Teaching aspect via english
hefin jones
hefinjones at hotmail.com
Sun Dec 8 02:38:03 EST 2002
Following up on our thread on Fanning and Porter, what do people think about
the idea of teaching the concept of aspect as it manifests itself in English
as preparation for introducing the concept in Greek? It seems to me that
many of us students think "aspect" is yet another thing which the esoteric
language Greek, throws up at us, and we are sometimes tempted to think it
would be so much simpler if "english had been good enough for Paul".... :-)
The fact is aspect is there in English in the form of the aspectual
auxilaries: perfective "have" and imperfective "be". The difference between
greek and english seems to be that time is more central to the english tense
system. A further difference is that english allows the use of aspectual
"have" and "be" together (e.g. the Paul gag above).
Further, and here I fully expect to be shot down in flames, isn't the rough
conceptual analogy that exists between greek and english aspectual systems
thus:
perfective = perfective
imperfective = imperfective
simple = "aorist"
Hefin Jones
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