Linguistics and opposite conclusions

Ron Fay roncfay at hotmail.com
Sat Oct 26 23:24:28 EDT 2002



>Fanning and Porter have been contrasted lately out
>here. I have been wondering about a particular issue
>for some time now after reading both Verbal Aspect
>books. One author/scholar holds that there is no
>temporal nature to the finite indicative verbal
>system, whereas the other holds just the opposite....
>that the Greek finite indicative verbs do by and large
>make temporal assertions. To make matters worse, one
>scholar holds that the aorist tense is the default
>tense, whereas the other holds that the same default
>verbs are those in the present tense. (And there has
>been even apparent disagreement between two B-Greek
>scholars, Iver and Dr. Conrad, as to the relative
>emphasis on word order.)

I am not sure what Fanning bases his understanding on, but Porter chooses 
the dubious path of going for the most numerous in the NT as the default 
tense.  The problem that I see with this is that the NT is essentially 
occasional writing, meaning that we have such a small sample of it in 
general that one can hardly judge a default tense by use of statistics.

Fanning on the other hand would seem to base his conclusions on morphology.  
This seems to be the more appropriate route, though I have only read an 
article or snippet of Fanning in the past.  Upon reflection, though, the 
concept of morphology being the default makes much more sense when Verbal 
Aspect Theory (VAT) as a whole relies so much upon it.  For that matter, so 
does Greek in general (no 8 case system here, morphology dictates 5).  Based 
on the assumption that morphology dictates language, which I would assert 
that VAT does assume, then Fanning's idea makes more sense.

Of course, this is just off the top of my head (no reference to the EPI THS 
KEPHALHS discussion intended), so I could very well not see a deeper issue 
here.  As far as I know, though, morphology would seem to dictate that the 
present tense is the "root" form, as it were.

>Question then: Is the field of Linguistics,
>particularly those aspects of linguistics that can be
>applied to Greek, so subjective as to allow for
>opposite conclusions as stated above? What needs to
>take place to introduce objectivity into the issues
>that Porter and Fanning have so noticeably disagreed
>upon?

Yes, linguistics does seem to carry a varying degree of uncertainty in that 
many models are argued for, much like theology has it's various models and 
proponents.

However, this is an outsider looking in, as I have only Greek training, not 
linguistic.

- Ron
______________________________________
Ron Fay
Ph. D. student and New Testament Teaching Fellow
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Deerfield, IL.
roncfay at hotmail.com


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