[B-Greek] Fwd: Imperfect and Aorist Tense-Aspects
Barry
nebarry at verizon.net
Sat Sep 16 07:50:39 EDT 2006
> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org]
> On Behalf Of Curtis Hinson
> Sent: Saturday, September 16, 2006 1:34 AM
> To: B Greek
> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Fwd: Imperfect and Aorist Tense-Aspects
>
> 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. :-)
Excellent!
> 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.
Thanks, Curtis, for a bit of perspective on this question. Really, I think lexical semantics helps us out a bit here. Grammatical forms have range of usage much as lexical items have a range of usage. Now, language is not simply mathematical formula -- it gets generated by living speakers and writers, who sometimes push the envelope, so to speak, and surprise us. At times we look at a particular form in context, and from our understanding of the language, founded on grammars based on a limited number of texts and informed by our own reading of a limited number of texts, and wonder just what in Gehenna is going on. It is very instructive, I think, to begin applying the same sort of analysis to a modern spoken language. Do people speaking English as their first language, or even knowing it well as a second language, really worry about tense and aspect? No, they simply learn the language. I think much of this discussion results from the dedicated defense of dearly held theories...
I reminded of a story:
A young man had grown up in the church, and as far back as he could remember, wanted to become a minister. To that end he took all the right courses in college (avoiding math and science like the plague and taking all sorts of language, history and philosophy), and subsequently attended a seminary noted for its scholarship. As he pursued his course of study, he began to fall in love with scholarship itself, but still felt strongly drawn to working in the church. His professors encouraged him to go beyond his first theological degree, but the churches where he served as an intern loved his preaching and his gentle ministry. In other words, he couldn't decide between publish or parish...
N.E. Barry Hofstetter
Adjunct Faculty & IT Support
The Center for Urban Theological Studies
http://www.cuts.edu
Classics Instructor, The American Academy
http://www.theamericanacademy.net
And my site:
http://mysite.verizon.net/nebarry
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