[B-Greek] Fwd: Imperfect and Aorist Aspects

cwestf5155 at aol.com cwestf5155 at aol.com
Mon Sep 11 14:42:36 EDT 2006


     
 -----Original Message-----
 From: cwestf5155 at aol.com
 To: ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
 Sent: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:22 PM
 Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects
 
  Greetings Randall,
 
 I won't be able to responsibly take part in much disucssion consistently, so I'll just shoot and run.
 
 It's wonderful to be in agreement and to see you support the argument for aspect here--you have given a vintage aspect explanation. However, I wouldn't say HLQEN causes the change in the speaker's viewpoint, as much as expresses a change.
 
 And yes, context supplies the 'future' here...just as I have been saying.
 
 I also understand this usage is not widespread.
 
 Cindy Westfall
 Assistant Professor
 McMaster Divinity College
 
    
 -----Original Message-----
 From: ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
 To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
 Sent: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 2:40 AM
 Subject: [B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Aspects
 
   From your double posting I am assuming that you would like a comment  
on Jude 14.

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 AUXHSIS "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
  
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