[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




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