[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Tue Sep 5 15:05:56 EDT 2006
>and the aorist as normally past,
undefined action (of course I am referring to the indicative). My question
is what does Mounce know that the rest of us don?t or some of us don?t, that
he describes the aspect of the aorist as undefined? >
Mounce is simply translating the word "aorist", which is a metaphor, and
literally means 'unlimited, undefined'. It does not have a modern linguistic
sense.
In context of ancient Greek grammarians it probably means "none of the
above", without additional meaning, that is, it does not add the
"continuative" of the present-imperfect system, nor the stative-result of
the perfect system. It is 'simple', the whole event complex. Within modern
linguistics the aorist, or simple past system of a language, is often
thought of as highly defined, definite. So one needs to be careful with
comparing metaphors when talking about a language. You will feel better
about this after you've read a thousand lines of narrative story. How do you
think the Greeks learned their system? Same way, multiplied by 1000, i.e. a
million lines of oral text.
blessings
Randall Buth
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com
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