[B-Greek] Aorist and Imperfect: points of consensus
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Fri Sep 22 20:09:02 EDT 2006
Yes, there are some major differences.
Rolf egrapse
>1) ...Tense and
aspect are two completely different entities, but they can in many cases
produce the same patterns. >
Tense and aspect are distinct entities, agreed, but 'produce the same
patterns'? I disagree.
>2) ... How can we account for the real use of verbs in the Hebrew
Bible if Hebrew has
just two conjugations ("tenses") and not four, as is universally believed?>
This isn't a faith proposition. There were four. Your question sounds
like "How will we do math where 2+2=3".
>List-members may disagree with my description of Hebrew
aspects, >
Good. I do disagree.
>... The claim regarding [aorist indicative]+AURION,
therefore, is a nonstarter. We cannot take one adverbial or another word and
say that if an aorist is not found together with this word, aorist is past
tense. If this combination is not found, it need not have any bearing on
tense, it simply can be a matter of linguistic convention. Perhaps, no
native speaker would find it naturally to use such a combination. >
Thank you for explicitly dealing with this challenge.
Linguistically, your answer needs to be labelled "ad hoc". You have
added a rule ("It just doesn't occur") to cover the data. [It doesn't
cover the data. see below.] But it does not relate to the grammar in
any way whatsover. [in linguistics 'ad hoc' is a synonym for
incorrect and unacceptable.]
AURION 'tomorrow' is not just another adverb but a word with a strong
temporal definition. And quite common. It meets your expectation of a
how a pure-aspect language would work: adverbs can mark time and verbs
mark aspect.
so here is a time adverb, but the verbs do not all come out and mark
the aspects, as predicted. the aorist does not come out to mark
aspect. whenver AURION is there to refer to 'tomorrow' an aorist
indicative is not found. That is a mis-prediction of a pure-aspect
theory. My theory predicts and explains why this doesn't occur.
Even more amazing, the same thing appears to be true of Hebrew. 52
times maHar occurs in the Hebrew Bible and there is no qatal AND no
vayyiqtol used in its clause/predication. An accident in Greek AND and
accident in a totally unrelated language?
Finally, your ad hoc answer is incorrect. the actual word AURION
'morrow/next day' does occur with the aorist indicative. There was no
lexical repugnance of the combination aorist + AURION per se. It
occurs where AURION is in a past context, when AURION does NOT refer
to 'tomorrow', the day after 'now', but refers to a past day, 'the
morrow after a day in the past'. Typically these "non-tomorrow" AURION
have an article: EPI THN AURION 'the following day' Acts 4:5. In the
LXX they correspond to moHorat 'the morrow'. Ex 32:30 META THN AURION
"after the next day".
The asterisked line still holds: *aorist indicative+AURION 'tomorrow'
does not seem to occur.
[[and Hebrew is tighter on this, because it distinguishes two adverbs,
MoHorat 'the following day' from maHar "tomorrow, the following day
from 'now'".]]
So neither Greek nor Hebrew allow the candidates for 'past tense'
(aorist, qatal, vayyiqtol) to occur with a word referring to
'tomorrow'.
ERRWSO
Randall Buth
----- Original Message -----
From: "Randall Buth" <randallbuth at gmail.com>
To: "B-Greek at Lists. Org" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 8:39 AM
Subject: [B-Greek] Aorist and Imperfect: points of consensus
> I'll add a quesiton to the list.
> How does a theory explain both what is attested and what is not
> attested in ancient Greek? What do theories of aspect and tense in
> ancient Greek have to say about attestation patterns. How do they
> theorectically "predict" or "produce" such patterns?
>
> Summary:
> There was discussion on this issue, with some people claiming that
> such a question was illegitimate for an ancient language while others
> claimed that checking a theory against multi-million word databases is
> no different than doing the same thing with a modern language.
> (Multi-million word databases do exist for ancient Greek, though not
> for Ugaritic.)
> In any case, modern linguistics has a consensus on the legitimacy of
> the question for testing any theoretical linguistic claim. And the
> b-greek discussion did apply this to ancient Greek with the specific
> question of how to explain the non-occurrence (or extreme rare
> occurrence if found) of *[aorist indicative]+AURION in the same
> clause. PS: this also holds true for the imperfect indicative.
> *[imperfect ind.]+AURION in the same clause.
> Claims differed. Some argued that this was evidence of tense being
> included within the Greek aorist indicative. One proposal used a term
> 'remoteness' as an explanation, without explaning why "remote" items
> were blocked by AURION 'tomorrow' without being blocked by eXQES
> 'yesterday.
>
> Some explanation:
> A good theory cannot just "explain" a limited corpus, it must somehow
> constrain itself so that it would not also "accept" something
> unacceptable (that is, that it would not include something within the
> "explanation" as acceptable that was not acceptable). In modern
> linguistics this is known as an overpowerful theory, a theory that
> predicts things that are unacceptable. For example, to say that any
> verb can be used with any verbal morphological process would
> overpredict in English. *I goed to the store is not acceptable. the
> theory needs constraint. Discussing and including the constraint
> within the theory is mandatory for a good theory.
>
> Caveat: the above was written by one of the participants of the
> discussion.
>
> 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
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo
--
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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