[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects

Dr. Don Wilkins drdwilkins at sbcglobal.net
Fri Sep 8 19:50:22 EDT 2006


Just to clarify, note below that I did not say context alone, rather  
aspect and context. Randall has a legitimate gripe with my reference  
to aspect, and I'm not sold on his position either, but that's all  
for another day. It is true that the distinction between tense and  
aspect in Hebrew is blurry. Setting aside our differences, my point  
is that one can see the same Hebrew grammatical form (traditionally  
the "imperfect") freely used in any time frame (the same is generally  
true for the Heb. "perfect"). Indeed, a translator encounters many  
Heb. verbs for which the timing simply cannot be determined without  
reference to context. The same is not true for Greek (unless you  
artificially force such ambiguity on the Greek by voiding tense  
indicators), and if you work back and forth between the two  
languages, the difference is striking.

Don Wilkins

On Sep 8, 2006, at 1:37 PM, Randall Buth wrote:

>> I do think those who want to ignore the augment as a tense/time
> marker would find it more fruitful to take a close look at Hebrew, or
> short of that, at Homer, Herodotus, and modern Greek, to see aspect
> and context alone being employed to represent tense. >
>
> As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is one way Greek people get
> in trouble.
> Context alone is NOT what Hebrew uses.
> that is why MAHAR BATI and vayyavo MAHAR don't occur.
> Hebrew did not differentiate aspect from tense in its verb system.
> they were fused, both potentialities available in one morphosyntactic
> category..
> English Hebrew metalanguage can be ignored, just do what Don says
> literally, go to Hebrew itself.
>
> Randall Buth
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