David Lim wrote:This reminds me of a few questions about morphology that I forgot to ask:
(1) Why does the aorist passive verb use the active ending?
(2) Why does the aorist passive participle use the "ντ" stem suffix rather than the "μεν" suffix?
This question really belongs in a new subforum, so I'm changing the subject-header.
This was one of the observations that first spurred me to think more seriously about the morphology and semantics of the ancient Greek voice system. One of the more "obvious" things to say about it is that these secondary endings involved are identical for the verb-forms that we call "athematic" or "nonthematic" actives (e.g. ἔβην, ἔβης, ἔβη; ἔγνων, ἔγνως, ἔγνω) and so-called "second passives (e.g. ἐβλάβην, ἐβλάβης, ἐβλάβη; ἐγράφη, κτλ.) are identical. These endings do not indicate the semantic voice of the verb-forms; they are simply nonthematic aorists. Most --not all, but most -- verbs that appear in these forms are intransitive (e.g. ἔβην, ἔστην), and of course these are the forms in which all traditionally-termed "aorist passives" in -ην/ης/η and -θην/θης/θη appear.
My view (and I doubt I'm the first to think of this) is that these were originally simply an aorist paradigm among others, but that in the course of time they came to be employed especially for the
marked -- middle-passive aorist of what are traditionally called "deponent" verbs (I prefer to call them "middle" verbs): ἵσταμαι/ἔστην, φαίνομαι/ἔφάνην. My guess is that this type of aorist middle-passive -- especially with the formative element -θη- appended to a verb root -- grew alongside of the distinct "first" aorist "active" forms in -σα, so that there were clear oppositions between the
active forms like ἔγραψα, ἔβλαψα, ἔθαψα and the
middle-passive forms like ἐγράφθην/ἐγράφην, ἐβλάφθην/ἐβλάβην, ἐτάφην.
There's more on this on my web-page on ancient Greek voice:
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/GrkVc.html; also accessible there is my compilation titled "Theta_Passive.pdf " (July 5, 2005) Extracts from Pierre Chantraine and Andrew Sihler on the origin of the aorist intransitive and “passive” verb forms.