[B-Greek] Third aorist; varieties of the AoristRe: [B-Greek] Third aorist; varieties of the Aorist

cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Jul 27 22:39:21 EDT 2004


At 5:03 PM -0500 7/27/04, "David Dawson" <David_Dawson at ibi.com> wrote:
>
>(If you are still there 3 years later.)
>
>The first Greek textbook I ever used (but did not finish) 40 years ago, 
>had been
>published about 1900 and referred to a 3rd aorist in just the way you describe,
>so the term was once in some use.  I'm afraid it may have been banished by some
>arbitrary don.  I note that Chase and Phillips, ca. 1935, refers to an
>'irregular 2nd aorist', which makes as much sense as referring to the 2nd
>declension as 'irregular 1st declension', since these forms are neither
>irregular nor 2nd aorist.  It may be that '2nd' was traditionally used to refer
>to any non-standard forms, so '3rd' would once have been '2nd', but that's just
>a guess.  I was once taught that the 3rd aorists obey regular rules: they have
>these distinct endings; they are usually the intransitive form corresponding to
>a transitive 1st aorist; they never have a middle voice; they show the simplest
>form of the verb stem, which consists of one or two consonants followed by one
>vowel (in rare cases two).  So much for 'irregular'.  
>
>Since the endings in -N -S -null -MEN -TE -SAN are so common, I would prefer to
>reserve the term '?3rd aorist' for actual aorist actives and not use it for
>pluperfects, passives, -MI verb imperfects, and optatives; but this is a minor
>quibble in comparison with your great taste in agreeing with me on the major point.

Now that I've retired from active teaching, I'm less inclined to think in terms
of the "third" aorist as a meaningful term. I do think we need to distinguish
Sigmatic aorists in -SA, Thematic aorists in -ON/ES/E;-OMHN/OU/ETO, and
Athematic aorists with long-vowel stems to which the -N/S/_/MEN/TE/SAN endings
are attached directly. There are only the three verbs EDWKA, EQHKA, and -hHKA
that have Kappa endings; in older Greek they had the KA forms only in the
singular, but later these tended to become regular throughout the conjugation
and therefore one might almost, so far as the Koine is concerned, lump these
with the -SA forms as "Alpha" aorists that mostly have the -S-
tense/aspect-marker but in these three primitive verbs have the -K- tense/aspect
marker.

It's not quite true that all the athematic aorists are intransitive, inasmuch as
EGNWN/EGNWS/EGNW is transitive active--but fundamentally these morphoparadigms
really are intransitive. That was one of the eye-openers for me that the -QH-
"aorist passives" not only DERIVED from the -H- athematic aorists but that they
are in fact a special form of the athematic aorist that commonly corresponds to
present-tense forms in -MAI/SAI/TAI that are traditionally (but wrongly) labeled
"deponents." These forms can bear either middle or passive semantic force, but
they are essentially intransitive (EGEIROMAI "I awake"/HGERQHN "I awoke").

So we probably ought to think fundamentally of three kinds of aorist
morphoparadigms: (1) Alpha-endings (both sigmatic and the three archaic -KA
aorists), (2) Thematic aorists (e.g. ELIPON, EIPON); (3) Athematic aorists with
N/S/_/MEN/TE/SAN endings added directly to a long-vowel stem. And of course it's
also true that those thematic aorists are already beginning in the Koine to be
conjugated with alpha endings, a process which has reached consummation in
Modern Greek where BOTH imperfects AND aorists are conugated with alpha endings.

>I have a Greek textbook from 1850 that presents the aorist of DIDWMI, for
>example, as EDWN, EDWS, EDW, EDOMEN, EDOTE, EDOSAN in alternation with a 1st
>aorist EDWKA.  By my standards, we would have to call this a 4th aorist.      

I have never seen EDWN/EDWS/EDW in any Greek text I've ever read and I'm really
skeptical of it, surprised that any text would list it as an aorist of DIDWMI.
Unquestionably the aorist stem of DIDWMI is DW/DO, but in the indicative the -KA
endings are standard, at least for the singular. I wonder whether EDWN/EDWS/EDW
is given as a paradigm precisely to explain the non-indicative forms which are
all clearly formed from DW/DO. Still, it seems odd to list as a paradigm a set
of conjugational forms that weren't ever used.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)



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