Primary and Secondary tenses

dconklin at tcq.net dconklin at tcq.net
Tue Oct 22 19:46:19 EDT 2002


> At 12:59 PM -0700 10/22/02, Mitch Larramore wrote:

> >Can someone explain to me what and why Greek has Primary tenses and
> >Secondary tenses. Why are the Primary Tenses the ones they are like
> >Present, Future and Perfect?

In line with Mitch's question I had an exchange on a forum that went like 
this:

>Note that Paul says that these things "are" (present tense) not "were" 
(past tense).
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Tense in Greek is morphological, not time-oriented. It actually conveys 
the authors concept of the action. See Stanley Porter's Verbal Aspect in 
the Greek New Testament.

Is that true?

David
Conklin




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