[B-Greek] H vs. QH passives in Homer
Elizabeth Kline
kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Fri Feb 1 23:15:25 EST 2008
Thank you Carl,
Your comments about the diachronic aspect of the problem are well
taken. R.Allen, G.Cooper (52.6-0-3,2.52.1) and Monro (pages 44-45)
all make a point of mentioning the chronological aspect of the -HN-
and -QHN- aorists in Homer. However when R.Allen[1] in chapter three
develops his semantic maps of the -HN- and -QHN- aorists it isn't
clear to me how he has incorporated the diachronic dimension into the
maps. It seems like everyone agrees that the Homeric texts
demonstrate language features that span a considerable time but when
Allan gets down to making statements about the meaning of of his 100
sample -HN- and -QHN- aorists I don't see any temporal axis in his
semantic mapping.
I must admit that chapter three is really hard to understand. I
cannot figure out what Allan is trying to accomplish in this chapter.
Chapters one and two were clear sailing and now he seems to have
broken his compass. He breaks down his 100 sample -HN- and -QHN-
aorists according to the consonant vowel patterns (??) in the verb
stem. What does that have to do with the semantic mapping of the -HN-
and -QHN- aorists?
I will take a fresh look at this chapter tomorrow.
Thanks again for your help with this.
Elizabeth Kline
[1] Rutger Allan, "Middle Voice in Ancient Greek: A Study of
Polysemy" Amesterdam 2003.
On Feb 1, 2008, at 5:16 PM, Carl Conrad wrote:
>
> 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 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 if 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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