Re: Mari Broman (was Aorist resources)

Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Tue, 10 Dec 1996 06:19:15 -0600

At 7:56 PM -0600 12/9/96, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>At 08:43 PM 12/9/96 -0500, Don Wilkins wrote:
>
>>Well, as Carl also pointed out, the only issue concerns the indicative. I
>>don't think any of us (certainly not I) would try to put time in the other
>>moods.
>
>For aorist and present, this is true. For the other tenses, Mari does not
>make an explicit statement, but as I read the papers, she implicitly implie=
s
>that imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and future are true tenses *regardless=
*
>of mood. Maybe Mari can comment about whether I'm understanding her
>correctly. (She needs a break from Prolog programming anyways...)

Just so that the water, which is hardly translucent now, be muddied beyond
necessity, it should be noted that the imperfect and pluperfect do not
exist but in the indicative mood (nor have infinitive & participle), and
that the future, although it has infinitive and participle, is found
outside the indicative ONLY in the optative, which is for practical
purposes obsolete in Koine, which by nature has future reference,and which,
I think, appears (future optative) almost exclusively in conditional
clauses in indirect discourse in classical Attic--well, I guess it could
appear in indirect questions as an alternative to the indicative.

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/