Re: English perfect, Greek perfect

Jonathan Robie (jonathan@texcel.no)
Thu, 04 Jun 1998 14:01:20 -0400

At 09:36 AM 6/4/98 -0700, dalmatia@eburg.com wrote:

>And the more I think about this, the more I wonder about the
>morphological implications of the Greek perfect. Does it indeed imply
>'possession' through its form, as in the English 'has' risen, and is
>it thereby really a present stative 'tense'? How DOES that morphology
>work anyhows???

I don't think that has in the phrase "has gone" means the same thing as the
same word in the phrase "has eggs". There's no possession involved in "has
gone". In English, there's at least the accident of the word "has", which
is used for both possession and the perfect, but I see no similar accident
in the Greek language.

Jonathan
___________________________________________________________________________

Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com

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