[B-Greek] Consonant stem ending + NTAI
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Sep 17 10:37:42 EDT 2003
At 6:16 AM -0700 9/17/03, Mitch Larramore wrote:
>The grammar I'm reading says that the Perfect Middle
>3rd pers. pl endings cannot be joined to a consonant,
>as in the conjugation of AGW (redup-AG + NTAI). In
>stead, he gives the periphrastic, implying
>that the Greeks would use the periphrasis in stead of
>the 3rd pers pl. In fact, according to his
>conjugation, there is no 3rd pers. pl. form of the
>Middle Perfect with verb stems ending in a consonant.
>What I'm not following is why the Greeks didn't come
>up with a form for this occasion, or did they?
Earlier Greek regularly converted a consonantal Nu to short Alpha; there
are several perfect middle-passives in -ATAI older Greek and in Homer, but
Greek-speakers came to prefer to use the periphrastic form, and so far as I
know, one ONLY finds the periphrastic 3d plural middle-passive in Koine.
The same principle is responsible for the -A ending of the 3d-declension
masc. acc. of consonant stems; the original ending was -N, which appears in
1st-decl. -HN and -AN and in 2d-decl. -ON, also in 3d-decl. vowel-stems
like POLI-N and ANASTASI-N and the adjective POLU-N, but consonant stems:
FULAK-N --> FULAKA, etc.
--
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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