21st Century Classical Greek -- gerundives 3

We’re starting on the three aspects and voices of gerundives, some of which used to be known as participles. The old claim that grammars made was that these were used as adjectives, substantives, and adverbs. None of the old grammars admits that they were also used as substitutes for 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.

In the last clause, I was able to point out that the adverb euthus has no verb to modify. Saying that it modifies the participles ignores the fact that this is a separate clause with no conjugated verbs; the action is carried by the gerundives.

Thucydides uses gerundives in these places as a sort of description of the action, and his audience accepts this as good grammar. They would never complain that “the verbs disappeared”.

I do not distinguish between past and present gerundives. The old grammars didn’t have to; they had already determined that the aorist, imperfect, and perfect participles were past actions.

In a world of aspect, how do I distinguish?

Well, I don’t have to. I go by the aspectual nuances of usage, and remember, this lets us ignore “present” conjugated verbs in clearly past actions, because we have progressive aspect, not present tense. The timing is not part of the verb morphology, it’s part of the context.

That gets rid of an old concept called the “genitive absolute” and its cousins, the dative and accusative forms. Supposedly, like conjugated verbs, participles encoded timing, one of the uses listed in White’s page 130 discussion. Now that we’re aspectual, the timing is no longer by definition encoded in the verb.

The definitions of the absolutes are fuzzy and the examples aren’t clear. Mostly, the examples are so short they don’t have enough context to let you distinguish them from other uses of the same morphology. The grammarians simply copied from their sources, added in results from recent papers, and there you are, with Goodwin’s long lists of notes that are sometimes contradictory.

The timing information for verb derivatives is no more part of the morphology than it is with the conjugated forms. It is contained in the CONTEXT. Euthus is the simplest example. I’ll have a better example later where I show how the old grammars derived the “absolute” from failing to distinguish their interpretation from what the morphology actually meant. There’s even an example where I had to bone up on the Megarean war to understand what Mr. T said.