I knew this was coming. This puts me in the slightly ridiculous position of
trying to defend Mari, who is as bright as they come and knows her stuff,
against someone who has much more experience with Greek than I do, and for
whom I have a lot of respect, but here goes...
>First, a matter of clarity: we must
>always be careful to address the *indicative* mood, because only it can
>inherently have the sense of timing.
Yes. My mistake, not Mari's, but as you see, I have posted a fresh set of
examples.
>Thus when Mari argues that the aorist
>and present are not true tenses, I assume she is referring to the
>indicative (Mari, if you are reading this, please correct me if I misstate
>your position).
As I understand her, and I don't think she says this explicitly, her table
is independent of mood. The real tenses - imperfect, perfect, pluperfect,
and future - are tenses regardless of mood, and neither present nor aorist
are tenses, they both indicate only aspect regardless of mood.
>In an earlier conversation with her, she indicated to me
>that she believes the augment has no meaning, which is a point of
>contention I had years ago with Stan Porter. It is essential to view the
>augment historically. It is not found in old Ionic Greek (Homer etc.) but
>appears later with Classical and continues all the way through the
>Byzantine period and beyond. This raises the question of when the augment
>ceased to have meaning, and it seems to me that Mari and others are
>presuming a very premature death for this past-time (excluding the perfect
>augment) indicator.
Her paper indicates that the augment probably had meaning as a past-time
indicator in all "tenses", but lost this meaning over time for the aorist.
She does not establish the period over which this occured.
>The only way the theory of a meaningless augment can be objectively
>evaluated is by a careful reading of all the relevant texts
How would you define "all the relevant texts" for this particular question?
My guess is that it would include most of the Greek corpus. Certainly any
theory has to correspond with the data, i.e. the Greek corpus, but there
*are* other ways to prove things.
Mari seems to focus on the concept of "cancellability". By examining how the
"tenses" combine with other time indicators, we can determine which are the
true tenses, the ones which retain their time reference even contrary to
other indicators in the context. Consider the difference between these uses
of the Aorist and the Imperfect in combination with NUN:
(GNT, John 11:8) hRABBI, ***NUN ***EZHTOUN SE LIQASSI hOI IOUDAIOU, KAI PALIN
hUPAGEIS EKEI;
John 13:31 hOTE OUN EXHLQEN, LEGEI IHSOUS: ***NUN ***EDOXASQH hO UIOS TOU
ANQRWPOU KAI hO QEOS EDOXASQH EN AUTW:
Roma 11:31 hOUTWS KAI hOUTOI ***NUN ***HPEIQHSAN TW hUMETERW ELEEI, hINA KAI
AUTOI ***(NUN) ***ELEHQWSIN.
I've argued in a separate message that the Aorist examples, taken in
context, do not refer to the past, but the imperfect clearly does. Why? Mari
says this is because the imperfect is a true tense, and the aorist is not.
>I hate to sound like a broken record, this requires a thorough search of the
>TLG database inter alia. She may feel that she has good reason to
>disagree about the need to do such a search, and if so, that is where I
>probably have to part company with her.
In private correspondence I told her that I always do Gramcord searches when
I'm trying to learn grammar, since I no longer know who to believe. She
responded:
"Exactly. I do the same on other corpora for other things I work on.
This is why I'm in computational lingusitics at all...verifiability
for one's theories..."
So I doubt that you'll find much disagreement with her that searching a
corpus makes sense.
>Recently John 13:31 was offered as a good example of a future-referring
>aorist, and I disagreed on grammatical and contextual grounds.
Oops...I missed that discussion (I don't read everything due to bandwidth
limitations on my brain), and used the same example today.
>One might begin, e.g., with a
>search for all texts (not just biblical) where NUN occurs with the aorist
>ind., and determine which, if any, can not possibly refer to an event in
>the immediate past.
Well, I've done that for the biblical texts, but I can't afford the TLG
database, so if anybody wants to explore the rest, I'd be grateful!
Jonathan
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Jonathan Robie
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