[B-Greek] My new "Ancient Greek Voice" page

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Aug 3 08:23:33 EDT 2005


Those few who may be interested in my emerging convictions about how  
ancient Greek voice morphology and usage should be understood may  
want to know that I have started a new page on my web-site, Others  
may and likely will ignore this.

"Propositions Concerning Ancient Greek Voice"
at
http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/GrkVc.html

The URLs for viewing or downloading my older PDF files from Nov 2002  
and Dec 2003 are there.

More important: I have broadened my perspective on several relevant  
issues, including that of aorist and perfect-tense "active" forms of  
intransitive verbs the primary lemma of which is middle (e.g. GEGONA  
from GINOMAI, hESTHKA from hISTAMAI); Martin Culy has argued that  
these forms too should be taken into consideration under the heading  
of "deponency." Of course, I advocate dispensing altogether with the  
term "deponency." If one wants terms to refer to the unexpected or  
"missing" parts of a complete verbal paradigm, one could use the term  
"defective" for forms that aren't in the paradigms, such as active  
forms of verbs that really are middle in meaning (e.g. GINOMAI). But  
the truth is that there are quite a few verbs that are in common  
everyday use at any particular time in a language's historical  
existence that can't be shown to have all the expected and  
predictable forms in a complete paradigm (there are NT Greek primers  
that display a complete paradigm for LUW showing a middle aorist set  
ELUSAMHN etc., although the aorist middle of LUW is defunct in NT  
Greek).

At any rate, pending completion of my expanded and revised “New  
Observations on Ancient Greek Voice,” I intend to post here more  
recent and hopefully clearer formulations of the chief propositions  
that I am trying to urge the community of students and instructors of  
ancient Greek to adopt in the hopes of coming to a better  
understanding and a more useful way of talking about the verbal voice  
system of ancient Greek.

I have recently settled upon one proposition regarding terminology  
for the verbs which have traditionally or conventionally called  
"deponent verbs" -- I think they should be called "Middle Verbs." Why?
(a) because they are essentially middle in meaning (they fall into  
the categories listed by Suzanne Kemmer and Neva Miller as bearing  
essential middle meaning;
(b) because in the Koine and later Greek they came increasingly to  
have -QH- endings while generally retaining a middle sense  
(APEKRINAMHN is found 7x in the GNT, APEKRIQHN 213X; there's no  
difference in meaning; on the other hand EGENOMHN is found far more  
commonly in the GNT than EGENHQHN, but the latter is one the way to  
supplanting the former in the Koine era);
(c) In addition to those verbs whose standard lemma is middle-voice,  
I would include among the "Middle Verbs" a number of verbs that are  
fundamentally middle in meaning but that do have active transitive/ 
causative meanings; here I would include such verbs as hISTAMAI, the  
intransitive "come to a stand" with its aorist ESTHN and perfect- 
tense form hESTHKA; the active form hISTHMI is not really the primary  
form of this verb but means rather 'cause to stand" or "bring to a  
standstill."  I really think this verb should be lemmatized as  
hISTAMAI and that hISTHMI should be listed secondarily. A similar  
verb is EGEIROMAI, the intransitive "wake up, rise from sleep or  
reclining position"; there is an transitive/causative active form  
EGEIRW "rouse" or "raise up" --and this is another verb which I think  
ought to be lemmatized with the middle-voice form EGEIROMAI rather  
than with the active-voice form EGEIRW.

I'll be adding to and revising this page as I gather materials and  
formulate my thoughts for a fuller and better-documented revision of  
my "New Perspectives on Ancient Greek Voice."

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




More information about the B-Greek mailing list