[B-Greek] atelic histrocal present

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Fri Apr 10 03:37:01 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

But I am not claiming that it is iimpossible for a historic present to
naturally encode to an imperfective, only that that is the norm. I do
not know of my own knowledge that a story could not begin
HN DE LEPROS 'there was a leper' . . .
or that a historic present might be used
ESTIN DE LEPROS.
Rijksbaron does make that claim, which needs checking out and
which would only strengthen my own claim. i.e., that the
historic present is a rhetorical device of a semantic marker, that
it uses its semantic marking against the grain for rhetorical
effect and therefore is ABUSED by the aspect only people when
they claim that they have no problem whatsoever with an
no-time whatesoever aspect theory. If Rijksbaron is correct, then
the historic present is used in cases where both the time and aspect
are being used rhetorically/pragmatically. If not, then at least the
majority of cases is a pragmatic play on the aspect and tense, with
the remaining cases only a play on the tense. In either case, the
aspect-only/no-tiime people are pulling the wool over
students eyes', maybe their own, too. They make students
feel guilty/unsupported by claiming that 30% of Mark's presents
negate a tense theory but 100% fit an aspect theory. In Hebrew
we say פויה, whichmight be etymological calque with
Greek "φευ!", don't know.

Randall Buth
-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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