[B-Greek] H vs. QH passives in Homer

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Fri Feb 1 20:16:07 EST 2008


On Feb 1, 2008, at 4:19 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

> I found the first two chapters of R.Allan [1] good reading. Allan
> seemed to be drawing together functionalism and cognitive semantics
> in manner that demonstrated he had internalized the principles from
> these frameworks and wasn't just borrowing ideas from them in a
> haphazard manner. Chapter three however seems to be venturing into
> dubious territory. Allan attempts to establish a distinctive semantic
> maps based on morpological patterns like the H and QH passives in
> Homer. The H and QH semantic maps have a high percentage of overlap
> but the specific semantic category Body Motion appears to be absent
> in the H passives. I don't have the necessary expertise to critique
> Allan's work in chapter three but I am wondering about validity of
> this project. What would we say of someone tried to draw a semantic
> map of the first, second and third declension? How does this differ
> in principle from what Allen is doing with H vs. QH.
>
> I noted that Monro (Homeric Grammar 2nd ed. 1891) suggested that
> there might be some semantic significance to the H vs. QH passives.

I had been intending to think some more about this, but I'll go ahead  
and give some expression to my initial thoughts in response. Two or  
three (or more) considerations bear upon these questions:

(1) The -H- forms are older and hardly (if at all) to be distinguished  
from athematic ACTIVE second aorists like ESTHN/ESTHS/ESTH, while the - 
QH- forms appear to be (relatively) more recently emergent forms that  
eventually supplant the -H- forms in all except the most common  
everyday verbs that retain their archaic forms the longest. Many verbs  
have both -H- and -QH- forms with questionable differentiation in  
meaning (and we know too that the -QH- forms later, in the Hellenistic  
era, supplant even the older aorist middles in -MHN/SO/TO (e.g.  
APEKRIQHN for APEKRINAMHN).
(2) The GNT as a corpus of Hellenistic Greek texts evidently has a  
range of compositional dates from roughly the middle of the first  
century CE to roughly the middle of the second century CE and displays  
a broad range of concurrent older and younger morphologies and  
syntactic patterns. One ought to envision the Homeric corpus as  
spanning a considerably greater chronological range of composition for  
its parts; I think it is safe to say that there is no more uniformity  
of morphologies, syntactic patterns, and lexical semantics in the  
Homeric corpus than there is in the GNT -- perhaps even considerably  
less uniformity in the Homeric corpus than in the GNT. For that reason  
I would expect to see a fair amount of evidence of linguistic  
evolution within the Homeric corpus, e.g. old second declension  
genitive singulars in -OIO as well as newer second declension genitive  
singulars in -OU, older first declension masculine genitive singulars  
in -AO and newer first declension masculine genitive singulars in -EW  
(PHLOPIDEW).
(3) One of the neater features of Allan's thorough discussion of  
Homeric and Classical evidence regarding middle-passives is its  
diachronic treatment; in chapters subsequent to the third he will go  
on and describe the further expansion of semantic categories in the - 
QH- aorists. What would be a splendid supplement to Allan's work, in  
my judgment, is a few more chapters dealing with the further  
developments of the -QH- forms (at the expense of older -MHN/SO/TO  
forms) in the Hellenistic era, e.g. the growing usage of EGENHQHN even  
as the usage of EGENOMHN still remains current.

At any rate, it seems to me that the question raised at the end of the  
opening paragraph above implies an expectation that Homeric language  
is essentially homogeneous and intelligible in synchronic terms.


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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