Re: 3rd Aorist
Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Thu, 31 Oct 1996 12:37:42 -0600
At 12:10 PM -0600 10/31/96, BibAnsMan@aol.com wrote:
>There is still some confustion over the list of verbs cited from Smyth, para
>687 that are supposed to be 3rd Aorist.
>
>Chris writes,
>
><< Have YOU made any sense of it? I think my solution for identifying them,
>since the 2nd aorist passive and the 3rd aorist active are the same form is
>to call anything which is 2nd aorist in form but which should be translated
>as active in the sense of the text is: ta da: 3rd aorist. That's generally
>what we do in class when Frank says wrong when we say "2nd aorist"--come back
>with "3rd aorist." >>
How's about: process of elimination: if it's aorist and non-thematic, and
it's not obviously passive (by which I mean one of those relatively rare
"second" passives that don't have the distinctive -QH- with them, then it
must be a "third" aorist. A lot of these verbs are intransitive (ESTHN,
EBHN), but that in itself is not sufficient to identify them, because EGNWN
is transitive and active.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/