Tuesday, July 28, 2020

21st Century Classical Greek -- Thucydides and aspect


Possibly the most important reason for understanding aspect in classical Greek, is that it’s what the Greeks of Thucydides’ time understood from what he wrote.

Thucydides did not write in a vacuum. When he uses grammar, he is copying what he learned in immersion, heard in public and in private, in the agora and the courthouse and the council chamber. Sure, he had to learn grammar when he was growing up, as part of the trivium. But he had the full range of expression at his fingertips, 24/7, from infancy. Contrast that with the scholars of past times who didn’t start on Greek until they were nearly 10 years old, spending a few hours a week in among half a dozen other subjects and other school activities, and then just possibly going on to work with the desperately few survivors of what we know was a much larger corpus in what by then was a dead language, having nothing to do with their social lives.

The result is that what the scholars put into their papers and their grammars is based on less data and less experience than Thucydides had to work with. Naturally the lack of data produced inaccuracies and gaps in every work on the grammar of Classical Greek. I will also point out signs that the post-Renaissance grammarians ignored data that their predecessors ignored, as well as data that disagreed with their claims.

Thucydides wrote for his own class, the class with a liberal education in the trivium and maybe the quadrivium. He had to use grammar that presented him as an educated man, not a clod. He also had to use language people understood, not make things up or torture the grammar for effect. Thucydides didn’t have time to make up his own grammar. He was active in the events he recorded. He even came down with the plague like so many other Athenians, although he recovered, unlike Pericles. Using verbs aspectually, not according to tense, was natural to him. He uses perfective aspect for poetic works, not because those works are the products of past times, but because once they were written, they became fixed in the culture instead of being rewritten over and over. And he didn’t have to explain using “present tense” for something that happened before he was born, because he used it for situations and everybody in his audience understood that.

It’s easy to dismiss the idea of aspectual verbs in classical Greek as nutty, unless you know that 21st century scholars of Greek in Christian scripture realize that it has aspectual features. And that ditching the half-tense, half-aspect description of Greek verbs in favor of a completely aspectual description wipes out a lot of notes in William Goodwin’s old-fashioned grammar, notes that nearly contradict the main points he inherited from his sources. For example, we won’t have to explain why “aorist tense” is used for imperatives which clearly envision future action; our imperfective aspect is the default verb form and an imperative in any other aspect will have special nuances.

So I’m not stepping onto uncharted ground here. I’m pushing a concept to its limit, the way I did with Biblical Hebrew. And it will buy you understanding of Thucydides’ material, without stressing your memory as much as Goodwin would, because I can set down some objective definitions and show how they relate to Thucydides’ meaning.

If you want Goodwin to look at when I refer to it, you can bookmark or download it here:

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