Aspect of the Greek Verb

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Dec 17 10:20:33 EST 2002


At 10:12 AM -0500 12/17/02, Eric S. Weiss wrote:
>> 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.

FWIW, I have always assumed that Greek AORISTOS underlies the name  of the
French "workhorse" past tense termed "Passé indéfini" which is somewhat
troublesome to English-speaking learners of French because it looks like
but doesn't quit correspond to the English "Present perfect."
-- 

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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