[B-Greek] Ancient Greek Voice Forms
Michael Aubrey
mga318 at yahoo.com
Sat Apr 16 13:48:55 EDT 2011
>> Would you please repeat your reply to Mark in English? :)))))) or should I say
>> in Greek? :)))))
I can try, but I can't make any promises...this is a difficult subject to discuss without a technical vocabulary.
>> Active usually has the Subject performing the action, while Passive usually has
>> the Subject receiving the action. I take "Subject Affectiveness" to mean that
>> the "focus is on the subject's relationship to the action or state of the verb.
That's a decent paraphrase of what I said.
>> It seems that the Middle is some what like the Action and Passive voices
>> involved together. If Carl is correct in the history of the language, then the
>> Passive was later separated from the Middle-Passive to reflect the receiving of
>> the action upon the Subject.
Yes and no. We need to be careful here in what we mean by "passive." There is no unique passive voice. The -QH forms were never limited to merely passive meaning even as early as Homer. Allan demonstrates that in Homer, the central uses of the -QH were the canonical passive (the demoting of the Subject to a by-phrase and promoting of the object to the subject position) and the spontaneous process/event middle. But it was already spreading to body motion middles and mental process middles. It needs to be emphasized here that the canonical passive *function* is a subset of middle usage: the promoting of the affected object to the subject position could be considered subject affectedness par excellence. That is to say: there is no *morphologically marked* passive voice for Classical or Koine Greek.
>> This created a situation in which there was less
>> use of the Middle to reflect a "reflexive" or other uses than in previous
>> generations of the language. This is especially true of Koine since it was in a
>> state of flux during the main period of the use, 200 BC-200 AD. The Byzantine
>> Period would reflect the development of the changes from Classical and Koine.
This is historically wrong. At no point in time was reflexivity a prominent use of the middle. Albert Rijksbaron's The Syntax and Semantics of the Greek Verb is a useful starting point for this and Allan's book on middle voice makes this superbly clear (dissertation version here: http://dare.uva.nl/en/record/108528).
>> It seems to me that English, especially in the US, has gone the same way in
>> reflecting the predominance of Action Verbs over against Passive Verbs. We could
>> also add the demise of the 2nd Person Pronouns, Thee/Thou/Thy/Thine, into the
>> mix. Thus, the Middle Voice, even in English, is really only used with the
>> addition of the suffix, "-self" and its plurals form, "-selves."
English has no middle voice. The English -self is not middle. It's reflexive. Middles and reflexives are not the same thing. The closest English get to the middle voice is not the reflexive -self, but certain constructions like: John closed the door vs. The door closed. Or: Henry frightened Silvia vs. Silvia frightens easily. The latter in each case is the closest we can get in English to the middle voice (cf. Pullum & Huddleston, Cambridge Grammar of the English Language[Cambridge, 2002], 307-8).
At this point, I should emphasize that Greek and English have two opposed and completely different types of voice systems. English has a Active-Passive system. It's derivational: the passive is derived syntactically and morphologically from the active voice. Greek does not have such a system and cannot be equate to such a system. Greek has an "Active"-Middle System, where both "voices" are basic. Neither can be derived from the other. Klaiman's Grammatical Voice(Cambridge, 1991) gives an extremely useful discussion of this point.
The problem is that the term "voice" is used for a variety of grammatical systems in a variety of languages. If you look at what's called voice in a language like English, compared to voice in a language like Greek, compared to a language like Tagalog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagalog_grammar#Trigger_.28voice_.2F_focus.29), compared to a language like Ojibwe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct%E2%80%93inverse_language), compared to a language like Dyirbal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipassive_voice), you'll find that voice is a relatively useless term as soon as more than one language is involved in the discussion (in our case, English and Greek).
In an ideal world, we wouldn't use the English word voice to refer to Greek at all in order to hopefully avoid this confusion. Personally, I would advocte going back to the Greek diathesisfor talking about Greek's active-middle system.
>> This would also be reflected in the differences in spelling, e.g. color vs
>> colour, Savior vs Savior, judgement vs judgment, etc. The pronunciation of
>> certain words, etc. potato, tomato, INsurance vs inSURance, schedule (skedule)
>> vs schedule (shedule), etc. The schemes reflect not only regional, e.g. "Y'all"
>> vs "You all," but also national dialectical differences, British vs American,
>> e.g. "boot" (trunk) vs. "boot" (a type of shoe); "torch" (flashlight) vs "torch"
>> (a long stick with fire/flame on one end).
Perhaps, but that's entirely suppositional. I wouldn't make such a claim about English syntax without significant data. Pullum and Huddleston, the most comprehensive grammar of English available says nothing about dialectal variation on the subject either in the two pages where middles are discussed (cited above) or their significantly larger section on reflexives (1483-1499).
I would encourage you to sit down and read through Rutgar Allan's dissertation: http://dare.uva.nl/en/record/108528
Mike Aubrey
http://evepheso.wordpress.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Aubrey" <mga318 at yahoo.com>
To: "Mark Lightman" <lightmanmark at yahoo.com>; <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2011 8:22 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Ancient Greek Voice Forms
> Well, if you're going to redefine a technical term so dramatically, then none
of them. But you're over extending a term that has a precise meaning.
>
> Subject affectedness refers to predications where the subject is ‘the locus of
the principle effects of the verbally denoted action’ (Klaiman 1991: 106).
>
> Mike Aubrey
> http://evepheso.wordpress.com
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