[B-Greek] English vs Greek Perfect
Suedaleg at aol.com
Suedaleg at aol.com
Tue Nov 15 03:32:25 EST 2005
Bert,
Concerning the meaning of the perfect tense, I think that what the
instructors and writers generally ahve shown is that it indicates a look at the
action's result. I think you will find this use in the NT most often. A common
example is the perfect participle Ephesians 2:8 where Paul's emphasis is not on
the event of salvation but on its result.
I tend to think that the English use of the perfect also has the same
purpose. The difference between "I came to town" and "I have come to town" is that
the second carries the idea of what came as a result of the coming, the
speaker's new position in the town while the first speaks only of the action of
coming.
The difficulty with defining these two concepts is that languages offer both
these ways of saying what may seem to be the same thing, and sometimes the
speaker truly uses them apparently indiscriminately so that exchanging these
tenses makes no significant difference. The context, the paragraph and
section, can help us determine whether the intended implication is consistant with
the "definition" of the tense or whether it is not significant.
Dale Greenlee
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