21st Century Classical Greek -- gerundives 2

Thucydides uses more unconjugated verbal forms than conjugated verbs in his first subsection. There’s a reason for that and it’s a 21^st century realization about languages.

All languages have ways of expressing something less than certainty about the truth of what you’re saying. Greek has an additional issue that I call definiteness.

Certainty is an issue of epistemology, how much the speaker is personally invested in the truth of what they’re saying. It’s crucial to oral traditions; a narrator who claims to know more than his audience can stand for, may earn ridicule for it. In Biblical Hebrew I found clear signs that to avoid this, the narrator had to use different grammar for things his audience wouldn’t agree were true. I’ll say more about certainty later because it’s related to changes I will make in the conjugated verb paradigms.

Thucydides also has an issue that I call definiteness. He pins down some actions as actually happening, by using conjugated verbs for them.

Other actions he doesn’t pin down. He knows they happened but unless he is currently telling us the details, he simply references them. For these he uses verbal derivatives with adjectival endings.

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

These verbal derivatives used to be known as participles and were supposed to operate as adjectives or substantives. In a sense, Thucydides is describing the actions as taking place, not stating that they took place. Arabic, which has no progressive aspect morphology, uses “participles” to describe the subject as “somebody/thing that Xs [habitually]”.

In English, we have two types of participles, past and present. Again, they describe an action: “gone” or “going”. The “ing” participle is called a gerund.

It’s a good term, but since Thucydides uses “participles” as verbal references, not just adjectives or nouns, I’m going to call his derivatives gerundives.

There are gerundives for each aspect. What’s more, gerundives have different forms depending on something called “voice” which I will soon define fairly objectively.

How do we make sense of all this? It’s like trying to untangle the fundamental particles of the cosmos in physics.

In fact I am about to make it even worse, in a sense, because I’m not going to distinguish between past and present participles. I’m going to label all of them as gerundives and differentiate them by aspect/flavor and by voice when I explain it, and then I’ll add another type of gerundive with a different level of definiteness. But this change associates the gerundives more closely to their verbal sources in an aspectual system, than hanging onto terms like “past” or “present” that are only relevant to a tense system.