[B-Greek] Imperfect and Aorist Tense-Aspects-explaining the pattern on the imperfect side

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Fri Sep 22 04:49:33 EDT 2006


In trying to explain the lack of *HLQEN AURION, Con suggested
"remoteness", though without an non-temporal (i.e., pure-aspectual)
explanation of why EXQES was acceptable and AURION not. He also
suggested that the "aorist" nature of the Future made *HLQEN AURION
unnecessary. I pointed out that if so, the temporal nature of the
FUTURE would temporally restrain other members in a closed set, that
is, that the aorist indicative would thereby pick up within itself a
temporal meaning anyway. (without claiming/accepting that the future
was uniquely aoristic)

There is a more direct though not necessarily easier-to-grasp disproof
of the aspectual explanation.
Both *HLQEN AURION and *HRXETO AURION need to be constrained. An
aoristic Future does not explain the lack of *HRXETO AURION when
referring aspectually to a future situation "he will be coming
tomorrow". A perfective FUTURE would not explain how it blocks an
imperfective from occurring with AURION.

However, the imperfect might be expected to be found in the specific
situation of someone intending to do something in the past that had
relevance to tomorrow. "He was intending to come tomorrow." Note well:
This English example does not have the imperfect in the same clause as
'tomorrow'. Tomorrow (=AURION) is an immediate member of the
infinitive clause/predicate-frame 'come', not 'intend'.
However, I can conceive of saying in Greek
?HRXETO AURION or ?EPOIEN AURION ?ETELEIOU AURION
where the intent of coming or doing or completing was true in the past
and the intention referred to AURION. Someone with a TLG might find
such an example(s). Help?!

By the way, how many AURION are attested in the TLG corpus? Rolf? Carl?
Whatever number it is, it will be one difference between modern
language corpora and ancient. Modern corpora can grow at will, as soon
as someone lists and records more material. The ancient corpus of
Greek grows slowly. (But it does grow. Every new inscription and
papyri adds to the corpus. We shouldn't list Harry Potter in ancient
Greek with that corpus but I'll bet the translator learned a ton about
ancient Greek while producing it.)

ERRWSQE
Randall Buth
-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com


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