[B-Greek] atelic histrocal present

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Fri Apr 10 01:38:22 EDT 2009


On Apr 9, 2009, at 12:38 PM, Randall Buth wrote:

> What I do know
> is that the historic presents occur in sequences that are typically  
> sequential and
> would have most simply been encoded as aorist, like "X comes and  
> did" where
> the coming had to be complete in order to do the 'did'.

This is why I was tempted to say the proposition looks a little bit  
like a tautology, the pattern required by the definition seems to rule  
out atelic verbs by definition. Look at the following example:

MATT. 3:9 KAI MH DOXHTE LEGEIN EN hEAUTOIS: PATERA ECOMEN TON ABRAAM.  
LEGW GAR hUMIN hOTI DUNATAI hO QEOS EK TWN LIQWN TOUTWN EGEIRAI TEKNA  
TWi ABRAAM.

Here we have to several present tense indicatives, LEGW which is  
telic, ECOMEN which is atelic but not historic, DUNATAI which is  
atelic but not historic.

Elizabeth Kline







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