21st Century Classical Greek -- syntax particles

Now we have a problem. I’ve just discussed the only three conjugated verbs in this entire first subsection, which has 50 words. To make the problem clearer, memorize the syntax markers in Greek.

The two main syntax markers in classical Greek are μὲν and δὲ. They mark point and counterpoint in a thought; think of “counterpoint” in music, a different melody that enriches the main melody.  Men often appears at the start of a sentence and de soon after. You can find them near the end of the subsection we’re discussing in a new clause.

A little stronger than de is γὰρ, which you will see near the start of subsection 2. It tends to mean “for” and gives a reason for a prior statement.

The marker τε is slightly emphatic and has an additive connotation. This is reinforced in the syntax phrase καὶ τε (we don’t have an example of that here).

While καὶ can mean “and”, it is often used in places where it really isn’t a conjunction but a syntax marker for a continued thought. You will also see καὶ… καὶ, “both….and”.

When I mark the syntax particles in our first subsection, you can see why it’s an issue that we have only three conjugated verbs.

Θουκυδίδης Ἀθηναῖος ξυνέγραψε τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων, ὡς ἐπολέμησαν πρὸς ἀλλήλους, ἀρξάμενος εὐθὺς καθισταμένου καὶ ἐλπίσας μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ ἀξιολογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων, τεκμαιρόμενος ὅτι ἀκμάζοντές τε ᾖσαν ἐς αὐτὸν ἀμφότεροι παρασκευῇ τῇ πάσῃ καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ὁρῶν ξυνιστάμενον πρὸς ἑκατέρους, τὸ μὲν εὐθύς, τὸ δὲ καὶ διανοούμενον.

After isan there are no conjugated verbs. In the bit marked by men, there is no verb form at all, just the adverb euthus, “immediately” (memorize that, you’ll see it a lot). What happened “immediately”?

This gets us into the issue of verbal derivatives and how classical Greek uses them.

21st Century Classical Greek -- progressive aspect

Here’s our aspectual label chart to date, with a verb in it.

ASPECT         FLAVOR =>  eventive           conceptual

Imperfective                          ksunegrapse    ksuggrapso

Progressive

Perfective

Now copy the following => εἶμι <= and paste into Wiktionary. Make sure you have the entry for “be”; this spelling is also used to represent “come, go”. Memorize the conjugation. This is a high-frequency verb in almost every language that has it, even in aspectual languages.

Why “even”?

By and large, aspectual languages do not use “be” in equational sentences. There are like two exceptions in Jewish Torah, which has over 5800 verses and nearly 80,000 words.

I’m having you memorize this now because of its frequency, and also because there’s an example in this beginning section of War that helps me expand the table.

It also affects grammar in a major way.

The example in this section is ᾖσαν and, as you can see from Wiktionary (also the Word Tool on Perseus), it is labeled as “imperfect tense”.

What is the definition of imperfect tense? You’ve been taught all your life that it’s an action which is interrupted by another.

Thucydides never uses it that way.

“War” runs to 8 books, averaging over 100 sections each, averaging over 4 subsections per section, something like 15,000 words. And Thucydides never uses “imperfect tense” the way every grammar book in history says it should be used. (The closest he gets to one action interrupting another doesn’t use progressive aspect at all.)

Let’s fix that.

Isan is our first progressive aspect verb, and it is eventive despite meaning “be”. It’s there because Thucydides uses a verbal derivative that requires a series of events to bring it about; I will talk about that derivative a few posts from now.

The function of progressive aspect is to identify actions that progressively create a habit or situation. In the eventive, it focuses on the actions. In the conceptual, it focuses on the habit or situation. Do not think of the habit or situation as a result; they are always treated as a stage in a process. Aspectually, a result is permanent, and that uses perfecive.

And now I have explained why “present tense” can be used in past contexts. “Present tense” is our progressive conceptual. It’s about a habitual action or one that is part of a situation. So there goes a paragraph or two in Goodwin’s grammar that we don’t need because the explanation is meaningless in our paradigm.

Here’s our table:

ASPECT         FLAVOR =>  eventive           conceptual

Imperfective                            ksunegrapse    ksuggrapso

Progressive                              isan                 eisi

Perfective

Now let’s look at Goodwin’s claim that the progressive forms can mean “attempt”. It’s another thing I haven’t found in Thucydides. But the concept of attempting to do something can mean repeating an action multiple times. The lack of result in contexts that use progressive may have led to the idea that this form is used to mean “attempt”. There may be other Greek authors that more clearly use it in contexts that fit the connotation of attempt. But by and large it’s not inherent in the progressive aspect. There is an actual verb for “attempt” but LSJ doesn’t cite to any uses in Thucydides. Doesn’t mean they’re not there, just means LSJ uses other sources.

The problem, which I will state over and over, is that existing grammars rely on sources that mistakenly read meaning into morphology. We will get rid of several concepts that claim meaning is inherent in the morphology, when I can show that it derives from expressed or implied context.

Context is king. Make this your mantra.

By the way, while doing something over the weekend, I found a version of Goodwin that is not locked. When you have it open, you can use CTRL F and search on things like “conditional”, then put your own bookmarks in this to get to it quickly when I discuss it on the blog. You can also put postits on the file to show what Goodwin got wrong and what’s right.

https://archive.org/details/greekgrammar00gooduoft

21st Century Classical Greek -- imperfective definition

So we know that ksunegrapse is imperfective because the psi is really phi plus sigma, and the sigma is there to mark the imperfective, while the eta is the augment that belongs with the eventive flavor of aspect.

And the imperfective conceptual is ksuggrapso, with the sigma marker. The double gamma is something called “euphony”. The eta of the eventive separates the nu of ksun from the gamma of grafo, but the conceptual doesn’t have augment. The nu does something called “assimilation” in Hebrew and becomes another gamma.

Now, what is the definition of imperfective, and what is the definition of eventive as distinct from conceptual?

Imperfective is about action, which may be complete but may only be in prospect of being completed. Imperfective addresses action, not the result of the action, as distinct from perfective which is all about results.

Imperfective eventive in particular is about something that happens, possibly more than once. This implies that the result was not permanent, and even that it reversed itself. Imperfective is used for motion in alternating directions.

Thucydides often uses imperfective eventive for things that happen in multiple places, or at multiple times, or to multiple people. Sometimes more than one of these features applies, and the second conjugated verb in this section is an example.

Epolemisan has the imperfective sigma and the eventive augment. Thucydides is writing about wars, and he uses imperfective eventive because there were multiple battles in different places at different times, each with two or more mutually antagonistic parties. Not only were there multiple battles, the war went on, with a couple of breaks, for nearly 30 years. With all the killing, and the terrible plague, as well as famines, you can see that the armies had to field young people at the end who might not have been born at the start. And the battles occurred all over the peninsula, in the territory of the various city-states. That’s an extreme example of multiple places, times, and people covered by an imperfective eventive verb.

So Thucydides didn’t just say “I wrote…” He said “At various times, I wrote…” In fact, he didn’t even say that, because ksungraffo is an idiom for writing things down. Thucydides didn’t make this stuff up. He took what was happening and put it into words. He talks later about interviewing people to contribute to the work, and explains that he didn’t quote any of them directly because the info he got was inexact or mutually contradictory. He did other research and used what seemed most likely to be true; that’s what he wrote down.

And he did it on the fly. Something would happen, and Thucydides would take note of it before he could forget about it, then later he would review things and add information. There’s a note coming up which shows that he (re)wrote his introduction after the terrible plague, which he survived although the famous statesman Pericles died.

Thucydides is going to use imperfective eventive a lot, not just because the war lasted a long time or happened all over, but also because it’s the verb for simple action without implying a result. (Yes, people acted in order to achieve a result; I’ll discuss that when I get to voice.) Less frequently, he uses it because he has to talk about repetition of a reversed action. Memorize that definition, and you’ll understand the nuances of the lion’s share of the verbs in Peloponnesian War.

21st Century Classical Greek -- our first aspect

So let’s start with the first conjugated verb in Thucydides. We’ll start building our aspectual structure, and I’ll give you something to memorize, and then I’ll inventory the verbs in the 1^st section of the 1^st book of Thucydides to fill out the table.

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.