hHUREQHN (was RE: Romans 10:20)
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Dec 4 09:42:09 EST 2002
I won't change the header, but I will note that the form standard in Koine
is hEUREQHN with an epsilon rather than hHUREQHN with an eta, the latter
form perhaps being pretty rare in later Greek.
At 7:53 AM +0300 12/4/02, Iver Larsen wrote:
>> Accordance too lists only one instance of hEURISKW in the middle with a
>> special sense, but I hardly think that is statistically significant
>> evidence that hHUREQHN is really "passive" in sense. Consider the variety
>> of voice-senses of EGEIRW/EGEIROMAI/HGERQHN--not very clearly linked to
>> morphoparadigms.
>
>Yes, the argument that the MP forms of hEURISKW are almost all passive in
>sense in the GNT is not based on statistics, nor on comparison to how other
>verbs vary in sense. It is based on the context in which each form occurs.
You may believe that, Iver, but I believe that the aorist MPs are labeled
as passive simply because they are -QH- morphoparadigms. The one form in
the GNT labeled "middle" in Accordance is hEURAMENOS in Heb. 9:12; this is
the usage that you called attention to as indicated in BAGD (and it's still
there in BDAG) as being "Attic." Yes, it is, but note that it's inflected
with -A- rather than -O- (hEURAMENOS rather than the properly Attic
hEUROMENOS). That's a distinctive usage in a distinctive sense, and I don't
think it bears on our accounting for GNT forms of hEURISKW in terms of a
consistent "transitive" verb.
>Of the 32 instances of MP of hEURISKW, the context indicates that one is
>middle, one is present passive, one is imperfect passive, 2 are future
>passives and 27 are aorist passives. It is the context that has made both
>Friberg and Accordance (I presume) tag them as such.
>>
>> The distinctive usage of hHUREQHN in the GNT appears to be fundamentally
>> intransitive (note what BDAG said of its probable derivation from Hebrew
>> usage) and is, in my now-preferred terminology, "subject-focused."
>
>This is an unusual and IMO unhelpful use of the term "intransitive". Take an
>example. The word "discover" is a transitive verb because in its active form
>it can be supplied with a direct object. The passive form "it was
>discovered" is derived from the active (not in a TG sense). Any language
>with passives have such forms in one way or another derived from the active,
>either by affixes of by auxiliary verbs. What was the object in the basic
>active form becomes the subject in the passive form, and what was the
>subject in the active form, is left implicit. This does not mean that the
>passive form becomes "intransitive" in terms of how this word is normally
>used in linguistics. The term intransitive does not apply to passive forms.
>As you may remember from our earlier discussions, I do not think the term
>"subject-focused" adequately describes the MP forms, whether middle or
>passive. I do think that a better description will be based on semantic
>roles.
Then I guess that you'll also uphold the traditional category of deponent
verbs. EGEIRW is not normally considered a "deponent" verb, but it behaves
like one in several ways. I suppose you'll say that
EGEIRW/EGEIROMAI/HGERQHN is a transitive verb because in the active it CAN
take a direct object when it has the sense, "awaken" (or "raise from the
dead"). Yet the "active" imperative (so tagged in Accordance) appears 15x
in the GNT in the sense, "arise." The middle EGEIROMAI is well enough
attested outside the GNT but doesn't appear in the GNT at all, according to
Accordance, which shows 86 "passive" forms--20 in the present tense
(including 3 instances of EGEIRESQE--Mt. 26:46; Mk 14:42; Jn
14:31--followed by AGWMEN, clearly in the sense, "Get up, let's go!"), 11
in the perfect tense, all others in the -QH- future and aorist tense-forms.
Would you believe that BDAG refers to the sense "awake" or "arise" or "rise
from the dead" in these instances as a "passive intransitive"?
The fact is that I don't think it's very useful to speak of "passive
intransitive" either. What I do think is that we ought to distinguish
between designations of the morphoparadigms and the semantic roles of
verbs. I object to the designation of the -QH- forms as "passive" because
(a) quite frequently such forms are NOT at all passive in meaning, and (b)
to call such -QH- forms "deponent" when they don't perform a passive
semantic role suggests that they are somehow irregular, when they are
actually numerous and quite regular, even if they don't have "active" forms
(although EGEIRW certainly does have one, which is why, I guess, it hasn't
been labeled a "deponent" verb.
You don't like the term "subject-focused." Well, perhaps a better term may
yet be invented, but it seems to me that it does characterize the way that
both the traditional "middle-passive" and the traditional -QH- "passive"
morphoparadigms function in distinction from the traditional "active"
morphoparadigms. In §§7 of my latest "New Observations" I've suggested
"Basic" and "Subject-focused" as descriptive terms for the traditional
"Active" and the traditional "Middle-passive" and "passive" morphoparadigms
respectively, but in order to retain some continuity with traditional
terminology, I've suggested that we continue to use the term "active" for
the traditional "active" morphoparadigms while designating the traditional
"middle-passive" morphoparadigms as MP1 and the traditional "passive"
morphoparadigms as MP2.
What has impressed itself upon me in the course of my study of the middle
and passive morphoparadigms and voice functions of the Greek verbs is that
the categories in terms of which traditional grammar has described it--and
perhaps those into which scientific linguistics seems to want to force it
to fit--, don't seem to apply very well to the way the language
works/worked. We have wanted to see the Middle voice as a sort of half-way
house between a fundamental polarity of Active and Passive, whereas it
seems to me that the fundamental polarity of voice in Greek voice FORMS is
of unmarked "Basic" forms, most of which are what we would properly call
Active, but many of which are decidedly not so, and marked
"Subject-focused" forms which generally describe an action in which the
subject is deeply involved or a transition which the subject is undergoing
or experiencing--or suffering or being subjected to. When informed by
historical linguistics that proto-Indo-European had no true passive but
used what is called "medio-passive" to express both "Middle" and "Passive"
functions and that this is also true of the earliest Greek, I began to
wonder whether passive function wasn't ALWAYS in ancient Greek just a way
of using the "medio-passive" morphoparadigms. Thinking about the way
reflexive verbs in modern European languages function made me increasingly
aware that these reflexive verbs--or many of them, at least--also
functioned not infrequently for a semantic passive function. EMOI MEN OUN
TOUTO hEUREQH hEURHMA MEGA: In my perspective, at any rate, this presented
itself as a huge discovery.
KEIRATAI may mean "he cuts his own hair" or "he has his hair cut (by
another)"; XURATAI may mean "he shaves himself" or "he has himself shaved
(by another)." I don't think that the Greek psyche ordinarily thought of a
distinction between "middle" and "passive" usage with these verbs; rather I
think it is the modern translator who gets hung up on whether the "form" is
Middle or Passive. KEIRATAI simply means "he gets his hair cut" and XURATAI
simply means "he has a shave." If there's a need to specify who's cutting
the hair or doing the shaving, there is a regular agent construction, but I
think that to the Greek-speaker the distinction was ordinarily irrelevant.
I wouldn't want to be dogmatically insistent that every GNT instance of
hEUREQHN should be understood as intransitive or middle in function, but I
am far from convinced that the meaning of this form is ALWAYS PASSIVE in
sense. I called attention to the item in BDAG a few days back that there
may be some value in calling attention to anew:
hEURISKW 1.b. Pass. be found, find oneself, be (Dt 20:11; 4 Km 14:14; 1
Esdr 1:19; 8:13; Bar 1:7; TestSol 7:6; GrBar 4:11) F. hEUREQH EIS AZWTON
Philip found himself or was present at Azotus Ac 8:40 (cp. Esth 1:5 toiß
EQNESIN TOIS hEUREQEISIN EIS THN POLIN; also s. 4 Km 2), on the other hand,
a Semitic phrase )STKX B ...=to arrive in, or at, may underlie the expr.
here and in hEUREQHNAI EIS THN BASILEIAN Hs 9, 13, 2 (s. MBlack, Aramaic
Studies and the NT, JTS 49, '48, 164). OUDE TOPOS hEUREQH AUTWN ETI EN TWi
OURANWi there was no longer any place for them in heaven Rv 12:8 (s. Da
2:35 Theod.); cp. 18:22, 24. OUDE hEUREQH DOLOS EN TWi STOMATI AUTOU 1 Pt
2:22; 1 Cl 16:10 (both Is 53:9); cp. Rv 14:5 (cp. Zeph 3:13). hINA hEUREQW
EN AUTWi (i.e. CRISTWi) that I might be found in Christ Phil 3:9 (JMoffatt,
ET 24, 1913, 46).
Consequently, I think I'll not yet abandon my view that hEUREQH may in
several instances bear the sense of German "sich befinden" and be
essentially synonymous with EGENETO or even WFQH when used with a dative in
the sense "appeared to ..." (WFQH, moreover, is another verb like EGEIRW
that is certainly transitive in the active hORAW and the future OYOMAI, but
in that distinctive sense of OFQHNAI, "make oneself seen/appear," it has to
be understood as intransitive.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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