[B-Greek] Can the Imperfect not be Continuous?

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Mon Dec 13 20:35:13 EST 2010


Mounce is great--he's greater than great--but there is a real irony to what he 
writes in this blog.  He says you have to regularly review your grammar--your 
Wallace and others--or else you might forget that ελεγε (ELEGE) is not a 
continuous imperfect.  But if you never learned any grammar in the first place, 
if, that is, you learned a language the way 99% of all humans have ever learned 
a language, you would not even know what an imperfect is.  You would just read 
or hear or say ελεγε and you would get an intuitive feel that it pretty much 
means the same thing as ειπε and you would move on to the next word without even 
thinking about it and you would not have the problem that Mounce raises.  
Sometimes I think that the Zondervan School of Biblical Greek is like B.P.  They 
only clean up messes that they themselves make.

I'm not knocking Mounce or Wallace or grammar or linguistics. I'm not telling  
anybody how to learn Greek. I know that I have made this point ἕως βδελυγμίας. 
(hEWS BDELUGMIAS.)  But does anyone beside me see the irony here?  


 Mark L



FWSFOROS MARKOS




________________________________
From: cwconrad2 <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
To: B-Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Mon, December 13, 2010 2:52:51 PM
Subject: [B-Greek] Can the Imperfect not be Continuous?

The Mounce Monday blog item might be of interest to some -- the one with the 
above title.


http://www.koinoniablog.net/2010/12/monday-with-mounce.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FpQHu+%28Koinonia%29


= http://tinyurl.com/2dwv9bp

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (ret)

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