[B-Greek] Questions about NT verbal aspect
CTCE
jfs at ctce.cn
Wed Jan 17 18:24:09 EST 2007
I wish to make a general comment on this subject. When I first became aware
of Dr. Porter's idea of grammatically encoding aspect into Greek, I thought
it was the cat's meow. But after I read a piece from Plato that Dr. Conrad
put up indicating that the Greeks in the classical period recognized
tenseness in their verbs, I began to question the aspect theory. After I
became a wee bit more comfortable with Koine Greek, I became even more wary
of aspect as defining what the Greek verb was doing. My biggest hang-up is
with the idea that a major grammatical encoding, verbal aspect, was done
thru a very clumsy and awkward schema, tense endings; while a secondary
encoding, background, frontground, and foreground was presented in a
straight forward and easy manner, the primary, secondary, and future
endings.
I then in my own mind worked out how the verbal system worked, then looked
up how it was described in Burton's moods and tenses (on the internet). Lo
and behold, it was very similar. I do not write that to describe how clever
I am, I am a rather simple minded fellow myself; but rather to describe how
straight forward and simple the Greek verbal system is, that even a simple
minded fellow as myself can decipher the system.
And what is that system. Moving from the voice system (btw, in my mind all
passive constructions imply a middle voice); the main encoding is through
the primary, secondary and future endings. The primary endings indicate
"on-goingness" in one of two forms, either a stative or imperfective form.
It is not the aspect that is important, it is the "on-goingness" that is
important. (It appears to me that the Greek perfect is usually translated
into the English form in either -ing or -en; i.e., standing, written, etc.).
The secondary forms indicate an "existenceness", in either a perfective,
imperfective, or stative form. The Aorist indicates that it exists, the
imperfect that it is beginning with a presumed "on-goingness", and the
pluperfect indicates that it is terminating, presumably from an
"on-goingness". The future endings indicate the futureness in either a
perfective, imperfective, or stative mode. In the future, the perfective
and the imperfective are not even differentiated, one needs to determine
that aspect from context.
I do not wish to belabor the issue, but I personally think that those "old
guys" knew what they were writing about, and that what we now have is just
an intellectual fad.
John Sanders
Suzhou, China
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