Aspect of the Greek Verb

Eric S. Weiss eweiss at gte.net
Tue Dec 17 10:12:04 EST 2002


> Fully recognising the terminological, as well as paradigmatic minefield I
> really do have a problem with the not infrequent attempt to describe the
> aorist forms as "action seen as complete or as a whole". Part of the problem
> lies that such a description is too easily confused with perfect/perfective
> (3. in Eric's scheme below). As yet I'm unshaken not only from my 
> Porter-esque notion that the aorist goes not grammaticalise time, but also
> neither does it actually grammaticalise aspect. If you want to, you could
> describe it as 0-aspect ("Null-aspect"). Hence the parallel I tried to bring
> out in my original "teaching aspect via english" between greek aorist and
> english simple forms. The aorist is literally "undefined", not only with
> respect to time (so Aristotle), but also aspect.
> 
> Hefin Jones

To say that the aorist is "literally 'undefined'" just trades Greek for
Latin. A + hORIZEIN = un + definire, as I recall Carl suggesting in a past
post (my dictionary indicates that Latin would be "in," not "un"). So,
what do we mean by UNDEFINED? Can we define something that by definition
is "undefined"? Is the aorist really "undefined"? Just because it has the
name "aorist" doesn't necessarily mean that it is literally "undefined,"
i.e., no definition/category/description can be applied to it and its
usages. Sorry if this just makes things more confusing. I have somewhat
read Porter's Idiom book and his treatment/translation of Romans 1:18ff
with present tenses (like the TEV does) based on this idea of the aorist
(if I recall correctly) goes against so much that so many seem to teach
about the aorist.



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