[B-Greek] Deponents

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Jan 6 07:31:08 EST 2005


This thread was just beginning when I set out to return home after the
holidays. I want to add just a little bit and respond to Cirk's point about
retaining the term "deponent" as a reminder of the nature of verbs that
have no active voice.

At 1:41 PM -0800 1/3/05, Cirk Bejnar wrote:
>
>I do want to make one furter observation on your
>comment that "deponent verbs require a middle/passive
>translation."  Since it seems to be a point of
>confusion and also relates to the one point at which I
>am not in full agreement with Dr. Conrad.  No one is
>suggesting that the dictionary definitions of
>'deponent' verbs are grossly defective and that in
>practice an additional middle or passive force should
>be added in translation.  Rather the claim is that
>such verbs have, in fact, a middle force even when
>the, English, translation will be semantically active.
>
>This is why I found myself making the notation 'dep.'
>besides certain forms as a made my way through the
>Iliad a few years ago even after I had read and
>largely accepted Dr. Conrad's theories
>(http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/NewObsAncGrkVc.pdf).
> I needed an additional reminder that the mediopassive
>force of the form had already been taken into account
>in the gloss and needn't be further added by me.  Thus
>I am infavor of retaining the word 'deponent' with the
>limited meaning verbs which lack an active voice since
>they are, perforce, treated uniquely by lexica (using
>the 1st person present indicative middle/passive as
>the lemma and giving a translation of the
>middle/passive paradigms).  I do, however, quite agree
>with Dr. Conrad that nothing has even been 'laid
>aside' by such verbs and that the traditional 'passive
>in form but active in meaning' is both inaccurate and
>misleading.

Yes, that is certainly a major point in my discussion of ancient Greek
voice: that the standard definitions of "deponent" don't offer any useful
description of the nature of these verbs; I'd go further and drop the term
altogether, as Cirk evidently prefers NOT to do (that's his privilege, if
he finds a useful function for the term).

Long ago A.T. Robertson said p. 332, _A Grammar of the Greek NT in the Light of
Historical Research_. 4th ed., 1923), "The So-called "Deponent" Verbs.
These call for a word .... Moulton  is certainly right in saying that the
term should be applied to all three voices if to any. The truth is that it
should not be used at all. As in the Sanskrit  so in the Greek some verbs
were used in both active and middle in all tenses (like LUW); some verbs in
some tenses in one and some in the other (like BAINW, [p. 333] BHSOMAI);
some on one voice only (like KEIMAI). As concerns voice these verbs were
defective rather than deponent."

So that if one feels the need to characterize these verbs with a name, it
is "defective," i.e. wanting in one or more areas of conjugation and usage.

But the greater harm done by continued use of the term deponent, in my
opinion, is that the existence of a very considerable number of such verbs
vitiates the standard notion that -QH- forms indicate semantic passive
voice: the "deponents" constitute such a sizable exception to the standard
description of the Greek verb that the standard description itself seems to
be at fault--as I believe it is. And the development of my own thinking
about ancient Greek voice has led myself and some others as well to
recognize that the real nature of the middle voice AND of the standard
middle and passive morphoparadigms is mis-described because the nature of
middle-passive verbs is not fully understood. I've been emboldened by
discovering that much of what I've come to understand about ancient Greek
voice is consonant with what Robertson and others knew and said long ago
about these matters.

While in St. Louis for the holidays i was able to consult an 1892 classic
work by G. N. Hatzidakis, _Einleitung in die Neugriechische Grammatik_ and
found abundant evidence there to give grounds for what I had suspected,
that the long-term trend in Greek verb morphology is the very gradual
elimination of the Middle-voice morphoparadigms (MAI/SAI/TAI,MHN/SO/TO)
endings and their supplanting by -QH- forms that have traditionally been
called "passive." And this is something that A.T. Robertson noted too (p.
816): "The so-called passive "deponents," verbs which had no active, formed
the aorist with the passive form. But they were not always intransitive.
... As a result
of this inroad of the comparatively new passive forms the aorist middle
forms vanished. In modern Greek the passive aorist form is invariably used
for both the middle and the passive ideas. This tendency seen in the N.T.
(and the rest of the KOINH) has triumphed over the aorist middle. In Ro.
10:3 THi DIKAIOSUNHi TOU QEOU OUC hUPETAGHSAN, the Rev. V. translates 'they
did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.'"

Cirk Bejnar has said he finds it useful to mark those defective verbs which
appear in "Middle" or "Passive" forms but have no active voice forms as
"deponent." For my part, I don't think that's very useful because I think
that in learning vocabulary one learns the individual verbs and learns
POREUOMAI, ARNEOMAI, GINOMAI, etc. as being by nature middle-voice verbs.
While I don't really want to open up a new discussion on aspect and
"Aktionsart" I think that there is something comparable here: some verbs
are by their lexical nature durative while others are punctual and that is
a fact that at least partly governs their usage in different "tenses."
Comparably some verbs are by nature focused upon the experience of the
grammatical subject, whether voluntary or involuntary, and these are
"middle-voice" verbs. They have been nicely described and classified in
sub-categories by Neva Miller in Appendix 2, "A Theory of Deponent Verbs"
of the Friberg _Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament_ (ANLEX)
published in 2000; they have been discussed thoroughly in a lengthy study
by Suzanne Kemmer, _The Middle Voice_ (1993), who presents a broad
cross-linguistic accounting.  More recently, Jonathan Pennington presented
a paper on this matter at SBL Atlanta meeting of 2003 and Bernard Taylor in
an article in the Danker Festschrift ("Deponency and Greek Lexicography" in
_Biblical Greek Language and Lexicography: Essays in Honor of Frederick W.
Danker_, ed. Taylor, Lee, Burton, Whitaker, Eerdmans, 2004, pp. 167-176)
has argued against retention of the term and for taking more seriously the
real nature of the middle voice; I reviewed and commented on that article
in a message to B-Greek last May (Tue, 11 May 2004) that can be viewed in
the archives.

As I've said repeatedly, it doesn't surprise me that many or most adhere to
the traditional accounting of the morphology and semantics of the ancient
Greek voices; Nevertheless, I do intend to complete at least one more
revision of my "New Observations on Ancient Greek Voice" this year and I'll
continue setting forth this alternative view of the middle and passive
voices in Greek as occasion arises in B-Greek discussions.
-- 

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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