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Re: Aspect: discourse function (Mk.2)
Rod, I'll want to check over the entire section before I have any further
comment, but one thing strikes me right away, and that is the use of the
perfect tense in "hina eidhte": I would question whether this is a
perfect tense other than in terms of the verb's ancient (even pre-)
history. For all practical purposes it is a present tense. Now here we
get into some territory with which I am less familiar because I don't
really know the literature on Hellenistic usage of the aspects apart from
what you have yourself been reporting on this list. But there are other
verbs like this also, e.g. "eoika" (very common in Plato, but it appears
that the only NT usage is 3sg "eoiken" in James 1.6 and 1.23, the two
instances in different senses. Additional classical verbs not found in NT
are "deidia" and "dedoika" 2nd and 2st perfect respectively of a verb
lacking a present tense; although "oida" is SAID to be the perfect tense
of "horaw," of course it isn't really. These are all verbs with present
sense. The textbook out of which I teach Beginning Attic (READING GREEK)
even calls "oida" a present tense, which I would not quite do. Somewhat
different is the verb "histEmi", "histamai" (sorry to be inconsistent in
my transliteration of ETA), where the present middle does have a truly
present sense--"I am coming to a stand, I am standing up," the perfect
tense form hestEka has what is really a present aspect, does it not? "I
am standing"--as the pluperfect form "heistEkein" has an imperfect sense:
"I was standing." Is this an anomaly to the analysis of aspect. Certainly
no one would, except when referring to an act of arising prior to some
point in the past, translate "heistEkein" as "I had stood up."
I am quite frankly puzzled here; it seems to me that these forms ought to
be described and analyzed in terms of their semantic function rather than
their morphological form and that their aspect is properly described as
"present." What do the aspect-experts say about such verb forms. Frankly,
I really don't know whether this has any real bearing on your analysis of
the pericope of the paralytic.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
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