[B-Greek] Correction re: PERIKEITAI (was "Re: Mark 9:42")

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Sep 13 11:08:53 EDT 2006


On Sep 13, 2006, at 10:42 AM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

>
> On Sep 13, 2006, at 6:40 AM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>> It was off the top of my head the other day that I said KEIMAI
>> functions as the perfect tense for hIHMI -- that's wrong. Rather
>> KEIMAI and its compoundsdefinitely did function
>> for the perfect of TIQHMI and its functions. Some snippets that
>> come to mind:
>>
>> Mt 3:10 HDH DE hH AXINH PROS THN hRIZAN TWN DENDRWN KEITAI
>>
>> NOMOS EN LOKROIS KEITAI ... "There's a law on the books in  
>> Locri ... "
>
> Carl,
>
> LSJ only states that KEIMAI is used for the passive of TIQHMI. Smyth
> however spells it out #791 "KEIMAI ... regularly used in the present
> and imperfect instead of the perfect and pluperfect passive of
> TIQHMI" and again #1752 "The active or the middle deponent of a
> transitive verb used transitively or of an intransitive verb my
> replace the passive of a transitive verb."
>
> The consequence of this is a morphological present/imperfect having a
> stative aspect?

Well, in the give-and-take over aorist and imperfect the last few  
days (I've said before that I don't expect to survive until such time  
as the dust has settled and there's any authentic consensus on  
aspect) there was at least one person who was inclined to deny that a  
stative aspect exists. I can't help but feel this is much more  
subjective than "scientific" linguists would concede. BUT it seems to  
me that KEIMAI is not alone here: OIDA and HESTAMAI are perfect  
tenses that function as presents, hHKW ("I've arrived" and ERRW (not  
in GNT but with sense "I'm outta here" are presents with perfect- 
tense meaning.

I think everyone is sort of vaguely aware of the immense complexity  
of the Greek verb-system and the extent to which it is far less  
systematic than any first-year grammar book with its simplistic  
paradigm-charts makes it out to be; I sometimes wonder whether we  
students of Greek don't have the same attitude toward the Greek verb  
as ancient sailors had toward the open sea -- we try to stay within  
sight of the coastline for fear of gettng hopelessly lost. Students  
of French jokingly say that there are more exceptions to rules than  
there are rules when it comes especially to verbs, but the ancient  
Greek verb is "something else." Perhaps that would be less true if  
there weren't important literary classics from earlier epochs of the  
language's history, one impact of which was to keep alive archaic or  
archaizing verb-forms that might otherwise have succumbed to the  
process of standardization. While I understand what is meant by the  
insistence that we look at Koine Greek from a strictly synchronic  
perspective, I think that notion creates an illusion of linguistic  
regularity that belies the facts (and evidence -- "corpus"?) of Koine  
Greek.


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/





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