Ksunegrapse is a compound
verb. It has a prefix, ksun, and Thucydides typically uses ksi instead
of sigma for prepositions and prefixes; so this is actually sun- “with,
together”.
The root of the verb is grafo.
To understand how Thucydides got graps out of graf, go to White’s
grammar, his page 2, section 7, on “mutes”. There are consonants which, under
some conditions, transmute into other consonants. In this case, phi transmutes
into psi. To explain why it’s psi, you have to know the aspect of
the verb.
There are three aspects in Greek:
imperfective; progressive; and perfective. Russian doesn’t have progressive; it
does other things to get the same result. Biblical Hebrew has progressive;
Arabic doesn’t.
Every aspect has two flavors which I
label “eventive” and “conceptual”.
ASPECT FLAVOR => eventive conceptual
Imperfective
Progressive
Perfective
Imperfective verbs are marked by a sigma
before the modality/person/number endings. (There is an exception which I
will leave for a different post.)
So first, the phi in grafo
loses its dentality and becomes a labial “p” sound, and then it is followed
by an “s” sound. Instead of writing this out pi-sigma, the Greeks went
for psi. In a sense, psi and ksi were invented by the
Greeks specifically for their grammar. Note that in Biblical Hebrew, “p” and “f”
are the same letter with or without an internal dot called dagesh. In Russian the
two sounds are different letters; the Russian alphabet is mostly derived from Greek.
Arabic has no “p”; languages like Persian and Urdu that use the same
alphabet have different ways of representing that sound.
Now click on ksunegrapse in
Thucydides, and you get the Perseus Word Tool. At the top left is the verb form
previously known as the “infinitive”. Copy that. Now start a new tab and paste
it into a search engine. Delete any English characters and click. The top
result should be a Wiktionary entry. Click on that.
Like its cousin Wikipedia,
Wiktionary is not perfect, but it can be useful. Scroll down the page to the
panels labeled Present, Aorist and so on. One of them is labeled Future. At the
right it says “show”. Click on that.
In the row labeled “active”, “indicative”,
first, you see suggrapso. Notice it has the same psi as ksunegrapse.
That’s the clue that made me think classical Greek was aspectual; it pointed to
a relationship between aorist and future. This same relationship shows up in
Assyrian in the imperfect aspect. In Biblical Hebrew, one of the conjugated
verb forms points to a general event which, with a prefix, represents actions
in an ongoing narrative about past events. This prefix is cognate to the “augment”
which I will discuss below.
ASPECT FLAVOR => eventive conceptual
Imperfective ksunegrapse ksuggrapso
Progressive
Perfective
The tense formerly known as aorist
is the aspect imperfective eventive. The tense formerly known as future is the
aspect imperfective conceptual. With one exception which I’ll discuss later
(and it’s an entire class of verbs so it will be important to memorize), imperfective
verbs always have this sigma infix, which results in transmutation with
the consonants shown in the left-hand column in White.
Now what about that -eta-
between ksun- and -graps-?
The name for it is augment. There
isn’t one in the imperfective conceptual. Augment does not mark imperfective. It
marks the eventive flavor of a verb.
You used to have to memorize that
the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect tenses have augment, with some exceptions.
I’m turning that around; a verb with augment is the eventive flavor of one of
the three aspects. P.s. we will still have exceptions but they will not be this
picayune.
Next time I’ll explain that double gamma
and tell you what imperfective aspect is about.
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