[B-Greek] Vowel lengthening in contract verbs
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Tue Oct 28 09:05:41 EDT 2008
Ken egrapse
> When the final stem vowel in a contract vowel is lengthened
> in the future tesne, I can see how H is the lengthened e-class
> vowel for E and I can see how W is the lengthened o-class
> vowel for O. I'm having trouble seeing how H is the
> elngthened form of A. Any insights?
>
> Also, speaking of E to H in the future, why is it that KALEW
> does not do this, e.g., KALESOUSIN in Matt 1;23? Thanks.
The question is a good one for the history of the language.
Morphological irregularities usually preserve different histories
in the development of a language, which has happened in the
'contract' verbs. There are always 'reasons' for something to
happen in a language. But the most first and most important
rule to teach students is the one that every two-year-old
learns: "We do it like that, because that's the way they do it."
I will return to the morphology question below, I am not
trying to avoid it.
For learners of the language, it is important to realize that at the
end of the day every verb tense must be individually learned,
preferably through use in real communication.
'I will call, invite' is KALESW
'I will call' is FWNHSW
Of course, this happens with -a-, too.
'I will honor' is TIMHSW
'I will laugh' is GELASW
This touches on an issue of pedigogy. I am in my fourth decade
(still) of reading Greek and think that it is pedagogically damaging
to students to have them learn a language through roots and
rules like for the contract verbs. KALW and GELW are real words.
{*KALEW: KALE+W=KALW}
{*GELAW: GELA+W=GELW] are formulae.
(PS: I am fully aware that KALEW is good Ionic. If someone were
going to internalize Ionic then the following comments would not
apply to -e- verbs, but they would still apply to -a- and to all -o-
verbs. We probably don't want students saying KALHMI "Aeolic
KALW", which is a secondary Aeolicism.)
Formulae can be dangerous to a language user, especially if
applied every time someone wanted to say a sentence.
Formulae pull a language user 'out of the language' and into an
analytical mode, no matter how briefly, and this retards or blocks the
internalization process. Yes, this means that most students
of ancient Greek are 'damaged' in the process of learning the
language. I wish that I could say it ain't so. I know that after
thirty years I was damaged, even though I could spit out contractions
fairly fast, sometimes recalculating the accent position before the
sound hit the air.
So I wrote an article on the subject for the Danker festschrift,
"Biblical Greek Language and Lexicography". In language
learning the only known, proven, successful methodology is to
use real words. Real words. Real words. Please do not teach
students non-words. Real words need to get into our blood.
Having said the above, I also think that rules do need to be learned
by a student, including the contract verbs vowels. Is this some kind
of double speak?
These things are two different mental processes, learning the
language and learning the rules. They must be treated separately
or else a beginning student can be trapped into thinking thru
rules rather than with words. Enough preaching. I do it because I
care about the field, and sooner or later people do ask whether the
road they are travelling is a tunnel with a ceiling.
So back to your questions. Why KALESW, TELESW, GELASW?
In the history of the language many words had -S-, or -*D- or -*T-
at the end of their root. Sometimes, some of the forms of these
words will preserve and show this -S-.
P.X. (PARADIGMATOS XARIN, e.g.)
TETELESTAI 'it is finished'
shows the -S- before the perfect passive suffix. When those -S-
of the root met the -S- of the aorist and future systems, they
could preserve the short vowels, and then dropped out
themselves.
[There are also strange exceptions. I will leave it to you to figure
out why the aorist of XEW 'I pour' is EXEA 'I poured'. If you apply
the normal rule you will have a Greek audience snickering.
It's always good to know where the booby traps are in a
language.]
Other verbs also assimilated to this process, so it is not
necessarily true that any short vowel -ES/-AS in the future had
-S- in its proto-root.
Reference grammars (Smythe, Goodin, BDF) have introductory
comments on these things, and specific little puzzles sometimes
have articles in the literature. To this must be added some
knowledge of the history of some vowels and dialects, like the
shift of -A- to -H- in Attic/Ionic pre-Homeric dialects.
But the test for learning the language is still simple:
if I open my mouth, does the correct form come out?
If it comes out without thinking about the form at all,
then the form is internalized. The person has reached a significant
stage of fluency.
That should be the goal.
SLA differs on when and how to use rules for a student. One of the
biggest problems is that students usually get to use a modern
language at some points and the pedagogies are not tested in
their pure forms. Ancient Greek is scary because we can see the
result of some of the rule-first approaches.
It's been 130 years since Francois Gouin blew the whistle on our
field.
ERRWSO
IWANHS
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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