[B-Greek] Fwd: Aorist Indicative Example
Rolf Furuli
furuli at online.no
Tue Nov 4 00:19:59 EST 2008
Dear Randall,
In two different posts you wrote:
>
>
>RB:
>
>
>btw, some people [which includes everyone I know who
>communicates in Greek] think that Porter's position on time
>vis-a-vis aspect is simply wrong. Greek is one of the most
>aspectually sensitive languages in the world. NAI. And contact
>with Hebrew in the Second Temple period caused
>post-biblical Hebrew to expand its use of aspectual structures
>like 'be + participle'. But time was included in the verb systems of
>both Greek and Hebrew.
>
Spacial reference in the
augment does not exclude time because its relatively universal
(if not completely) that time is always expressed through spacial metaphor.
RF:
What do you mean when you say that *time* is relatively universal or
completely universal, and that *time* is included in the verb systems
of both Greek and Hebrew? Is your "time" the same as "tense"
(grammaticalized location in time)?
All peoples, past and present, have had a consciousness of past,
present, and future time, and this is expressed in different ways in
the verb systems of their languages. But time is not grammaticalized
in all languages. I have written a dissertation on the basis of an
analysis of the 80.000 finite and infinite verbs of classical Hebrew,
where I differentiating between semantics and pragmatics (is the
particular time caused by the context or is it an intrinsic part of
the verb form), and the conclusion is that tenses are non-existent in
the Hebrew verb system. I would also say that tense is not an
intrinsic factor of the Greek aorist.
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli Ph.D
University of Oslo
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