"Continuous, on-going, never ceasing" construct

Randall Buth ButhFam at compuserve.com
Sun Aug 18 11:12:38 EDT 2002


shalom Waldo, 

Thank you for your question. I think it is a good example of the difference
between common sense language use and a potetnially imaginary approach
to a language.

>"The Perfect Tense in 'you have been saved' means that
>which happened at a point in time in the past, and
>CONTINUES FOREVER AND EVER."

Languages don't grammaticize 'forever and ever' as a tense/aspect
mood category. Pastors and seminary students need to learn to treat
Greek at least as seriously as German or Spanish. Not to mention 
Hebrew, Chinese and French.

while it is true that Greek perfect (indicative) and simple past
(indicative) 
were in some kinds of fluid overlap during the hellenistic times, the basic

tenses could still make distinctions for most speakers.

PARADEIGMATOS CARIN (e.g)

Compare the two English sentences:

(1) Tommy has thrown up on his chair.

(2) Tommy threw up on his chair.

There is a higher probability that in the context of (1) that there
would still be some cleaning up to do, while in (2) the problem 
may have already been resolved (but not necessarily !), especially if 
talking about something from the day before or several hours earlier. 
In neither example is there the slightest grammatical hint of an 
eternal perpetuity of the situation. This holds for Greek, too. 

ERRWSO

Randall Buth
TOIS IEROSOLUMOIS





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