21st Century Classical Greek -- gerundives 1

So I pointed out that there are only three conjugated verbs in the 50 words of the first subsection of Thucydides, and there are whole clauses that don’t have a conjugated verb. This is not how English works.

But it’s how Thucydides writes, and while I can’t find the reference any more, I distinctly remember a character in a novel complaining that he didn’t understand the Greek of his Christian scripture because “the verbs kept disappearing”. He was reading “Grenglish” expecting Greek to work like English. No two languages work alike. Pretending they do is a sign of a teacher who doesn’t really understand what they are teaching.

Thucydides gets across verbal concepts part of the time by verbal derivatives formerly known as participles and infinitives, but which I am going to rename for a couple of reasons.

The first is this very issue that they can substitute for conjugated verbs in some contexts.

The second is that changing the label removes a cognitive dissonance, the same as I just removed the cognitive dissonance of using a “present tense” in a past situation.

The third is that they get me to another set of re-labeling in a grammatical subject called “voice” that is specific to Classical Greek, and which will correct another misconception spread by grammars of Greek since time immemorial.

So I pointed to the last part of subsection one and I asked what the adverb euthus, “immediately” was modifying.

…καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ὁρῶν ξυνιστάμενον πρὸς ἑκατέρους, τὸ μὲν εὐθύς, τὸ δὲ καὶ διανοούμενον.

This clause has three verbal derivatives, which I have bolded. The Perseus word tool labels all of them participles. The function of a participle is an adjective or substantive. That’s not what these participles do; they substitute for verbs.

All three of them have endings which resemble adjectives; White gives declensions of participles on pages 230-231, sections 754 and 755. But there’s a problem. While horon is obviously a masculine singular nominative like luon in the paradigm, there’s nothing that looks like ksunistamenon or dianooumenon. He covers those on page 130, starting with section 492.

At the bottom of page 130, White identifies the participles he is discussing as adverbial in some cases, but he never deals with the fact that they substitute for conjugated verbs.

Why does Thucydides use unconjugated verbs where we would use normal verbs in English? This gets into a 21^st century realization about languages that also applies to Biblical Hebrew, and is present in Modern Standard Arabic.