[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects

Rolf Furuli furuli at online.no
Mon Sep 11 01:29:03 EDT 2006


Dear Harry,

I suppose that you by the use of "non-temporal" means "lack of tense" (lack 
of grammaticalized location in time), Native speakers of English and other 
Western languages may find it hard to think of a language without tense. But 
the Burmese do not have this problem, since their language does not have 
tenses. I would say that the same is true with Classical Hebrew, a language 
that the NT writers knew and used. I teach Ugaritic this semester, and we 
are reading the saga of Kirti. Ugaritic is complicated because vowels can 
only be seen when one of the three alefs serving as mater lectionis occurs 
at the end of a word. In lines 60-104 Kirti has a dream where he is 
admonished to a lot of particular things, and from line 156 we are told that 
Kirti did these particular things. When we compare the verbs, we see that 
several verbs have exactly the same form, but in one context they have 
future reference and in the other past reference. How can we distinguish 
between the temporal references? Because of the context and the setting 
(some imperatives and other markers in the dream context etc). And 
interestingly, both imperfects (prefix forms) and perfects (suffix forms) 
have past references in the past context from line 156.

As far as time and tense is concerned, NT Greek is more complicated than 
classical Hebrew and Ugaritic, since Greek has a combination of tense and 
aspect in its verbal system. On the background of a situation with minimal 
pairs (only one morphological difference accounts for the difference in 
semantic meaning), it is much more difficult to pinpoint the meaning of a 
form consisting of two factors (tense and aspect) than a form representing 
one factor (either tense or aspect). The context is a very important factor 
in NT Greek. Try to test this out with Greek present (I do not use the 
misnomer "present tense"). Please analyse all the presents of the following 
passages and consider the basis for your choice of temporal references:

Luke 13:7
Luke 15:9
Matthew 26:45
John 8:14

Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <wayfaringman at netzero.net>
To: <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2006 8:43 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects


>
> Hello
>
> I really don't see how time could be expressed in Biblical Greek if
> the verbs were non-temporal. I don't see how the context alone could
> supply the time factor.
>
> Harry Jones





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