[B-Greek] Middle and Passive Voice
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Aug 26 17:14:36 EDT 2006
On Saturday, August 26, 2006, at 01:06PM, James Tauber <jtauber at jtauber.com> wrote:
>
>On 25/08/2006, at 5:30 PM, wayfaringman at netzero.net wrote:
>> 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.
>
>Are you asking how the forms themselves originated or how the
>semantic distinction between middle and passive developed? Your
>phrasing of the question suggests they are one in the same thing but
>I think it's important to keep the two separate.
>
>Proto-Indo-European, both semantically and formally had two voices:
>active and middle. The middle voice indicated that the subject was
>more affected by the action: e.g. it was done to oneself, or for
>oneself. While any verb could theoretically have both an active and
>middle form depending on how affected the subject was, it is easy to
>see why some verbs might only (or at least predominantly) use an
>active or middle form. It should be noted that this in no way means
>the verb should be considered "defective" any more than English
>intransitive verbs should because they can't be put in the passive.
>
>PIE didn't have a form corresponding to a true passive. Nor is there
>any indication, as far as I know, that it distinguished a passive
>sense semantically. (For this reason I think it's better, for PIE at
>least, to call the form middle and not middle-passive). However,
>various languages descended from PIE independently developed ways of
>expressing a passive sense. Some languages developed a passive from
>the middle form. Others developed it from things like stative
>constructions. For example, in English consider "the window was
>broken" which could be either stative ("was the window intact? no,
>the window was broken") or passive ("the window was broken by some
>kids").
>
>I am not convinced that so-called "passive" forms of the aorist
>developed specifically as a means of expressing the passive sense.
>They don't always mean passive in our literature and my understanding
>is they certainly don't in Homer. I think it's more likely the -QH-
>and (especially) -H- forms initially had some other meaning (the
>latter relating to the stative, for example, as suggested in Sihler).
>The middle form in general started to take on an occasional passive
>sense and, over time, the -(Q)-H forms were favoured (although not
>exclusively) for this in the aorist.
I think that the -QH- and -H- forms tended to be intransitive, likewise the oldeer perfects, especially "second" perfects such as hESTHKA, PEPOIQA, EGRHGORA, corresponding to hISTAMAI/ESTHN, PEIQOMAI/EPIQOMHN, EGEIROMAI/HGERQHN (older HGROMHN).
One must realize that the MP forms of the perfect are later in development.
>I'm not sure that the separate "middle" versus "passive" forms (or in
>his terminology MP1 and MP2) are really any different from, say, the
>distinction between 1st and 2nd aorist, although I'd be interested to
>know if Carl Conrad thinks me off base for this analogy.
Well, I think that the -QH- forms are more recent in development (relatively) than the -OMHN and -SAMHN forms. Ultimately, I'm inclined to think that the designation of "first" and "second" forms of morphological paradigms is very useful. The factor that complicates Greek verb morphology so greatly is the continued existence side-by-side of earlier and later morphological paradigms with common senses. For instance, there's no difference in meaning between GNT forms of the aorist middle APEKRINAMHN (relatively rare) and APEKRIQHN (more or less standard), or between GNT forms EGENOMHN (far more common) and the emerging EGENHQHN (far less frequent in the GNT).
I think that James's account is very much on target regarding pre-history and early history of the voice forms.
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/
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