[B-Greek] recommendations on Greek verb books
Mitch Larramore
mitchlarramore at yahoo.com
Mon Apr 6 15:05:51 EDT 2009
Dr. Buth:
You wrote:
"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."
If the idea was to borrow the aspectual value of the Present (Imperfective aspect) Tense in a place where one would have expected an Aorist (Perfective aspect) Tense, why would the Greeks not have used the Imperfect (Imperfective aspect) Tense in order to retain the same temporal climate as the (historical/past time) context? They had an Imperfect Tense (Imperfective aspect) set of verbs readily available for use.
Mitch Larramore
Sugar Land, Texas
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