[B-Greek] historic present as irrelevant to aspect/tense

Eddie Mishoe edmishoe at yahoo.com
Mon Aug 29 13:42:02 EDT 2005


Dr. Buth:

You wrote...

> My claim is that the 'historic present' can be
> proven to be a special
> rhetorical/literary usage in Greek and therefore is
> not relevant to
> the discussion of whether or not ancient Greek has
> indicative tenses.

In perusing the archives on B-Greek, a respondant was
fond of pointing out that not all propositions are
temporal. 

We are all aware of the famous Aorist in "The grass
withers..." Some linguists (for example, Stan Porter)
lump all propositions together as if all propositions
carry equal temporal weight.

Before one examines the temporal nature of the Greek
Indicative, I think it first necessary to separate
propositions into two groups:

G1. Those making or attempting to make a temporal
proposition.

G2. Those NOT making or attempting to make a temporal
proposition.

(For the linguist, you might be able to substitute
FRAME for PROPOSITION, but that's just a guess.)

Then, one must take both modern linguistic systems and
traditional approaches in evaluating these groups. The
reason you must use all systems is to offset hidden
assumptions that various systems subscribe to. (You've
seen the needless debates recently on Wallace vs.
Porter.)

Finally, on this...

> Thesis:
> The 'historic present' usages do not just conflict
> with tense theory,
> they conflict with aspect, too, because they can
> list sequential,
> complete events AS THOUGH they are on-going. It is
> the 'as-thoughness'
> that is a rhetorical feature of Greek and is not
> definitive for its
> meaning. That is, both its aspectual meaning and its
> temporal meaning
> are being CONTRAVENED for rhetorical effect.
> [Olsen's statement quoted
> above is thus misleading/wrong by only showing the
> temporal
> incongruity without including its aspectual
> incongruity.]

I think your assumption (that all propositions are
equally weighted as to temporal and non-temporal) is
what leads you to see a "conflict." But, remove
non-temporal propositions from the temporal group, and
you've got a better place to begin, if you ask me.

By the way, in the same way you can classify "historic
presents" you can also classify "non-temporal
propositions."



Eddie Mishoe
Pastor

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