21st Century -- what?

And now to prove that I am crazy, sort of. All the research that went into this version of Hebrew grammar got me thinking about Greek. If the grammar foisted on BH during the Renaissance had Latin labels on it, and turned out to be monumentally wrong, what about Classical Greek which is also painted with Latin labels?

Well, I’ve done it. I picked Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War to work with because it is so long it ought to have examples of most Greek grammar. It’s also prose, so I don’t have to worry about the complications of poetry. And it’s not rhetoric, either.

And it works.

The “tenses” of Greek translate perfectly into a table of three aspects, each of which has two flavors with differing nuances. Those nuances do not incorporate timing the way tenses do. The first thing the redefinition does is gets rid of exculpatory statements in the old grammars about finding "present tense" in past situation. Thucydides uses “present tense” in historical situations, because he’s talking about situations or habitual action. 

Participles aren’t. They are gerundives that function mostly as adjectives or nouns. Their use instead of conjugated verbs allows Thucydides to be rather descriptive of actions occurring than positively stating that they occurred. Due to the agreement in number case and gender with an antecedent, I have labeled these “personal gerundives”.

This is in contrast with the “infinitive” with its invariable endings that depend on voice. I call them “impersonal gerundives”; they represent actions as specific classes of substantives according to the aspect. This is a third and lower level of definiteness compared to personal gerundives, not even relating to an antecedent. When you convert Greek to an aspectual description, you lose the cognitive dissonance of “aorist infinitive” because it’s actually an imperfective eventive impersonal gerundive. 

Charles Conrad once wrote that the voices have no objective definition. Passive voice, I decided, is for intransitive use bordering on the descriptive. On the contrary, “active” voice is for the actions of individual agents, performed deliberately to get results, which I call executive.

Since all the grammars admit that “future perfect” is actually used as a passive, it does not belong in the table for perfective executive voice. It belongs in the imperfective conceptual column for passive voice.

There is a whole class of verbs in Greek that has passive voice with no executive, the -mai verbs (except erkhomai which is a suppletive). And yet they have an alternative conjugation, usually labeled middle or middle passive. 

The middle (in imperfective only according to Conrad) is usually labeled reflexive but Thucydides never uses it that way. Reflexivity is carried by pronouns, not verbs. 

The -mai verbs in progressive or perfective are labeled “middle-passive”. Their conjugations are 80% identical to the imperfective "middle". 

Since the conjugation endings in middle and middle-passive are so much alike, I have combined them as “base voice”. This voice shows up in transitive contexts for action that is not deliberate. In other words, it's for everything else. The impersonal gerundives ending in -sthai are all in base voice.  

After classifying verbs as -mai or non-mai, I realized that a -mai verb can have a non-mai verb with nearly the same meaning. Why? It turns out that the -mai verb occurs with evaluations of an action such as bad or good, while non-mai verbs show up in other cases.

Next I attacked the issue of mood, which 21st century linguistics calls modality, once again helped out by my Hebrew studies. The deontic modality is represented in Greek by “imperative mood”, but this isn’t the only way to issue commands. One alternative is explicitly with the verb keleuo. The other is to use an impersonal gerundive, which carries the nuance of the action being due and owing. The last uses the impersonal gerundive, cognate to the use in Biblical Hebrew of an aspectless verb (“infinitive’) with a finite version of the imperfect aspect, such as mot yumat, the phrase for capital punishment resulting from due process in court.

BH has two epistemic modalities, certainty and uncertainty, reflecting the speaker’s investment in the truth of a statement. Greek does not have a separate certainty epistemic; an indicative verb is about as certain as it gets. It turns out that the “optative” is an expression of uncertainty about facts; sometimes it provides a spoiler that a persuasive speech is going to be unsuccessful. I have renamed it the epistemic; the speaker is not invested in the truth of what he is saying.

By contrast, a speech that eventually proves successful uses the “subjunctive” but never the “optative”. I renamed subjunctive as oblique, despite its difference from the BH oblique modality. The latter is used in a subordinate clause which relies for acceptance on the specific or general truth of a main clause – which is a connection to the use of subjunctive in conditionals. The oblique in Greek is an action for which there is no evidence that it will happen or did happen, but which is highly likely; the epistemic is for something the speaker is less certain happened. This replaces the confusing concept of “future more/less vivid” and applies outside of conditionals.

When you realize that the oblique is an action that hasn’t necessarily happened (yet), you notice that the conjugational endings for the “aorist subjunctive” (imperfective eventive) are identical to endings for imperfective conceptual (formerly known as “future tense”). Moving that conjugation to the conceptual flavor makes conjugations more regular.

I did not relabel passive voice because I discovered anti-passive structures in Thucydides. Passive structures use a nominative noun as the logical object of an intransitive verb. Anti-passive structures use the grammatical object of one verb as the logical subject of another, which is an impersonal gerundive. The grammatical object that is in the accusative case is the basis of the claim in old grammars that “the subject of an infinitive is in the accusative case.” Anti-passives simplify expression by avoiding a change in case.

Then I came across a structure that used a nominative noun, a second aorist verb conjugated in executive voice, and an animate agent in the phrase hupo X. The second aorist verb is intransitive. This turns out to be an ergative structure. It was required in Hurrian, which has no passive morphology, for intransitivity. It is different from a passive structure because it does name an agent. The ergative is a middle ground in transitivity between a full passive (available only in -mai verbs and in the imperfective of non-mai verbs) and an executive voice (available only in non-mai verbs) in a transitive structure with an agent in nominative and an object in an oblique case. It turns out that there are five or six such structures in Book I of Peloponnesian War. I should probably rename “second aorist” as “intransitive imperfective eventive”.

These conclusions were all the more satisfying because they consist of sets of threes:

Aspect – imperfective, progressive, perfective

Definiteness – conjugation, personal gerundive, impersonal gerundive

Certainty – indicative, oblique, epistemic

Voice – passive, base, executive

Transitivity structures – passive, ergative, transitive

Overall verb classes – non-mai, -mai, and suppletive

The anti-passive as well as the ergative structure are found in the Hurrian language. Another analogy to Hurrian is what old grammars call the cognate accusative. The old grammars disagree with each other on a definition; they also disagree with the definition for Latin by Allen and Greenough. Lack of a consistent definition suggests there is no such thing.

Instead I would substitute something else in Hurrian, the Adverbial Equative case or more properly structure. This would be two occurrences of the same verb in different forms, one having adverbial effect. Biblical Hebrew has an adverbial equative structure although it is rare; Burton’s translation of Arabian Nights makes it seem as if this structure is endemic in Arabic. A similar structure occurs on Greek poetry and rhetoric; I found it in plays and in Demosthenes.

Greek scholars in the 21^st century are not strangers to aspect. It has been taught in Europe for decades, according to a correspondent of mine. Some American scholars are inching toward it but don’t quite realize that, being more successful at explaining prose usage, it ought to be substituted for tense in grammars; that is an example of the Test of Occam’s Razor. At any rate, the simplification of grammar, the coordination with the 21^st century description of all languages, and the debunking of some old grammatical claims, are certainly worth a look, even if you have been reading Greek for decades.

And if you haven't, you have until Tuesday to learn the Greek alphabet.