[B-Greek] Thread closed: Are there any aspect only language?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Sep 20 12:16:21 EDT 2006
It seems to me that this discussion has become so tangential as to
have abandoned any real relevance to the question of aspect in the
Greek verb.
On the other hand, the thread, "Re: [B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist
Tense-Aspects," still seemed at break of day today to have life yet
in it. I think it has been one of the more useful discussions of
aspect in the Greek verb ever "aired" in this list; a variety of
perspectives have been set forth -- and there's even been -- to some
extent, at any rate -- a bit of consensus on some matters pertaining
to the subject.
On Sep 20, 2006, at 12:08 PM, Curtis Hinson wrote:
> Yes, but nobody said that anybody functions without reference to
> time. :-)
>
> My point is, cultures think and deal with time differently and that
> there's nothing counter-intuitive about that. Each to his own. It's
> only counter-intuitive as non-natives are superimposing their foreign
> values on the language and culture.
>
> Bless the Name
> Curtis Hinson
> http://curtishinson.com
>
> P.S. I mistyped "common", whoops.
>
> George F Somsel wrote the following on 9/20/2006 11:02 AM:
>> That Chinese doesn't include any time reference in the verb itself
>> does not thereby necessarily indicate that time is an afterthought --
>> it is simply expressed differently (by your adverbs and particles).
>> While I don't know Chinese, I doubt that they would carry on their
>> daily lives without reference to time. This applies to all cultures
>> whether prior to the mechanical clock or not. It is one thing to say
>> that the verb has no temporal component and another to say that a
>> culture functions without reference to time.
>>
>> george
>> gfsomsel
>> _________
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Curtis Hinson <curtis at curtishinson.com>
>> To: Mitch Larramore <mitchlarramore at yahoo.com>; B Greek
>> <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 11:50:02 AM
>> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Are there any aspect only language?
>>
>> Your thought doesn't hold up anthropologically speaking. Westerners
>> especially after the invention of the mechanical clock think in
>> terms of
>> linear precise time, but that doesn't mean everyone does.
>>
>> Time is experienced and thought of differently by differently
>> cultures.
>> No language is counter-intuitive to its natives anymore than a
>> culture
>> is counter-intuitive to its members. The idea of intuition/"commen
>> sense" itself, I'd gather, only works within the context of a
>> culture,
>> so the statement is a meaningless one.
>>
>> In Chinese there is literally no tense: a verb is one word, one form,
>> one pronunciation, one character, every time, everywhere. What time
>> sense is there is added with adverbs or particles but those are not
>> inherent to the verb in any way. In other words, time is an
>> afterthought in Chinese, and aspect. Some other eastern languages
>> share
>> similar features although I'm most familiar with PuTongHua and
>> GuangDongHua.
>>
>> Bless the Name
>> Curtis Hinson
>> http://curtishinson.com <http://curtishinson.com/>
>>
>> Mitch Larramore wrote the following on 9/20/2006 7:22 AM:
>>> It seems to me that if there were one, it would end up
>>> like Porter's view of Koine Greek where one tense is
>>> almost always used for past, one almost always used
>>> for future, and one almost always used for the
>>> present. It would appear that that is one of the
>>> constraints we as humans have: we think in terms of
>>> time. How could some group of people put a language
>>> together that is counter-intuitive, especially one the
>>> size of Greek? (And if Greek had no tense, I think the
>>> Romans would have insisted upon Latin being the lingua
>>> franca, and if not, the people would have gravitated
>>> toward a tensed language.)
>>>
>>> Mitch Larramore
>>> Sugar Land, Texas
>>>
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>>
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Carl W. Conrad
Co-Chair, B-Greek List
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu or cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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