[B-Greek] Deponents

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Jul 24 16:16:45 EDT 2006


I hate to keep sounding a broken record for those who have noted my  
previous responses to questions of this sort over several years on  
this list since 1997. To quote A.T. Robertson's big grammar(1934),  
p.  332: "The so-called 'deponent' verbs: These call for a word at  
the risk of trespassing on t=syntax. Moulton is certainly right in  
saying tht the term should be applied to all three voices if to any.  
The truth is that it should not be used at all." What are most- 
commonly called "deponent" verbs are verbs that lack an active form  
in the present or another tense. Most of them are verbs that really  
have middle lemmas (lemmata, if you prefer) and generally an aorist  
(and/or future) in a -QH- form. There are certainly far more than 11  
verbs that I would call "middle" verbs. If you care to pursue this  
further, see my page

http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/GrkVc.html

On Jul 24, 2006, at 3:06 PM, José Antonio Septién wrote:

> My question is this: According to Daniel B. Wallace, the number of  
> true "deponent" verbs in NT greek is about 11. But other  
> grammarians expand that number up to 75 % of NT verbs. Is Dr.  
> Wallace right? Is it possible to calculate a percentege of  
> "deponents" in NT writings?
>
> Thanks.
> J. A. Septien
> ---
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Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/





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