[B-Greek] Middle and Passive Voice
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Aug 26 08:04:09 EDT 2006
On Friday, August 25, 2006, at 01:31PM, wayfaringman at netzero.net <wayfaringman at netzero.net> wrote:
>
>Hello Everyone,
>
>Does anyone know how the idea of separate middle and passive forms
>for the Aorist and Future tenses originated? It's in the textbooks,
>but how did it get there I wonder? Thanks for any help you can give.
Harry, I've already referred you to materials at my page on Ancient Greek Voice:
http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/GrkVc.html
I guess your question is HOW the distinct usage of -QH- forms in the aorist and future came to be used in a distinct passive sense to distinguish strictly-middle from strictly-passive senses of verb-forms such as EPOIHSAMHN/EPOIHQHN and POIHSOMAI/POIHQHSOMAI.
This is not so simple a matter -- I'm abbreviating an account of it as I understand it. -QH- aorist forms already appear in Homer but rarely in a distinct passive sense; they are really extensions of the intransitive aorist in -H- seen in such forms as ESTH from hISTAMAI and EFANH from FAINOMAI. The second line of Homer's Odyssey has the form PLAGCQH serving as an aorist for PLAZOMAI, "roam" or "go astray." I think it is demonstrable that the -QH- aorists in the older Greek literature are the intransitive aorist forms of verb that have present-middle lemmas in -OMAI and that do not have -SAMHN aorist forms. Egbert Bakker, in an article referenced on the above-cited web-page, argues that the -SA and -SAMHN active and middle aorists came to be used primarily for transitive and causative verbs and that for these verbs the -QH- aorists tended to be used to indicate the passive sense. But it should be noted that the older "second" aorist forms in -OMHN could, just like the -OMAI forms in present, future, perfect, and pluperfect, indicate EITHER middle OR passive sense, as remained the case with such essential verbs as EGENETO (came to be/was made to be) and APWLETO (perished/was destroyed). As for the -QH- aorists, it should be noted that they indicate a passive sense ONLY in verbs that are essentially transitive and causative; in quite many verbs those -QH- aorists are simply the aorist forms of verbs with present tense in -MAI, that is to say, they are simply the aorist forms of "middle verbs" that in most grammars are commonly called "deponent."
A later phase of the development is emergence of futures in -QHSOMAI; they are pretty rare in the Homeric poems but much more common in classical Attic and later Greek. Pretty obviously they are formed on the analogy of future middles in -SOMAI, i.e., by adding the future marker -S-, the thematic vowel -O/E- and the middle-passive endings -MAI/SAI/TAI KTL. Like the aorists in -QHN, these forms do NOT per se indicate passive meaning; rather they are used to indicate passive sense in verbs with a high degree of transitivity or causality, while in other verbs they are simply the future forms of "middle verbs" such as POREUOMAI/EPOREUQHN/POREUQHSOMAI.
A still later phase of the development is the gradual replacement of aorist forms in -SAMHN by forms in -QHN. Thus in the Biblical Koine we find aorists EGENOMHN most commonly but we also find many forms EGENHQHN that have the same sense (the same ambivalent middle-passive force) as the EGENOMHN aorists.
In sum, the ancient Greek voice system is a complex hodge-podge of earlier- and later-emerging morphologies with newer ones emerging but older ones surviving. For students of ancient Greek, it is a mine-field or a labyrinth. The whole complex doctrine of "deponency" is one of the schemes created to help students keep their orientations in this labyrinth, but that doctrine is of dubious value at best. The ancient Greek verb is exceedingly complex in its plethora of morphological phenomena; there's no easy way to acquire an understanding of it; much easier is it to speak and read ancient Greek than to understand it.
That's my "nutshell" view of what is, in fact, a hard nut to crack.
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