[B-Greek] Verb Stems and Liquid verbs
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Sat Apr 28 09:04:03 EDT 2007
Delbert egrapse
>
1. I'm under the impression that the 'stem' of a verb is what carries its
basic meaning. ARCW and ARCOMAI have different meanings due to the Active or
Middle form. How does the meaning of the verb change when it retains the
same stem?
How does Voice affect meaning of a stem?
>
> 2. With liquid verbs, the Aorist Active tense formative is A, not SA. My
tutor says this is incorrect. Mounce uses the liquid verb MENW and gives the
Aorist Active as EMEINA, which demonstrates the formative is A not SA. But
my tutor says that the S is seen in the I added to the stem, called
compensatory lengthening. The S actually drops out when it touches the N,
and to show the dropping of the S, the stem changes from E to EI. Is this
right and is this important to distinguish?
>
You and they are all correct.
Your teacher is teaching you the history of the language, etymology
and historical morphology. This can sometimes be comforting, if a
student learns that there is always some kind of historical reason for
what might appear to be 'stupid irregularities'. On the other hand,
philosophically, I would have a difficult time justifying the teaching
of a language (like English, or any other) through the means of
etymology. Does an English speaker/reader need to know where the past
tense of 'go' ('went') comes from? Or to know how "know" developed out
of something related to GINWSKW? What is of primary importance to to
control these words without thinking.
Hopefully, your teacher will have enough respect of WHD Rouse
(co-founder of Loeb classical Library) to rapidly speak these words
with you so that you can't mentally process all of these historical
developments while using the language. Until they become second
nature.
Back to etymology, stems like MEN + SA became MEIN+A, as your teacher said.
However, we also have APOKTEINW 'I kill' and APEKTEINA (theoretically
from a stem with -KTEN-) that can produce homonyms like
APEKTEINE 'he was killing' (Imperfect)
and APEKTEINE 'he killed' (Aorist).
If one were to look at the first person you would have
APEKTEINON I was killing
and APEKTEINA 'I killed'.
Surely it is the "A" that is the synchronic signal of the aorist.
Synchronic, means what users of the language would have heard. When we
find phenomena parallel to this in modern languages we regularly
discover that the language users are unaware of the theorectical
history of word. The history is no longer real or active or
contributing meaning for these people.
I believe that at least one dialect of a language needs to be learned
"synchronically", as it were, to a level of fluency where words and
forms become second nature. Then a "differential morphology" and
historical etymology can be taught in order to help in recognising
related forms and words.
In our own classes we refer to words like FILW~ 'I love' FILHSAI 'to
love, kiss' FILEI~N 'to be loving' and TIMW~ 'I fear' TIMA~N 'to be
fearing'. As a principle, a person learning a language should always
speak, hear, and use real words. If the student speaks and uses
artificial stems, they will forever tie themselves into knots where
they mentally generate correct forms through "rules" rather than
produce a word directly. This can prevent a language from properly
internalizing.
O EXWN WTA AKOUEIN -- AKOUETW.
ERRWSQE
Randall
--
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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