toward a definition of Verbal Apect
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Nov 5 06:49:09 EST 2002
At 11:39 PM -0600 11/4/02, Steven R. Lo Vullo wrote:
>On Monday, November 4, 2002, at 06:16 PM, Mark Wilson wrote:
>
>> How do you distinguish an Imperfect from a Present. Without time,
>> all you are left with is the same aspect, right?
>
>Or, for that matter, an aorist from a future? These seem somehow
>related in that both have the S tense formative in active and middle as
>well as QH(S) forms distinguishing passive from middle. As far as I can
>tell, they also seem to be aspectually identical. Though some argue
>that the aspect of the future is sometimes external, sometimes
>internal, this seems nothing more than the result of the same kinds of
>contextual influences that would lead us to the same conclusion for the
>aorist, if we didn't know better.
But in fact it's questionable whether the -S- future infix bears any
relationship at all to the -S- infix. The -S- marker for the aorist is
indeed an element inherited from Proto-Indo-European, but the future
marker, according to historical linguists, derives from an old desiderative
marker -ES- which lost its -E- when the root ended in an unvoiced stop (so
Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, §499, p. 556.). I used
to think that the Greek future originated from a Sigmatic aorist
subjunctive, inasmuch as the subjunctive in Homer commonly is used to
indicate the future, but that hypothesis doesn't seem to be taken
seriously. I still think that the augment on the indicative past tenses
functions fundamentally and originally to mark temporal priority, and of
course the augment appears only on the indicative of imperfect, aorist, and
pluperfect.
--
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.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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