[B-Greek] Caragounis' book
Dr. Don Wilkins
drdwilkins at sbcglobal.net
Sun Nov 28 15:23:38 EST 2004
On Saturday, November 27, 2004, at 02:27 PM, R Yochanan Bitan Buth wrote:
> EGRAPSE Wilkins
>
>> Then we could argue that this hINA construction eventually crystalized
>> into
> NA + verb as the infinitive in modern Greek.
>
>> ... whereas the modern Greek reader is used to thinking of NA + verb
>> as the
> formal infinitive, just as we do with "to" and the verb in English.
> And I
> would assume that modern Greek includes the idea of an infinitive of
> purpose, just as in English, thereby ignoring the nuances of the
> construction. Of course I invite corrections if I am misunderstanding
> the
> modern Greek constructions.>
>
>
>
> A minor quibble, NA + verb is not an infinitive in Modern Greek. The
> verb is
> inflected, which is why the structure should be back-translated into
> English
> as 'that + subjunctive finite verb' e.g. "I want that I would see"
> QELW NA
> DW, if one wants to show the Modern Greek structure. Modern Greek has
> dropped the infinitive along with the dative. Incidently, this is not so
> strange for languages. Arabic, a totally unrelated language, does the
> same
> thing: ouriid an adhab "I want that I go" => (approximately in
> English) "I
> want to go."
>
I don't think we really have a quibble here, just a semantic problem. NA
plus the subjunctive is a grammatical paraphrase for the infinitive,
just as "to" plus the uninflected verb in English is a paraphrase
accepted as the infinitive. Also, I don't think I have suggested that
the loss of these inflected forms is strange or unusual, but quite the
contrary. Any old or ancient language that has enjoyed a golden age has
most likely suffered a reduction in inflected forms, barring artificial
attempts to revive the old forms, which--if Greek is a good example--has
not overcome the reduction in general usage.
Don Wilkins
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list