[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Tense-Aspects

Bert de Haan b_dehaan at sympatico.ca
Fri Sep 15 20:59:37 EDT 2006


When I first joined this list there was a discussion about deictic centres 
as well.
I didn't understand it then.
Now I feel as though I am getting the point.
The thing that heartens me is that even if I don't know anything about 
deictic centres, I will probably understand the meaning (if I was attention 
to the context at least.)  Just like I would understand "The Lord arrived 
with myriads of his saints -- " in its context, to be in the future.
Because I read Greek considerably slower than I do English, often I lose 
sight of the context.  That is likely where my problem with understanding a 
particular construction lies.
Having said that, I will now proceed to show that maybe I DON'T understand 
it after all:
If the aorist is meant to give a summary view ( or is the unmarked or the 
default tense) of a past action, how am I to  understand the Ingressive 
aorist.
Would the Imperfect not be the more logical tense for that?

One more comment.
Con R. Campbell wrote: When I say 'If I WERE
>you', I do not imply past temporal reference at all.

I think the reason you do not imply past temporal reference is because 
"were" here is subjunctive and not past tense.  It just happens to have the 
same form as the past tense. I guess in the same way that 2nd person pl. 
indicative and imperative share the same spelling.

Though I did not understand everything that was said, I did learn 
considerably. Thank you.

Bert de Haan.





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