[B-Greek] Imperative Mood
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Apr 5 06:19:08 EDT 2004
At 11:28 PM -0500 4/4/04, Joseph Weaks wrote:
>On Apr 4, 2004, at 11:14 PM, Polycarp66 at aol.com wrote:
>> It is, however, inconceivable that there would be a past imperative --
>> "Do it
>> (yesterday)."
>
>Not to disagree with your larger argument, but:
>
>"You must have done it."
>
>There, I conceived it.
Or: "I should have ought to stood in bed!" Which is really a sort of
proverbial colloquialism declaring a wish that one had done something one
did not do: a counter-factual wish regarding past behavior. It shows up in
one celebrated English translation of the opening of Euripides' Medea:
"Oh that an embargo had kept in port the good ship Argo!"
Ah, but in the phrase "you must have done it" "you must have done it"
doesn't mean "you are obliged" but rather "you could not escape doing it."
There's something superficially akin to "you must have done it" in the
Greek aorist subjunctive with OU MH and the Latin subjunctive of the
perfect tense. That Latin perfect subjunctive shows up in the celebrated
'SUC' or "Senatus ultimum consultum" ('emergency decree of the senate'):
VIDERINT CONSULES NE QUID DETRIMENTI ACCIPIAT RESPUBLICA: "The consuls must
see to it that the commonwealth suffer no harm." Another celebrated
instance is Horace's poem against seeking to know the future: TU NE
QUAESIERIS QUEM TIBI QUEM MIHI FINEM DI DEDERINT ... "Don't ever seek to
know what end the gods have granted you or me ..." The Greek OU MH TAUTA
POIHSHS "Don't ever do that!" These do indeed point to the future; the
force of the Greek aorist subjunctive and of the Latin perfect subjunctive
in these constructions is not to point to past time but either to make as
urgent as possible the need to take an action or to negate with a powerful
taboo the very thought of carrying out a particular action. Now archaic
English conveyed that sort of urgency in the Mosaic Decalogue: "Thou shalt
not kill"
--
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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