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b-greek-digest V1 #927
b-greek-digest Wednesday, 25 October 1995 Volume 01 : Number 927
In this issue:
Re: magazine subscriptions sent ad nauseum
Re: FYI Hebrew not tenseless, II
here's what's wrong with Q
Re: Phil 2:12-14/Gen 32:22-32
semantics, pragmatics, and the teaching of greek
Re: Phil 2:12-14/Gen 32:22-32
Grammatical Tense, LEGW, & Mark
no future (finis)
Re: no future (finis)
Re: Porter on the present
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Keith A. Clay" <keithc@ramlink.net>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 05:21:22 -0400
Subject: Re: magazine subscriptions sent ad nauseum
>Dear Mr.Clay,
>I thank you for bringing this to my attention. We are aware of the problem
>and we have deleted the accounts which we believe have created the
>problem. However this has become an ongoing problem for us and few other
>centers. The person who is doing this is known as crazy kevin as we came
>to know from other netters, we do not know where he exists or if that is
>his real name. If you get any more of this garbage contact me. Dr.Leff is
>incharge of our Illinois facility where this problem has originated, he
>is aware of this problem and has stopped all news postings until futher
>notice.
>Dr.Leff can be reached at leff@ixc.net.
>Regards,
>Kent Charugundla
>
>
>On Sun, 22 Oct 1995, Keith A. Clay wrote:
>
>>
>> Mr. Charugundla,
>>
>> There are persons using pml-41.ixc.net for sending magazine subscriptions
>> ad nausem to people who do not want them. The biggest problem is is that
>> there are no return e-mail addresses with which to redress this highly
>> reprehensible action. I would ask that yourself or the appropriate
>> person(s) guarantee that any mail send from your sites carry an
>> e-mail-able address. If you have any questions, please contact me, and I
>> will show you what I mean.
>>
>>
>> thank you,
>> keith
>>
>> --
>>
Here's the response that I got by contacting the offending site. They seem
to be trying.
keith
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Keith A. Clay Tri-State Oxygen, Inc
4013 Blackburn Avenue 2927 Greenup Avenue
Ashland, KY 41101-5019 P.O. Box 121
(606)325-8331 Ashland, KY 41105-0121
(606)329-9638
(800)828-1620
School Address:
100 Academic Parkway
Kentucky Christian College
Box 171
Grayson, KY 41143
e-mail: keithc@ramlink.net
Fax: (606)325-8331 -- my computer answers both my phone and receives faxes.
(606)325-9962 -- work fax
==========================================================================
"Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found
difficult and left untried." -- G. K. Chesterton
==========================================================================
------------------------------
From: Vincent DeCaen <decaen@epas.utoronto.ca>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 07:46:13 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: FYI Hebrew not tenseless, II
> I sent out a recent post referring to Hebrew as practically
> tenseless before I read my mail. When I opened my e-mail folder, your
> post caught my eye right away. You say Hebrew is not tenseless, but you
> haven't given any instances to show that tense can be a factor in Hebrew.
> I'm supposing you have some in mind.
> David L. Moore Southeastern Spanish District
I think the burden of proof, BTW, is to show that tense is not a
factor in Hebrew. the original position was that Biblical Hebrew was
like medieval Hebrew (only somewhat true): a functioning tense system.
the case against this position is what I've been trying to undermine
for the last 5 years. it's a piece of cake.
I don't want to rehearse my doctoral thesis on line, but it should be
available by interlibrary loan soon, and in any case will go to press
in 1996. "On the Placement and Interpretation of the Verb in Standard
Biblical Hebrew Prose." U of Toronto 1995.
cf. for Arabic John C. Eisele 1988 "The Syntax and Semantics of Tense,
Aspect, and Time Reference in Cairene Arabic" U of Chicago Ph.D.
available through interlibr loan.
and
Abdelkader Fassi Fehri "Issues in the Structure of Arabic Clauses and
Words" 1993 Dordrecht, esp ch 4.
it depends what you want, and of course this is *not* the Hebrew list.
since there are a 101 theories of the Hebrew verbal system, it would
take a while to take them all apart. it would take equally as long to
argue for Hebrew's tense system. the major strawman of course is the
Slavic perfectivity analysis, and I deal with that in my SBL paper this year.
the actual position in the 1800s is anteriority, and it's flawed for
pretty much the same reasons. I could make that available, but that's
going to a journal editor in a much revised form by December.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vincent DeCaen decaen@epas.utoronto.ca
Near Eastern Studies, University of Toronto
Religion and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I really do not know that anything has ever been
more exciting than diagraming sentences.
--Gertrude Stein
------------------------------
From: Paul Moser <PMOSER@cpua.it.luc.edu>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 95 10:22 CDT
Subject: here's what's wrong with Q
Listmembers might benefit from a just-published book discussing,
with rare sobriety, everything from Q to Thiede (on the Magdalen
mss. & Mark at Qumran) to GThomas (with no trajectory suggested):
G.N. Stanton, *Gospel Truth?* (TPI, 1995). Stanton cites
what will surely be a watershed publication on Q: C. M. Tuckett,
*Studies in Q* (T & T Clark, 1995).--Paul Moser, Loyola University
of Chicago.
------------------------------
From: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 10:56:27 -0500
Subject: Re: Phil 2:12-14/Gen 32:22-32
At 10:22 AM 10/24/95, WINBROW@aol.com wrote:
>Carl Conrad wrote:
>>>>>> (omision) The parallels I have in mind are perhaps fundamentally
>literary, although I think that they are also theological. It may well be
>that the parallels have been noticed before--I would suppose there's a good
>deal of literature on the Philippians passage that I don't know of and
>haven't explored; on the other hand the parallels may exist only in my
>imagination. The shared themes I see are competitive struggle between human
>being and God and the paradox of human striving and divine initiative.<<<<<
>
>I am not prepared to comment on the Gen. passage at this time. I would agree
>that there may be some literary parallels. The best commentary on Paul's use
>of the terms of striving and apprehending is in I Cor. 9:24-27. From that
>passage, I would submit that a part of the "prize" he is seeking to attain is
>control of himself. KATALAMBANW may be used in the sense of overpower. In
>verse he indicates that he is trying to get himself under control (hUPWPIAZW)
>lest he become worthless (ADOKEMOS - unreliable, unproven). To that degree
>the idea of testing is a part of the Jacob stories as well.
Thanks, Carlton. Let me mull this over. Of course, Paul exposes himself to
the mercies(?) of psychoanalysts and would-be psychoanalysts repeatedly by
talking about religious/existential experience in first-person terms where
he may be using the first-person rhetorically (I'm thinking in particular
of Romans 7). On the other hand, he does seem to have much the same inner
tension and capacity to leap back and forth between emotional extremes as
Martin Luther. On the other hand, I'm not nearly so ready to see in Paul
the young man desperately endeavoring to please a rigid and demanding
father as I once was. He is certainly a very complex figure.
You're quite right about KATALAMBANW. It's "overpower" in John 1:5, or that
must at least be its primary sense. Ironic that it's also the Stoic verb
for "grasp an idea."
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/
------------------------------
From: Mari Olsen <molsen@astrid.ling.nwu.edu>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 11:11:37 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: semantics, pragmatics, and the teaching of greek
I don't want to take up all the (nevertheless interesting) threads
that have surfaced in this discussion on tense and aspect. However, since I
am passionately interested in linguistic theory that is useful as well
as elegant, I would like to bridge the theoretical-applied gap that
Bruce Terry and Timothy Janz have been alluding to. I do think it is
helpful to keep the traditional terminology to some extent, especially
when one is dealing with people who know the literature. SO, for
example, one could distinguish (as I do in my thesis) between tense
(grammaticalizing time, or some such--not exactly how Vincent puts it
in his thesis) and tense FORMS (or verb forms, or whatever). This is
a minor point.
A more important point is the value of any theory of the verb forms
for the teaching of Greek. I would argue that the goal, as in any
science is PREDICTION: what can one teach students that would enable
them to understand the very next, say, aorist form. To that end
Vincent and I agree completely that one must make a proper distinction
between semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is that uncancellable
meaning that is present in every use of a form. Pragmatics
contributes implicatures to the interpretation, implicatures that may
be cancelled in certain contexts. THus, if we see that a form (say
the aorist) is NOT always past, its "pastness" is cancellable and
therefore pragmatic rather than semantic. THis does NOT, however,
mean that its temporal reference is evenly distributed among the
possibilities (past, present, future, gnomic, omnitemporal): rather,
the reference must be understood in the context of the system as a
whole. From this perspective (and I don't feel like fussing with the
tabs to line up a chart) one can argue that the temporal reference of
the aorist as overwhelmingly past (85% according to Carson (1993, in
Porter and Carson) stems from the fact that it fills a gap in the
paradigm for a past perfective, to replace the rapidly disappearing
(and morphologically weighty) pluperfect.
I'll end with a favorite quote from Roman Jakobson, best known for his
phonological features, but also for work on semantic features:
"The meaning [in the case of unmarked features, such as past for the
aorist] is here conditioned by the situation, and even if this meaning
is the most common function of this category, the investigator
nevertheless must not equate the statistically predominant meaning of
the category with its general meaning.... By regarding as an
essential relationship something which within the system of the
language merely has the status of a possible relationship, grammarians
end up by making rules with a great number of exceptions."
In my experience it is the exceptions that frustrate students: better
to leave such rules out and send them elsewhere for the temporal
reference (or whatever).
Mari Broman Olsen
Northwestern University
Department of Linguistics
2016 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
molsen@astrid.ling.nwu.edu
molsen@babel.ling.nwu.edu
------------------------------
From: WINBROW@aol.com
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 11:22:10 -0400
Subject: Re: Phil 2:12-14/Gen 32:22-32
Carl Conrad wrote:
>>>>> (omision) The parallels I have in mind are perhaps fundamentally
literary, although I think that they are also theological. It may well be
that the parallels have been noticed before--I would suppose there's a good
deal of literature on the Philippians passage that I don't know of and
haven't explored; on the other hand the parallels may exist only in my
imagination. The shared themes I see are competitive struggle between human
being and God and the paradox of human striving and divine initiative.<<<<<
I am not prepared to comment on the Gen. passage at this time. I would agree
that there may be some literary parallels. The best commentary on Paul's use
of the terms of striving and apprehending is in I Cor. 9:24-27. From that
passage, I would submit that a part of the "prize" he is seeking to attain is
control of himself. KATALAMBANW may be used in the sense of overpower. In
verse he indicates that he is trying to get himself under control (hUPWPIAZW)
lest he become worthless (ADOKEMOS - unreliable, unproven). To that degree
the idea of testing is a part of the Jacob stories as well.
Carlton Winbery
Prof. NT & Greek
LA College, Pineville, LA
------------------------------
From: Stephen Carlson <scc@reston.icl.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 95 14:49:40 EDT
Subject: Grammatical Tense, LEGW, & Mark
This discussion on grammatical tense is very interesting, so I am wondering
if it could shed any light on why Mark, during one of Jesus's discourses
on the Sabbath, switches from the historical present [LEGEI 2:25] to the
imperfect [ELEGEN v27] for the pronouncement. The Lukan parallel is similar
but the switch is from the aorist [EIPEN 6:3] to the imperfect [ELEGEN v5].
(Matthew lacks a parallel to Mark's KAI ELEGEN AUTOIS of Mk2:27.)
Is there something about the imperfect that could suggest a punchline
here, or does it reflect the notion that this was one of many occasions
when Jesus proclaimed that the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath? (Hmm,
Luke's KURIOS ESTIN TOU SABBATOU hO hUIOS TOU ANQRWPOU 6:5 provides some
ammunition in the exegesis of Jn1:1c...but I digress.) Any other ideas?
Stephen Carlson
- --
Stephen Carlson : Poetry speaks of aspirations, : ICL, Inc.
scc@reston.icl.com : and songs chant the words. : 11490 Commerce Park Dr.
(703) 648-3330 : Shujing 2:35 : Reston, VA 22091 USA
------------------------------
From: Vincent DeCaen <decaen@epas.utoronto.ca>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 22:43:02 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: no future (finis)
I'm kind'a hoping we can end this thread soon, but since I've gotten
flooded with questions re "future tense" I think it's only fair to
respond a little.
first, I'm not sure what's wrong with either formalism or theoretical
elegance. I do admit a heavy emphasis on form because of a
methodological principle: strict compositionality (vs atomism). put
simply, we must take form seriously, and assign meaning to the bits so
that when put them together we get the correct semantics.
e.g., what tense is "I would have been being stupid (had I answered
all the questions)" ? atomism would say a "conditional perfect
progressive" or some such gobbledy-gook. compositionality would say,
"past tense of will"; and stem have, and the participle been, and the
participle being, which when put together gives the correct semantics.
my claim is that when we call the Greek thingy "future" we're in the
atomistic camp; and I'm interested in what the compositional camp
would do with it--that's all, period.
the other problem is consistency of form to meaning. and I'm sorry,
but you're not going to get this except maybe in Esperanto. if I say
that the English plural is the stem plus /-s/, some young'un will
point out that women obtains and not womans. well, that 's quaint.
should we give up the analysis of the regular plural on the basis of
less productive morphology? the problem in Greek is that sort of thing
is so characteristic of the verbal morphology. so because I was using
the sigmatic aorist for shorthand is no reason to through out the baby
with the bath water.
1. no, the analysis was not driven by the "binary fallacy"; though it
is curious how far binarism as a heuristic can get you, and how much
semantics is intuitively binary.
2. making explicit the model I'm assuming. well, since I'm just toying
with ideas, we shouldn't take it too seriously, but I assume contra
Olsen that there is a distinction between perfective and "perfect" or
anterior (semantically, the latter is much more marked; even formally,
it appears with more stuff, or quirkier stuff).
Non-Past Past
[ ] [PAST]
Imperfective "Present" "Imperfect"
[ ] [ , ] [PAST, ]
Perfective "Future" "Aorist"
[PERF] [ , PERF] [PAST, PERF]
Anterior "Perfect" "Pluperfect"
[ANT] [ , ANT] [PAST, ANT]
now, it is a nice result to me that formally we get the "stems" lining
up, and the augments lining up; and it looks conceptually
clean/elegant. but hey, aesthetics is a personal thing.
3. is there not one speaker of Russian or cognates, or Hungarian or
Georgian or any of these systems that use (unconstroversially) the
combination of nonpast + perfective = future?? I mean, the cogency of
the model stems from my work on Russian, Polish, Hungarian and Mofu
Gudur; so what more can I do than refer you to these systems to see
the semantics for this proposal?
4. there are some predictions in moving to the nonpast + perfective.
one is that there are other uses of the "future" other than future.
since Greek is not my specialty, I won't venture out here; but I do
remember anomalous "futures" that fit the semantic bill.
5. the diachronics is of course a problem. two problems actually. a)
looking at Sanskrit we see two stems, e.g., sigmatic stems: -s- vs. a
"future" -s-y-. I can see how it could be argued that the two
collapsed. on the other hand, history is opaque to language learners.
b) there is the constrast lu-s-o-nt-os vs lu-s-a-nt-os, future part
and aorist participle respectively. here I would argue that the future
is expected with the "present" or regular endings. I would venture
that the presence of -a- is the source of additional past (is there
not something in Hittite -Ha- ? memory fails now).
6. I've done a lot of surveying of languages, and the only candidates
for bona fide "future" is the inflected Romance infinitives, and
systems with "metrical tense" like Bantu systems or Inuktitut
(Eskimo). I'm not interested in taking apart counterexamples here.
It's clear historically that the clitic of *habere is on the end of
infinitives, and formally the analysis still holds. I could regale you
with data from Portuguese and others that still have material showing
up between infinitive and clitic auxiliary--some other time.
generally, the metrical systems are subject to decomposition.
the Bantu systems are interesting because of the apparent
one-TMA-particle-per-verb rule. here the key is that stacking of TMA
particles requires auxiliary supports (morphological requirements I
guess). when you look at the additional data, you can separate out T,
M, A and in that order. I'm most familiar with Swahili, and I'm still
working on the so-called future tense (probably irrealis mood).
anyway, the burden should be on those supporting the future tense (the
world apparently does just fine with just past/nonpast, thank you very
much). there're some good books, but the only one that comes to mind
is Fleischman's 1982 "The future in thought and language". she's
dealing with Romance mostly.
xxx
Conclusion: points suggesting this route (give it to a grad student to
work out, I'm working on Semitic syntax right now).
a) cross-linguistic lack of bona fide future not subject to decomposition
b) synchronic symmetry: stem and aspect
c) doing without one major semantic feature [+/-Future] that doesn't
do much otherwise and is in complementary distribution with perfective
in just the nonpast.
d) Slavic, etc, nonpast + perfective = future.
sorry I'm not more forthcoming: it's been a long couple 'a days. sigh.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vincent DeCaen decaen@epas.utoronto.ca
Near Eastern Studies, University of Toronto
Religion and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I really do not know that anything has ever been
more exciting than diagraming sentences.
--Gertrude Stein
------------------------------
From: "Michael L. Siemon" <mls@panix.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 00:11:03 -0400
Subject: Re: no future (finis)
>I'm kind'a hoping we can end this thread soon, but since I've gotten
>flooded with questions re "future tense" I think it's only fair to
>respond a little.
Well, the thread has been fascinating and extremely suggestive to me,
and your contributions not the least -- however, I think here that your
attempt to squeeze a lot into a "little" response exposes your smooth
sailing to an iceberg or two ...
>first, I'm not sure what's wrong with either formalism or theoretical
>elegance
Nothing, per se; but there is a problem with over-systematization of
language, which you illustrate below:
>the other problem is consistency of form to meaning. and I'm sorry,
>but you're not going to get this except maybe in Esperanto.
Exactly -- no REAL language HAS such a consistency.
>if I say
>that the English plural is the stem plus /-s/, some young'un will
>point out that women obtains and not womans.
The problem is more interesting than this quick dismissal -- the
very young WILL pick up your elegant "stem plus /-s/", and then
after much correction by older speakers of English, will tend to
err in the opposite direction, by making irregular plurals or
irregular pasts or whatever in cases where the typical speaker
*does* use the rule. :-)
In fact, there *is* no consistent synchronic system of any real
human language -- just a near approximation to one such system
or another, varying over time. In your quest for "compositional"
semantics derived out of consistent pieces, you are implicitly
assuming a uniformity of language without the "fault lines" along
which language change happens diachronically. With no assured
"tracking" of syntactic and semantic elements in correlation.
As in Mari's (entirely laudatory) goal of teaching language compre-
hension with a minimum of "exceptions" to the "rules", I am quite
in favor of the systematizing (and the goals of simple elegance)
you urge so passionately. But you seem to be being carried away
in your passion, if I may say so :-)
>well, that 's quaint.
>should we give up the analysis of the regular plural on the basis of
>less productive morphology?
No -- of course not, as long as we recognize that there are in fact
*several* rather incompatible things going on at once! It is (I think,
though I will accept correction readily on this) a fact of life that
verbs in Greek *are* systematically something of a mess (e.g., in
comparison to Latin.) However much tidying up of this mess you do,
you are still left with a whole raft of things like irregular English
plurals and highly sporadic ablaut. And those things ARE part of the
language, however inconvenient for synchronic theorizers.
There is a quotation running around the net, apocryphally ascribed
to Einstein, that "things should be made as simple as possible, but
no simpler." I believe that rule should be inscribed on the lintels of
all schools of linguistics :-)
But again, I have to concede that my gut entirely approves of the
style of thing you are doing, or that Mari is doing. *Given* that our
synchronic systems are *not* going to be an exact match to the
language as she is spoke, you have all the motivation in the world
to construct a model that conveys the greatest possible sense of
the actual usage with the least need for ad hoc patches, and I at
least rather like some of the stuff you guys are saying about TMA
(at least as regards Greek; my Semitic is nearly non-existent, so
I have no opinion at all on that.)
------------------------------
From: David Moore <dvdmoore@dcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us>
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 00:34:14 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Porter on the present
"Philip L. Graber" <pgraber@emory.edu> quoted and wrote:
>> Faulty exegesis, may I point out, can grow out of
>> any false conception related to the grammar of a language.
>
>This is certainly true. However, a conception that allows for a
>substantial number of exceptions is a setup for errors--how does one know
>whether any given case is an exception or not? This lends itself to
>arbitrary and subjective judgments, the kind of thing you rightly stated
>we all want to avoid.
I don't think we want to get into a "Is not!" "Is so!" type of
argument on this. I just want to say that, in something like grammar,
simplification is good only to the extent that precision is not lost. As
with the fellow who, for the first time saw a schematic drawing of the
Power PC chip and said, "This would be a lot easier to understand if it
were simpler."
Even in terms of aspects of the respective forms, there are
exceptions. So, there must be other considerations besides avoiding
exceptions that should guide us in deciding under what system to talk
about grammar. Mari, in a recent post, quoted Roman Jakobson to the
effect that we should not admit a meaning for a form simply because it is
statistically predominant when that meaning is not essential to the form.
This may be so, but I wonder if the temporal augment in the indicative is
not just such an essential marker. Philip has said that its introduction
to Greek as a temporal marker doesn't mean it should be taken as such now.
Nevertheless, the 85% past temporal reference for the aorist cited by Mari
from Porter and Carson apparently indicates that it normally retains its
past sense at least in the aorist, and upon looking at the other tenses
with the augment, it would not surprise me to find that their sense is
also statistically mainly past. If this does not constitute an essential
link with past time for these inflected forms, then at least I would think
the burden of proof should be with those who deny that there is a link to
the augment's original meaning.
If the augment normally marks past time, then it is logical that
the unaugmented, indicative forms would be influenced, being unmarked for
past and also being non-future. But whether the unaugmented indicative's
often serving for present time could be called "essential" is another
question.
Regards,
David L. Moore Southeastern Spanish District
Miami, Florida of the Assemblies of God
dvdmoore@dcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us Department of Education
------------------------------
End of b-greek-digest V1 #927
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