[B-Greek] HLQON - ERCOMAI
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Mar 9 14:28:18 EST 2005
At 8:35 AM -0800 3/9/05, Eric Biggs wrote:
>Dr. Conrad,
>
>I have read the paper on deponecy that you provided to the list a while
>ago. Unless I just don't understand, I believe that you are saying that
>there is no such thing as a deponet verb, but that these verbs labeled as
>such are really middle or passive. They are not active.
It's not quite so simple as that; what I'm saying is that there are only
two meaningful categories of voice-forms, one that is
traditionally/conventionally called "active," the other, comprising both
the MAI/SAI/TAI,MHN/SO/TO endings and the QH endings,
traditionally/conventionally called "middle-passive" and "passive"
respectively but BOTH bearing the ambivalent semantic sense that can be
interpreted as either middle or passive, and BOTH, in my opinion, would
better be called by the same name "middle-passive"--or I've suggested
calling the MAI/SAI/TAI,MHN/SO/TO forms MP1 and the QH forms MP2.
I've not so much said that "there's no such thing as a deponent" as that
the name "deponent" is not useful, that it has conventionally been employed
to designate verbs that are better understood as having middle-passive
forms and bearing the semantic sense of such verbs, which is that they
indicate the grammatical subject of the verb as undergoing a process or
alteration. I believe that the term "deponent" has been applied
conventionally to a great number of ancient Greek verbs that have been
thought not to conform to the standard formations of the Greek verb. It's
my opinion that it is the nature of verb voice that hasn't been understood,
partly because grammarians have tried to understand Greek verbs that aren't
active in form in terms of English or other target-language verbs into
which the Greek verbs are translated.
>ERCOMAI being one of those miss-labeled verbs, in the aorist has an active
>ending- HLQON.
>
>Am I not understanding something here? Is it that, when classifing verbs,
>only the lexical form is under consideration?
I am in the process of revising my "New Observations," the last version of
which was promulgated in November of 2002; one of the features of the
ancient Greek voice-system that I expect to treat more fully and more
adequately is verbs such as ERCOMAI that have different voice forms in
different tense-systems. I believe such phenomena can be explained, but
there are several different factors involved in the explanation. One major
factor is that from its earliest extant literary usage in the Homeric poems
continuously to the end of antiquity (really up to modern times) the Greek
language has been in flux, changing continuously, newer forms replacing
older forms while at the same time some of the very oldest forms have
survived with relatively little change from the composition of the Homeric
times through the early Christian era. The verb ERCOMAI is one of those
verbs the forms of which have changed little if at all over that time
period.
Technically speaking, the aorist form HLQON is not from the same verb as
ERCOMAI, the root of which (ERC-) appears ONLY in the present system; it
might be said that ERC- has supplied the present system for
ELEUQ/ELOUQ/EL(U)Q since it is this latter root that accounts for the
future ELEUSOMAI, the aorist HLQON, and the perfect ELHLUQA. But still the
question is: why does the verb HLQON have an "active" form in the aorist
and perfect tense-systems and a "middle-passive" form in the future tense?
I believe that there are two categories of voice-forms in ancient Greek:
the DEFAULT form is that which is normally called "active" while the MARKED
form is normally called "middle-passive" and indicates that the grammatical
subject is undergoing a process or alteration. What is called the "active"
voice form is not tied to transitivity, although most transitive
(direct-object-taking) verbs that we'd call "active" in English are found
in that form; yet many intransitive verbs are found in that form also and
some verbs that even bear a "passive" sense are found in that form also
(e.g. PASCW, PIPTW as passive of BALLW, APOQNHiSKW as passive of
APOKTEINW). Nor is transitivity necessarily associated with the
"middle-passive" forms: some of them will take a direct object (e.g.
KTAOMAI "get, acquire") while others do not (e.g. GINOMAI, "come to be"). A
student seeking to understand the ancient Greek voice system ought NOT to
confound the Greek voice form with the voice form of the English (or other
target-language) verb used to translate the Greek voice form. "Come" may be
"active" in English, but this does not mean that the Greek ERCOMAI is
"active" in meaning; the fact is that the form of ERCOMAI implies for the
Greek-speaker that the subject of the verb is "engaged" in the movement
toward a goal.
I believe that the "active" form of a verb is the default form and that the
"middle-passive" form of the same verb, if it appears, always indicates or
implies a significant level of subject-involvement in the process or action
of that verb. It is noteworthy that several verbs that have "active" forms
in the present tense have "middle-passive" forms in the future tense:
BAINW/BHSOMAI, MANQANW/MAQHSOMAI, PASCW/PEISOMAI, to name a few. But it is
also true that some verbs which have "middle-passive" forms in the present
tense have "active" forms in the aorist and perhaps in the perfect also:
such is ERCOMAI/HLQON/ELHLUQA; there are more instances of verbs with
middle-passive forms in the present and "active" forms in the perfect
precisely because the middle-passive forms in the perfect tense are later
developments; thus hISTAMAI/hESTHKA (intransitive "stand"),
PEIQOMAI/PEPOIQA (intransitive "trust, believe"), GINOMAI/GEGONA
(intrransitive "come to be").
I hope that I can make these explanations fuller and clearer in my
forthcoming revision of "New Observations"; for now this will have to
suffice. Suffice it also to say that I think that the ancient Greek verb
generally is very complex in its forms and usage; in recent years the
complexity of verbal aspect has been the focus of considerable
investigation and controversy on which the dust has not yet settled
completely; there's considerable complexity in the ancient Greek
voice-system too. It's my contention that the categorization of verb-forms
as "deponent" has done more to conceal the underlying nature of the
voice-system than to clarify it, and that a major obfuscating factor has
been thinking of the Greek voice-system in terms of an essentially
transitive active-passive antithesis wherein the middle voice plays an
strange role as a sort of halfway house between active and passive. And
that will have to do for now.
--
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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