[B-Greek] Danker Festschrift: Deponency and -QH- forms

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue May 11 16:21:08 EDT 2004


At 12:46 PM -0700 5/11/04, Eddie Mishoe wrote:
>Dr. Conrad:
>
>Can I ask for two insignificant points of
>clarification on this excellent thread you have
>posted?
>
>First...
>
> Dionysius Thrax (2nd c. BCE in
>> Grammaticus 638.8) says of
>> these forms: EISI TREIS, ENERGEIA, PAQOS, MESOTHS
>> ('there are three,
>> activity, passivity, medial character'); Apollonius
>> Dyscolus (2nd c. CE in
>> De Syntaxi, 210.19, 226.10) speaks of DIAQESIS
>> ('dispositions') as
>> PAQHTIKH, MESH ('passive,' 'middle.')
>
>
>Was Apollonius writing about the Greek of his day or
>that of the 4th c. BCE Atticists? (Can we use the
>statements from Thrax and Apollonius as temporal "book
>ends" on either side of the GNT, or must we take both
>as pre-GNT observations regarding Voice?)

A fair question: I think he's writing about ancient Greek as he knows it up
to his own day--certainly those three characterize the Greek of the GNT as
well as that of classical Attic and the semantic passive is  found even in
Homer: some -QH- forms have passive sense in Homer, though most do not; we
find BEBLHTO as an aorist meaning "he was hit."

>Last...
>
>>  In Greek the aorist stem is generally
>> prior to the present
>> stem which is a modification of the aorist stem.
>
>
>Is this an observation regarding pre-Homeric Greek or
>even further back to the IE ancestors of Greek? (Was
>the Present tense in "full force" during Homer's day?)

We're only talking about ancient GREEK here; yes, the present tense exists
in Homer, but the aorist "tense" is (a) the "tense" in most frequent use in
all  periods of antiquity, and (b) more frequently displays a clearly
recognizable form of the verb's root than does the present stem (the
present stem usually involves any one of a number of additives; e.g. the
root of MANQANW is MAQ which appears in EMAQON; the present stem is formed
by addition of -AN- and insertion of a nasal infix before the Q of MAQ).
Cf. Smyth, §§496ff.
-- 

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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