[B-Greek] "Is Deponency a Valid Category for Koine Greek?"
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Nov 24 10:54:34 EST 2003
At 7:35 AM -0500 11/24/03, Stephen C. Carlson wrote:
>Yesterday at SBL, I heard a delightful paper by Jonathan
>T. Pennington of the University of St Andrews entitled
>"Is Deponency a Valid Category for Koine Greek?" He
>argues that "[d]eponency is a grammatical category that
>has been misapplied to Greek because of the influence
>of Latin grammar and our unfamiliarity with the meaning
>of the Greek middle voice."
>
>Pennington cites a paper by B-Greek's very own Carl Conrad.
>
>I think he's very right that many verbs that we've been
>calling deponent are true middles because it is hard for us
>English speakers to understand the subject's self-involvement
>or self-interest in the action. For example, DECOMAI.
>
>Pennington lists the interchange between the active and
>middle voice of some verbs with little apparent change in
>meaning as among the potential objections to the non-deponency
>thesis. An example he gave was AITEW, which alternates
>in voice in the following passages: Matt. 20:20-22 // Mark
>10:35; Mark 6:22-25; John 16:23-26; James 4:2-3; 1 John
>5:14-16. He notes that there is a semantic distinction
>between the active and middle of AITEW, which he can see
>operative in the Matt., Mark, and James passages, but that
>it is hard to spot in the John and 1 John passages. P.
>suggested that in John, the lack of distinct senses of AITEW
>in the active and middle may be due to local dialect or
>interference from the writer's native tongue, but I have
>to wonder whether another explanation is more probable.
>
>I am struck that the two passages in which is it hard to
>tell the intended difference between the active and middle
>of AITEW both occur in John (John and 1 John). As we surely
>know from at the question of AGAPAW and FILEW in John 21,
>this author apparently likes to interchange two nearly but
>not exactly, synonymous words in the same context. Thus,
>I'm not sure that the interchange between AITEW and AITEOMAI
>without any apparent intended difference in meaning in *John*
>is the kind of evidence that can be extrapolated beyond this
>writer's own stylistic behavior to a general principle of Koine
>grammar.
This may well be the case with regard to AITEW and AITEOMAI in the
Johannine works. There are other verbs that are less common that seem to be
used arbitrarily in one voice or another without any distinction
whatsoever: one is AGALLIAW/AGALLIAOMAI.
>A question that came up in the question period is: what's the
>middle meaning of ERCOMAI, if ERCOMAI is not deponent? I would
>suggest that there is an English idiom, reflexive in form,
>with a similar meaning: TO GET ONESELF (SOMEWHERE). So
>perhaps Mark 8:22 KAI ERCONTAI EIS BHQSAIDAN "And they get
>themselves to Bethsaida." Now, I'm certainly not suggesting
>that GET ONESELF (SOMEWHERE) can be or ought to be a plug-in
>replacement for all occurrences of ERCOMAI. Rather, I am
>suggesting that, if English, which strongly prefers to employ
>the active over the reflexive, can have a formally reflexive
>idiom of similar meaning to ERCOMAI, then it should not be
>so strange that Greek, which makes use of the middle in far
>more circumstances that English is comfortable with in using
>the more restrictive reflexive, would have this verb in the
>middle.
In my more recent ruminations I've been thinking more and more about
English usage of "get" as an auxiliary verb with a passive participle and I
think that many, perhaps most (I'm not ready to say "all" yet) of such
expressions neatly express the ambiguity of the Greek middle-passive forms;
it seems to me that "get baptized" is just about as ambiguous or ambivalent
in English as Greek BAPTIZESQAI: the focus of the verb's FORM is upon the
experience undergone by the grammatical subject, but unless there's some
specifier in the clause, we may not be able to distinguish whether this is
something that the grammatical subject is deliberately subjecting
himself/herself to or something that is being done TO the grammatical
subject by some other. Then take, "How am I going to get to town
today?"--in Greek we'll clearly use a future tense form of the verb and
adverbial complements EIS THN POLIN SHMERON, but what verb? BHSOMAI,
POREUSOMAI or POREUQHSOMAI? Most likely simply GENHSOMAI (later Greek
GENHQHSOMAI): see BDAG s.v. GINOMAI 6. Suppose that late on Thursday
evening one of us in the U.S. should say "I got stuffed on turkey today,"
surely nobody would imagine that entering into this condition is something
done upon the grammatical subject by some other. It's the middle
CORTAZOMAI, a word that may originally go back to browsing animals feeding
on hay or whatnot. So we have ECORTASQHN SHMERON ..., not passive but
middle, or should we say middle-passive"
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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