[B-Greek] Second Aorist Middle
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Feb 19 13:49:49 EST 2004
At 9:31 AM -0800 2/19/04, Mitch Larramore wrote:
>Mounce on page 193 gives a chart for learning the
>Second Middle Aorist.
>
>Augment + Aorist active tense stem + ...
>
>Really all I want to do is confirm this (active?). I
>note in the back of his book he gives the Second
>Aorists of hISTHMI (Active and Middle), and in those
>conjugations, the tense stems appear different. Active
>has STH while Middle uses STA....I think.
>
>And I want to voice my agreement with Dr. Conrad's
>earlier comment on learning Greek. You really do need
>a teacher present! Learning from a book is hard
>because you never know if you understand it. And it
>slows down the process because I don't want to embed
>anything into my memory until I am sure I got it
>right.
I no longer have a copy of Mounce at hand to check on what you report, but
you do need to be careful about this; the term "second middle aorist"
sounds sort of weird to me:
What we normally mean by "second aorist middle" is forms in
-OMHN/ESO/ETO/OMEQA/ESQE/ONTO (in the indicative). But one really needs to
differentiate between the THEMATIC "second aorist" (the indicative endings
I just noted) and what is normally referred to as the ATHEMATIC "second"
aorist in -N/-S/-/-MEN/-TE/-NT (endings following upon a long-vowel which
in most cases is an Eta).
A verb such as hISTAMAI is middle and intransitive, meaning, "I am coming
to a standing position." The aorist for this is ESTHN; this too is
intransitive and means "I reached a standing position." It is true that the
endings on ESTHN (or EFANHN or APEKRIQHN) are active endings, but I would
never claim that the STEM to which these endings are attached is active.
I used to think that it was pedagogically useful to distinguish these
athematic aorists (EGNWN, ESTHN, EFANHN, etc.) from Sigmatic and from
Thematic second aorists by calling them "third aorists."
First aorist: ELUSA
Second aorist: EMAQON
"Third" aorist: EGNWN/ESTHN
Unfortunately this area of voice is dealt with in a confusing manner in the
great majority of Greek textbooks. I've tried to be clear and helpful in a
little document which I've called attention to here before, "Active, Middle
and Passive: Understanding Ancient Greek Voice." It's at
http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/Docs/UndAncGrkVc.pdf
You can read it on-line or download it by option-clicking the URL.
--
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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