No subject
Tue May 3 10:41:24 EDT 2011
objectionable. I don't believe that there ever was a form compounded of
LELUKA + a personal (pronominal) ending -E(N) with an "elided" A, nor was
there ever a form compounded of LUSA- and -WMEQA (LUSAWMEQA) with an
"elided" A. Rather there is an Indo-European "aspect morph" that is a
simple -S-. It is rather the A where it appears following that -S- in the
aorist forms with -SA- that calls for explanation regarding its emergence
in Greek linguistic history. The most common explanation offered is that it
arose from a first-person sg, pronominal ending in -M that changed to -A
following a consonantal stem and from a third-person plural pronominal
ending in -NT that attracted an -A- to become -ANT, and that the -A- then
spread to other Sigmatic-aorist forms. At any rate, there's no evidence
that the -SA- "morph" ever was universally present in sigmatic aorist forms
and was "elided" before another vowel at the beginning of a personal
ending. In fact, I would prefer to retain the term "elision" ONLY where the
final vowel of a lexeme is suppressed before a following vowel; that's
exactly what happens in the case of disyllabic prepositions ending in -A
before pronouns (e.g. PAR' EMOU for PARA EMOU) or in the case of disyllabic
adverbial prefixes that suppress the final vowel before an augment or
before an initial vowel in a verb stem (e.g. PAR-E-QHKEN for PARA-E-QHKEN
or PAREIMI for PARA-EIMI). But here we know that the -A- was indeed
originally an element in an adverb that has come to be used as an additive
to a verb-stem; and the evidence is ready to hand in the fact that the
prefix must precede the augment (one writes PAR-E-QHKEN, never E-PARAQHKEN).
Although I would like to reject as "fictions" that are historically
inaccurate Ward's explanation of verb forms in terms of "stems" and "aspect
morphs" and "elision", I can't do it, because his analysis "works"
descriptively with sufficient success to be pedagogically viable with
learners of NT Greek. What one wants, after all, is an understanding of the
verbal system which enables a reader to recognize and parse correctly the
verb forms he or she confronts when reading the GNT. Perhaps it's a poor
analogy, but I'm told that Newtonian Physics adequately explains most of
the mechanical phenomena of our experience of the world-order, although it
can be shown that there are some phenomena that it does not adequately
explain. Another way of putting it is the old American proverb, "If it
ain't broke, don't fix it" = "If it works, don't argue with it."
Nevertheless, I persist in my view that if one is going to endeavor to
understand the Greek language as something more than the language in which
the New Testament was originally composed, one needs to approach the
language, at least in part, from a diachronic perspective. In fact I am
personally convinced that one is not likely to understand even the language
of the GNT without looking at some forms and usages in diachronic terms.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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