[B-Greek] Fwd: Imperfect and Aorist Tense-Aspects

Curtis Hinson curtis at curtishinson.com
Sat Sep 16 01:33:35 EDT 2006


Sometimes a bit of functionalism can equal some sanity and clarity.

Today's Greeks don't seem to struggle with these sort of questions.  For 
that matter, if we do this to Greek we'd have to ask some hard and 
unnatural questions about English, whose verbs can be tricky.  We can 
use past tense verbs in a future tense narrative in a future perfective 
or continuing sort of way, and I imagine I could come up with 
combinations of helping verbs to make tenses we don't even have 
technical words for, that would still be valid to a native speaker.  
Nevertheless, having that ability doesn't make us claim we don't have 
any ideas of tense in our verbs, it's just we have a huge degree of 
flexibility and subtlety in the sense in which we craft them.

On this note, let me share some relevant scholarship by Douglas Adams.  :-)
> The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to
> consult in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook
> of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe
> something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided
> it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will
> be described differently according to whether you are talking about it
> from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further
> future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the
> possibility of conducting conversations whilst you are actually travelling
> from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother
> or father.
>
> Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally
> Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and
> in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been
> left blank to save on printing costs.
>
> Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
> /
> /
Maybe it makes sense to recognize that there is a basic function of a 
verb that includes temporality, or not, as the case may be, but also to 
recognize that verbs can be used in ways that focus more on aspect, or 
even change the basic temporal function into a different one, or disable 
it, or invert it.  At some level it seems to be a metalanguage issue.   
Organic issues probably need organic ways of sorting themselves out. 
Perhaps it says something about the way scholars approach the question 
that it takes us 130 years to sort out a question that 4 year olds 
learned on their mother's knee.  But  I guess there's a cottage industry 
for having to come up with a Greek Unified Field theory, so everybody 
needs to build boxes that can be knocked over again.

////

Bless the Name
Curtis Hinson
http://curtishinson.com

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