[B-Greek] Fwd: Imperfect and Aorist Aspects

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Sun Sep 10 07:26:14 EDT 2006


Hmm. It seems something irregular is going on with the list server. A
couple of hours later I don't see this response so i am double posting
via a different email. Please ignore the question on double posting
should the original post below appear.

[delete]
From your double posting I am assuming that you would like a comment on Jude 14.
[continue]

Rolf EGRAPSE
>I accept exceptions. But each of them
must be shown to a special case. Jude 14 is hardly a special case. We do not
know whether the verse is a quote, and even if it were a quote (from another
language than Greek), Jude was the one who chose  the aorist. Therefore, in
Jude´s mind an aorist with future reference would be perfectly acceptable.>

We radically differ here. I see the HLQEN as causing a change of
speaker viewpoint. It is looking back to the past, but since it is
talking about something that has not happened in our world
view/encyclopedic knowledge, the reader and speaker are taking a view
from the future. The context supplies the 'future' here, the aorist
indicative supplies a past viewpoint. And I would argue that this is
highly marked and very rare. (If one seriously wanted to argue with
that, then just show me some *AURION HLQEN examples. See below.) Greek
marks default future reference with the FUTURE verb system. Jude was
happy with both default futures and rare pragmatics. But I
differentiate an aorist being used in a future context from an aorist
having future reference, and the former does not rule out its carrying
a '+past feature'. It does not have future reference/marking. Just
like a French future can be used in a past narrative. the French
future does not mark the past, but it is used in the past even though
it marks future. (Thus, absolute non-cancelability is often an
unattainable ideal for human languages. Sometimes one needs to go
beyond Euclidean geometry and build non-Euclidean geometries in order
to deal with the real world.)

In the meantime, I am waiting for ***AURION HLQEN. That is what I
claim is non-Greek, because the AURION sets the speakers viewpoint
before "tomorrow" and thus the HLQEN is blocked, not being able to
refer 'back' (aorist ind.) and 'forward' (AURION) simultaneously .
I've never seen one of these.

The fact that I've never seen one of these tells me that if I ever do,
it will definitely be a very special context. Since you "accept
exceptions", you will probably even grant me such exceptionality with
a smile, SHOULD ONE EXAMPLE EVER BE FOUND. (folks, the difficulty of
finding such, should signal that something is wrong with absolute
tense-less analyses. I would argue that only some kind of mixed valent
analysis will ever work in the real world). In the meantime, as I've
said, I can only say that aorist indicatives have something in them
that block their co-occurence in a clause with an explicit future word
like AURION. I call that a feature of TENSE.

I would link '+past' with AUKSHSIS "augment" [E-] and recommend that
any learner do the same. Otherwise, you will enter a neat, but
non-real world, and difficult to leave. ("aspect-only" is subjective
by definition and potentially unfalsifiable if one only looks at
aspect and then demands "unique, always valid" meanings for any
features that are measurable. That's called a stacked deck. Hotel
California.) The lack of *AURION HLQEN is not a stacked deck, just a
waving, flashing red flag.

ERRWSO
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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