Future Passives categorized (correction)

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Dec 15 08:53:51 EST 2002


At 4:37 PM +1100 12/15/02, Peter Kirk wrote:
>Thank you, Carl. The corrected version is much more satisfactory. I
>agree that careful interpretation of each example is required. I would
>certainly not want to argue that "passive" forms of EGEIRW necessarily
>imply divine agency as part of the sense (and come to theological
>conclusions from that), but I would argue that the possibility that
>divine agency is in view, in many cases, makes it unsafe to conclude
>that these cannot be passives.
>
>I have been taught that many of the verbs which I have traditionally
>understood as passive are a "divine passive", a special Jewish
>periphrastic idiom to avoid expressing the divine agent. For example,
>that PARAKLHQHSONTAI and CORTASQHSONTAI in Matthew 5:4,6 (the latter on
>your list of middle senses, the former an uncontested passive) means
>that God will comfort the mourners and satisfy the hungry and thirsty. I
>wonder, in view of this discussion, do you consider the "divine passive"
>to be a myth?

Well, for one thing, I really don't like this usage of "myth," although I
know it's quite conventional; having taught mythology for the last years of
my teaching career, I prefer to think of a myth as a story that, while not
necessarily historically or scientifically true, nevertheless gives
expression to profound truth.

As for the "divine passive," I am extremely skeptical; while it may well be
Jewish idiom, I am inclined to think that it may be a "cop out" when
applied almost casually to supposed passive forms in the GNT. I don't doubt
that a feature of the mind-set  operant in NT writers is the conviction
that God's will underlies events in general; what I doubt is that instances
of a middle-passive verb in the GNT without an explicit indication of an
agent should automatically be assumed to be divinely caused--or so directly
caused that participants in events are fundamentally puppets on a string.
More to the point, I think that a middle-passive verb form may more often
indicate that the speaker/writer is not concerned with agency or cause but
with the fact of the occurrence, and that when the instrument or agency
behind the occurrence is important to the speaker or writer, it is usually,
not necessarily always, indicated by the appropriate construction.

>I also want to make some comments relating to your paper VoiceCorr.pdf
>which I downloaded.

Just a cautionary note here. The "VoiceCorr.pdf" is an older compilation of
my initial 1997 posting on these matters along with a transcript of some of
the follow-up correspondence on the list. I probably should have removed it
from my web documents because it really has been superceded by the
recently-issued "NewObsAncGrkVc.pdf" wherein I have expanded and attempted
to document my argument from significant authorities and arguments based
upon Greek texts. I'd like to think that "New Observations" is a bit
further along than what I wrote and compiled in "Voice Correspondence."

 This is a very helpful article. But I do have some
>doubts about your arguments from Indo-European languages. Don't forget
>that this group is much wider than Romance, Germanic and Greek. I have
>the advantages of a good knowledge of Russian and some of Persian, sadly
>not of Indian languages or other smaller groups. From this, I would
>agree that use of reflexives as passives is widespread - also found in
>Russian, but interestingly only in the imperfective - but these are
>clearly recent (post-classical in Romance languages) secondary
>formations, and so not evidence that there was a proto-IE morphological
>category corresponding to the middle voice. (I don't think we can argue
>that Romance use of the reflexive for passive is based on some kind of
>folk memory of original IE morphology which had been lost for the
>centuries when Latin was spoken.) And the Greek middle also bears the
>hallmarks of being secondary, though much more ancient, i.e. LUOMAI,
>LUESAI (LUHi) were very likely originally LUW EME, LUEIS SE etc. So, I
>wonder, is there real evidence for an Indo-European middle?

What you say here makes me think it probably is "Voice Correspondence" that
you read rather than my more recent paper. Let me say that I know a few
languages as you do--I've taught Greek, Latin, German, and French and I can
read a couple others. I don't know whether you consider yourself a
professional linguist or not; I certainly don't consider myself anything
more than a serious student of particular languages. But I rely upon some
sources that I consider authoritative, especially upon Andrew Sihler's _New
Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_, a reference work which was
published within the last decade and which supplanted it's multiple-edition
predecessor by Carl Darling Buck. From Sihler as well as from considerably
older works by Meillet and Chantraine (I give bibliographic references and
page numbers in "New Observations"), I continue to be persuaded that the
parent language from which Greek had only the two basic inflectional
patterns, "active" and "medio-passive." I am pretty skeptical of your
suggestion that LUESAI derives from LUEIS SE and would have to see a lot of
evidence for it before taking it seriously.

>Now I am not trying to argue for an Indo-European passive either. I
>suspect that IE made do with an active voice only, as in many modern
>languages; and I wouldn't rule out use of reflexives for passive and
>middle senses though we have no clear evidence for this. But there is
>one passive form which is so widespread that it must have a common
>Indo-European root: the past participle in -d or -t e.g. English -ed,
>German -t, Latin -t(us) (cf. French -é), Persian -de, Russian -t(yy). In
>all of these languages this form has a passive sense when used with
>transitive verbs, and in most of them (not sure about Latin, obsolescent
>in English) an active sense with intransitive verbs, which indicates
>split ergativity. And there is a similar participle in Greek, the aorist
>passive participle -QEIS - theta representing IE dh or th, and -EIS
>being an adjectival ending.

With all due respect, Peter, I have to ask whether this is speculative or
whether you've consulted any historical linguistic authorities? Just to
take your last assertion, I would say that QE- is a short-vowel form of the
MP2 voice marker, and that -NT- is the ACTIVE participial infix; the
nominative participial form -QEIS is derivative from QE-NT-S (-S being a
nominative-case ending). One of the remarkable facts about the so-called
"passive" -QH- aorist, is that it is conjugated with ACTIVE endings
(-N/S/{T} etc.--that was what made me first realize that there must be a
close link between athematic aorists like EBHN and ESTHN and the "passive"
forms in -QHN.

>Of the languages I know, it is only Greek which has full paradigms
>including this d/t/theta. But the full paradigms look very secondary to
>me, as derived from the participle and forms of EIMI. For example, I
>would suggest that LUQH = LUQEIS EI, LUQHSOMAI = LUQEIS ESOMAI etc. This
>would explain the odd phenomenon that aorist passive endings look
>active, but future passive ones look middle/passive. I would suggest
>that these forms arose from periphrastic tenses (as for the past passive
>in every other IE language I know) which were originally used to
>emphasise passivity against the reflexive-derived middle forms. Now I
>don't know if there is any real evidence to support or disprove my
>hypothesis e.g. from surviving early Greek. I would be interested to
>hear of any. And I would accept that semantic shift over the centuries
>before the Koine era eroded the original distinction between middle and
>passive senses.

Perhaps you ought to look at some surviving early Greek. The Homeric poems
provide a rich resource for Greek linguistic archaeology. I really don't
understand what you're saying about LUQH = LUQEIS EI, LUQHSOMAI = LUQEIS
ESOMAI. There's no evidence that there were any periphrastic forms of these
aorist and future "passives." If you're talking about LUQHS or, more
properly, ELUQHS, that's more simply a matter of augment + verb-root + -QH-
+ secondary 2nd-sg. ending -S. As for LUQHSOMAI, that even more simply
LU-QH-S-O-MAI: verb-root + -QH- + S (future-marker) + O (form of thematic
vowel O/E) + -MAI (primary 1st sg. MP  ending).

I must say that I also don't think it is true that "the Koine era eroded
the original distinction between middle and passive senses." I think the
fact is rather that earlier Greek used the identical forms (what I've
called MP1 forms) to express BOTH middle and passive senses, and that the
later emerging -QH- forms (what I've called MP2 forms) ALSO expressed BOTH
middle and passive senses.

>The point of my argument here is not to rebut yours about the meaning of
>"passive" forms in Koine, but only to show some scepticism about your
>attempt to find evidence for your theory from Indo-European. This
>evidence is certainly not clear-cut in your favour.

Skepticism may very well be warranted, but from what you've offered above,
I don't see a credible alternative explanation of these phenomena that
bears much relationship to what I do think I know about Greek linguistic
history.
-- 

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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