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

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Feb 2 06:48:05 EST 2008


On Feb 1, 2008, at 11:15 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

> 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.

You are quite right about this: there's no temporal axis. On the other  
hand, I rather think that an endeavor to provide one would fail  
because of the difficulty of dating specific verses or blocks of text  
within the Homeric corpus. Certainly Aristarchus and Aristophanes of  
Byzantium obelized verses that they deemed interpolated or added to  
the text later, but there is an unavoidable subjectivity in this  
business of assigning portions of the corpus to one era or another. On  
the other hand, one can analyze the data, as I think Allan has done,  
and take note of where the different semantic categories fall within  
morphological types in the extant corpus as a whole. I think it's a  
safe assumption (others might not) that the -QH- forms are later- 
emergent than the simpler -H- forms. And as I noted, Allan goes on in  
later chapters to show how the -QH- forms extend over a wider range of  
semantic categories than they did in the Homeric corpus.

> 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 think he's speculating on factors that may have contributed to the  
development and expansion of the -QH- morphology -- on the basis of an  
assumption that it IS a later-emergent morphology.

You might try Suzanne Kemmer's _The Middle Voice_ (John Benjamins  
Publishing Company, 1993 -- from her 1988 dissertation. This is the  
one that underlies Allan's study and is really the impetus for work on  
middle and passive in the last two decades. But I found Kemmer's book  
much harder going than Allan's (perhaps because I can read Greek,  
whereas I can read only two or three others of the broad array of  
languages that Kemmer takes into account in her thorough study.

>
>
> 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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