Hi, Don! Welcome back!
Carl just sent me some output from Prometheus - epistolary aorists from P.
London. Cool! Unfortunately, I suspect that Prometheus only runs on the Mac,
and I don't have one. Probably a good thing, since I might *never* get
anything done if I got to play around with programs like that!
>At 3:33 PM 4/30/97, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>...
>>But there *are* aorists which do not have the augment, and some forms which
>>are used with and without the augment. So far, I haven't heard anybody argue
>>that aorist forms without the augment do not have past time referent, but
>>aorist forms with the augment do. Do you know if anyone would argue this
>>position? Would you? (Please? Pretty please? It would be kind of fun! ;->)
>....
>
>Jonathan, if you are referring to the absence of the augment in
>non-indicative moods, then of course we would say that such aorists
>inherently do not have reference to the past. As always, the problem is
>with the indicative. Do you have in mind some aor. ind's that do not have
>the augment? Offhand I can't think of any except those which are from the
>Homeric time period or are "missing" the augment due to purely
>morphological reasons (e.g. those verbs which begin with a long vowel).
Hmmm...looking at a few examples that come to mind, they seem to fall into
the two categories you mention. Does anybody out there know if there are
other uses of the aorist without the augment?
Jonathan
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Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie
POET Software, 3207 Gibson Road, Durham, N.C., 27703 http://www.poet.com
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