
>> I'm curious here; I haven't checked the evidence from the lexica for the
> > forms as yet, but I'm wondering: Is AFHKAMEN to be considered perfect
>tense
>> or aorist? Or is this one of those relatively common verbs whose
>> morphological idiosyncracies seems to promote the fusion of the perfect
>and
>> aorist tenses? Here's what the Perseus web LSJ offers, but I'd want to
>> check BAGD when I get to my office:
>
>You are correct, all the "lexica" (that I've checked--including BAGD) list
>this form as aorist! No Active perfect forms are given for this verb.
>
>Nevertheless--and this I ask not to defend my initial blooper--when the
>perfect form is wanting, what form takes over the meanings usually carried
>by the perfect? The aorist seems a likely candidate (could the present?).
>Glancing through Mt, there are several Active Indicative aorist forms, some
>found in straight narrative where the aorist sense is expected, but others
>which are usually translated as though they were perfects: Mt 19.27,29,
>23.23, and perhaps others.
That is precisely the point I'm interested in: that the aorist, partly
because it already subsumes functions of the pluperfect, partly because of
its function to express the telic sense, does seem to be supplanting the
perfect in Hellenistic Greek, to some extent at least--or perhaps,
following the course of earlier Latin developments, the two tenses are
fusing into one in the Koine, and perhaps the older -KA aorists such as
AFHKA and EDWKA and the sense that the Alpha endings really belong to the
aorist are factors contributing to this amalgamation--for want of a better
word. Admittedly this is all speculation, of course; it would take a lot of
work to prove this notion.
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
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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