[B-Greek] Interpreting the imperfect tense

Eddie Mishoe edmishoe at yahoo.com
Fri Jun 4 22:42:03 EDT 2004


Bert:

As an oversimplification, when I come across an
Imperfect Finite Indicative I generally think of the
same thing as the Present...with one exception: while
both tenses indicate the event is "in progress" at
some pre-specified reference point, the Imperfect
indicats we are to consider this "action in progress"
before the reference point and the Present indicates
the "action in progress" takes place simultaneous with
the reference event.

There are some very good earlier posts on this
Aspectual concept in the Archives. The easiest to
follow/understand, IMO, are the posts from Mark Wilson
and more recently Waldo Slusher (sp??).

Eddie

--- bertdehaan at gosympatico.ca wrote:
>  The recent discussion on how to interpret the
> genitive case was very interesting.
> My question is very similar.
> The various uses of the different tenses of the
> Greek verbs tend to make me wonder if experienced
> readers (or speakers) of Greek ever have to stop and
> think in what way this particular tense was
> intended.
> I'll pick on the imperfect tense for now.
> There are the progressive, ingressive, iterative,
> customary, conative imperfects, and probably others
> as well.
> 
> Those of you who are very comfortable reading Greek:
> Do you read an imperfect tense and "feel" the
> imperfect aspect intended by the context?
> Most of the first letter of John, or the gospel
> according to John I can read without having to
> translate it in my mind but I don't really get any
> sense  when I come across an imperfect tense that I
> know whether it is intended as -..he began to..- or
> -..he kept on..- or -..he used to..-. 
> 
> Thank you.
> Bert de Haan.
> 
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
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> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
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