Re: Mari Broman (was Aorist resources)

Don Wilkins (dwilkins@ucrac1.ucr.edu)
Tue, 10 Dec 1996 14:49:52 -0500 (EST)

At 6:19 AM 12/10/96, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>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 implies
>>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.

Good points, Carl. It should perhaps be clarified for those who are not
completely familiar with Greek indirect discourse that in past tenses of
the verb of speaking/knowing, Greek prefers to keep the tense of the
original statement but (often) change the mood, usually indicative, to the
optative (English generally does the reverse). You may be right about the
obsolescence of the future optative in koine, but I wonder, given inter
alia that fact that Luke sometimes uses the optative in indirect discourse
(sometimes I think NT grammars should try to do more with the optative for
this reason alone).

Don Wilkins
UC Riverside