From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 13 1998 - 17:16:49 EDT
At 4:05 PM -0400 7/13/98, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>I was thinking about the Present and the Imperfect, and the common
>statement that they differ only in that Imperfect expresses past time. It
>struck me that if absolute time exists only in the Indicative, it might be
>interesting to explore how Present and Imperfect differ outside the
>Indicative.
>
>So I fire up Gramcord and do a search for Imperfect verbs that are not
>Indicative.
>
>"Construction not found".
>
>Wow. The Imperfect occurs only in the Indicative, eh? That caught me by
>surprise. There's apparently not much need for the Imperfect outside the
>Indicative, which seems to reinforce the notion that the Imperfect and
>Present differ only in that the Imperfect expresses past time.
>
>Are there really no undisputed examples of non-Indicative Imperfect verbs
>in the GNT? Are there examples of non-Indicative Imperfect verbs outside
>the GNT?
I shouldn't think so--and I can't imagine what one would look like. What
needs to be recalled is that the imperfect is precisely a past indicative
to the PRESENT (PROGRESSIVE?) SYSTEM; the imperfect really ought to be
envisioned as part of the present system in exactly the same way that the
aorist is a past indicative to the aorist system.
BUT--the imperfect (indicative) retains one function in Koine that it had
in Classical Attic: it is used in both protasis and apodosis of present
counterfactual conditions. I've never been able to figure out a good reason
why the indicative should function in Greek for a counterfactual
condition--but of course the aorist indicative does so in past
counterfactual conditions also.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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