[B-Greek] recommendations on Greek verb books

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Mon Apr 6 11:20:55 EDT 2009


Baldwyn HRWTHSE
...
>and, if you would not recommend novices to read this book,
what would you recommend that would be [a] more accurate,
but also [b] comprehensible? [and, minorly [c], as affordable? :-)]
>

shalom Stephen,
(I had intended to put both your questions and Con Campbell's in the same email
but this has grown too long and I will try to get another email out before
PesaH (Wednesday night).

So I'd first recommend
Albert Rijksbaron, Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical
Greek, 3rd ed., U Chicago Press, 2002. It is paper (perfect bound) and
reasonably priced. I think that it is reasonably clear, too, because
his linguistics is solid. It may surprise a Greek student to hear
about 'state of affairs' as a near synonym for the semantic
description of what verbs do, they predicate 'states of affairs'. (He
defines this in a note on page 3.) But after a few repeated uses of
'state of affairs' a new reader should be fine. Like walking into the
water at the beach, the water may seem cold on touch, but quickly
becomes quite comfortable. (We have 86F beach water in Aug-Sept, which
is almost too hot. All y'all come, now.)

Rijksbaron's linguistics is up-to-date and fits normal linguistic
usage outside of Greek. He defines the aorist  as "completed
(confective value)", rather than taking the etymological meaning of
the name AORISTOS 'undefined'. I find that 'undefined' usually leads
students into mistaken extrapolations, so I approve Rijksbaron's
choice to adapt a modern linguistic terminology. He also says "while a
present-stem state of affairs can be broken off, an aorist state of
affairs denotes an indivisible whole." I think that the Greeks meant
'indivisible whole", 'simple', and 'without adding an extra
definition' when they chose AORISTOS. In a modern linguistic aspectual
world that simple aspect is called "perfective", the indivisible
whole.

On page 3 Rijksbaron has a useful little discussion on the 'lexical
meaning' of the verb where he describes internal semantic
characteristics to states of affairs and in a note mentions that this
is often called Aktionsart (he is correct), and refers to Lyons 1977
and Fanning 1990, chapter 3, for those wishing more discussion, as
well as sections 6.2.2 and 6.3.2 of Rijksbaron's own book. In fact it
is useful throughout Rijksbaron's book. At 7.3 in the sections on
'historic present', note 1, he points out that "the historic present
is only found with terminative (telic), not with stative (atelic)
verbs (cp. sec. 2). Thus, the present indicative of verbs like
βασιλευω, ειμι, εχω, οιδα, ρεω is never used as a historic present."
This is a profound observation that lines up with a claim and
counter-proof to the 'aspect-only/tense denying' people that I've made
several times on this list, and never with a direct refutation. The
historic present occurs in contexts that would otherwise expect an
aorist 'indivisible whole' aspect. In other words, the historic
present is a pragmatic playing with the aspectual value of the present
tense. It describes a state of affairs "as if" it were open-ended,
while in context it is in a series of events where it is an
'indivisible whole'. In literary terms, the historic present is a
rhetorical playing with aspect just as much as it is a rhetorical
playing with time. It is wrong for 'aspect-only' people to point to
the historic present, claim that it occurs in a past context and then
claim that the Greek present tense cannot logically have time in its
semantics. The same argument would require that the present tense
cannot have aspect. For example, I see that Rijksbaron quotes the
opening to Xenophon's Anabasis in 7.2. The first state of affairs 'two
children being born, coming into being' and the second state of
affairs 'summoning Cyrus' are both "present tense" but in no way was
an open-ended aspect chosen as a clearer or better communication of
events to the reader. Ditto for all the nine historic presents here.
We have discussed this on list previously. Proper marking of aspect
was not the reason for the verb choice, it was exactly the opposite.
The reader assumes that both were 'indivisible whole' for the purpose
of this paragraph and narrative. These events ended up interpreted as
a sequence of indivisible wholes in the past. The choice of the
historic present plays with the aspect and plays with the time in
order to get the attention of the audience. This is what I meant by
saying in a thread last week that people need to wrap their head
around this if we are going to have a fruitful discussion on the Greek
verb.

So by all means, get Rijksbaron.

My second recommendation may surprise you. K. L. McKay's A New Syntax
of the Verb in New Testament Greek, An Aspectual Approach, Lang 1994.
It is paper and reasonably inexpensive. It is also clear enough to be
valuable to a student, as long as the student realizes that there may
be an occasional overgeneralization or mistake because of McKay's
trying to distance himself from 'time'.

But his table on 1.8.2 is excellent and talks about the
interrelatonship of tense-aspect-mood. He uses tense in the indicative
rows, correctly in my view. Aspect is at the top of the columns,
correctly in my view. In fact, the verb tables in Living Koine Greek
would mesh with McKay's almost 100%. We have juxtaposed columns for
imperfective (called PARATATIKH in Living Koine Greek) and perfect
(PARAKEIMENOS) aspects, because both only have two morphological
voices and both are directly usuable in real present situations. We
then juxtapose columns for aorist (AORISTOS) and future (MELLWN)
because both have three morphological voices, both have severe
limitations for use in an actual present situation, and both default
to an 'indivisible whole' aspect.

McKay also says, "I have therefore defined tense as belonging only to
the indicative mood and have introduced imperfective as a term to
cover the present and imperfect tenses and the moods." (preface) It
doesn't get much better than that, which is exactly what Living Koine
Greek has done by referring to EBLEPE as PARATATIKOS XRONOS and
BLEPEIN as PARATATIKON APAREMFATON ('extending infinitive) and both as
PARATATIKOS OPSIS (extending viewpoint), with OPSIS being a neologism
for KOINH Greek and replacing Dionysios Thrax's too-vague SYNGENIA
'family'. (Dionysios, of course, understood that BLEPEIN and EBLEPE
were semantically related and not by time. He just didn't put a name
on it that can be usefully used today.)

However, McKay has some occasional mistakes that require a cautionary
word to be given to students. At the beginning of the section on
historic present he says, "In narrative relating to past events the
present is sometimes found instead of the imperfect, or even the
aorist, tense." At the end of the section McKay writes, "Of course,
all these presents are in place of normal imperfects." At least McKay
is treating the present indicative as a present tense. However, it is
not clear that they are in place of the imperfect tense. Even McKay
admitted that they sometimes seem in place of an aorist. Consider what
would happen if the above quote from Xenophon was re-written without
the historic present. The direct mapping to the semantic states of
affairs would have been the aorist indicative, not the imperfect. The
children were not 'being born' (process) they were born 'indivisible
whole', Cyrus was summoned 'indivisible whole', etc. Now that does not
mean the the opening of Xenophon could not have been re-written with
imperfect indicatives. It could have. But if so, those imperfects
would not have been chosen in order to semantically position an
incomplete, divisible event in the story, but to pragmatically demote
and background events that were otherwise complete within the
narration of the story. McKay, by the way, recognises this
'backgrounding' use of the imperfect. 4.3 "It is commonly used when an
activity is presented as the background." That part is good. Even the
section on the imperfect being used with present time reference,
4.3.6, is good because of the unreality of the examples "excluded
potential statements and questions, unreal conditional protases, and
excluded wishes." That is hardly the stuff for throwing time out of
the language paradigm (and McKay doesn't actually throw out time, as
mentioned). In fact, those same examples can be done in English and
would make English a time-less language if 'aspect-only' logic were
followed. (I think that anyone reading this list would feel that
things have gone too far if someone were allowed to claim that English
was without time because of such examples 'cancelling' the time
meaning. That is how Greeks feel when they hear of this aspect-only
circle of NT people, and how I suspect Dionysios would feel, since he
specifically used XRONOS in his presentation of the verb.)

McKay has another category of imperfect for the present, but admits
that it has no certain NT example. If the student starts with
Rijksbaron they will already have seen a 'imperfect of modal verbs'
category (Rijksbaron 8.1) used in present situations with special
pragmatics.

So for studying about what the Greek verb can and cannot do, I would
recommend Rijksbaron and McKay. For practicing the internalization of
this, Living Koine Greek would help, but the extensive, pervasive
audio makes it expensive in comparison to grammar-translation texts.
But maybe necessary for those committed to really learn/inernalize
this stuff.
And Goodwin, Smyth, Robertson, and BDF are all useful as long as
allowance is made for terminological differences.

PS: We run into a similar problem in Hebrew. Our third volume
"Selected Readings" has a chapter called 'Short Syntax of the Hebrew
Verb'. It is specifically designed to help students after they start
trying to understand confusing and contradictory descriptions in other
pedagogies and some reference works. It points out how even the binary
verbal morphologization of Hebrew is sensitive to time (e.g. you can
say maHar avo, maHar ani ba, uvati maHar, but you apparently can't say
maHar bati "tomorrow I came", contrary to 'aspect-only' Hebraists.) It
also distinguishes the semantics that the language communicates and
the situation in which the semantics are used." Thus, volitionals
(modals) and futures often overlap in many situations often serviced
by modals in other languages. Distinguishing all of the different
modal situations is not what the Hebrew verb does, but it is what
translators into other languages may want to do. In any case, we had
to write up the Short Syntax of the Hebrew Verb because we didn't have
something as helpful as Rijksbaron and McKay available.

ERRWSO
Randall

-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life



More information about the B-Greek mailing list