21st Century Classical Greek -- causative and absolute

We’re working over the first subsection of Thucydides to a fair-thee-well because there’s lots of grammar in it and in particular, because it lets me destroy stuff in the old grammars. The old grammarians were hypnotized by verb morphology and virtually ignored context, and they came up with some really weird concepts as a result.

The gerundive kathistamenou in this subsection lets me pound on two of them.

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.

When you are in Perseus, and you click on this word, the word tool tells you it is causative.

What is being caused by the wars being a settled thing?

Nothing.

Unless you count the point when Thucydides decided to start writing.

Which is arksamenos, with “Thucydides” for its antecedent. What’s the antecedent of kathistamenou?

There isn’t one.  There’s no substantive in “genitive” singular for kathistamenou to hang from.

But if you click on euthus, the Word Tool will tell you that with a genitive gerundive, it means just as that action happens.

Now look at the LSJ entry for kathistimi.  Is “bring down” causative? No, it’s simply transitive. Is “set up” causative? It’s transitive. What about “make”, “reckon”, “get”? Nope.

Causative means to cause the execution of some action, not to execute it. The contexts cited in LSJ are not long enough to support the notion of causality. If we get to something that the word tool marks as causative, and I think the context supports that nuance, I’ll let you know.

So even if you were trying to think of kathistamenou as a genitive absolute, this dictionary entry shows you that the timing is in euthus, not in the gerundive, all the more so as the gerundive is a progressive conceptual, not a progressive eventive.

Every single grammarian of Greek has a different definition for “genitive absolute”, and one of them (Gildersleeve) copies from his own Latin grammar.  What’s more, the most comprehensible definition is in Allen and Greenough’s Latin grammar, but the Greek grammars of Smyth, Farrar, and Gildersleeve don’t agree with A&G or with each other. That’s a “fuzzy” definition. There is no objective proof that something exists unless everybody agrees on the definition of what that something is.

The next time I refer to the absolute, I will give you more information on why the absolute doesn’t exist.

Experiment with Wordpress is over

 I asked people reading this blog to try the new Wordpress interface and some of you did.

The interface is nice, I even found out after some experimenting how to clean it up by getting rid of irrelevant graphics.

But if you want to use Wordpress for a blog, either start there or convert over before you have put up more than 100 posts.

Because the Wordpress import app doesn't work the way you want.

You can import all your posts to have Wordpress addressees. Your images will follow.

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Your index pages will get Wordpress addresses.

The posts that they link to will still have addresses on your old site.

You will have to re-create every link on those pages to point to the Wordpress address of the post.

With nearly 1200 posts, I wasn't willing to go through that pain. I brought it to the attention of Wordpress support;  They probably won't do anything about it, unless they put it in their highest-priced site option.

So it was worth the experiment but Wordpress isn't the place to put a long-term blog that you move from a previous host. 

21st Century Classical Greek -- gerundives 4

Now I’m going to inventory the gerundives in our first subsection to show how the meaning grows from 1) context and 2) aspect. I’ll give you the aspect information; I want you to look up every gerundive in the Perseus Word Tool to reinforce how tense labels translate to aspect.

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.

Arksamenos – imperfective eventive. Perseus shows you that this is masculine nominative singular; its antecedent is Thoukudides, that is, in a sense it describes the author as making a beginning. The context shows that this is a past event because Thucydides had to make a beginning or his history wouldn’t exist.

Kathistamenou – progressive conceptual. This is a perfect example of what’s wrong with tense labels. As a “present” participle, the word nevertheless comes in a past connotation because it happened before Thucydides started writing. The point of its aspect is that it had become a settled situation, not just a series of border battles which would have been more suited by imperfective eventive.

Elpisas – same as arksamenos, once again referring to Thucydides’ actions. Those of you who already know some Greek may be surprised to see “hope” used as an event, but you didn’t look at the dictionary entry carefully. It can also mean “watch out for [something]”.

Progegenimenon – is our first perfective aspect and later, I’ll go over it in more detail, both to tell you about perfective and to discuss the root verb gignomai. Thucydides uses it here because the old wars have closed out; the Peloponnesian War was not an extension of them or a do-over. He will also use perfective for the poets, whose work is fixed in content.

Tekmairomenos – again refers to Thucydides. As progressive conceptual, it refers to the situation he is in, as having formed a judgment about the war he is recording.

Akmazontes – this progressive conceptual is the situation of the combatants. Notice that, in combination with the progressive eventive isan, it gives the nuance that the enemies achieved the height of their preparations in several steps, not one fell swoop. If Thucydides had used imperfective eventive, he would shoved those steps under the rug.

Horon – progressive conceptual. As masculine singular nominative, it again refers to Thucydides. It refers to his situation of perceiving a specific thing, which is expressed in the next two gerundives.

Ksunistamonon – progressive conceptual, the enemies reached a situation where some of them had allied together. Notice that the euthus in the men phrase modifies this act of allying together.

Dianooumenon – progressive conceptual. Being in the de phrase, this is the counterpoint to the euthus, not to the joining up. Some of the enemies took their time deciding which alliance to pick.

Once again. Thucydides pins down his writing and the war being fought. But all the actions that led him to start writing are rather described as happening than stated to happen. Some of them are expressed in progressive conceptual because they only contributed to Thucydides’ decision when they had become settled situations – the whole war could have been averted at any point while they were going on.

I brought up a concept with elpisas that deserves to be one of your mantras, and I’ll give another example of why it’s important later. For now the mantra is

KNOW THE VERB.

The lexicons are formatted so that what a student sees first relates to difficult grammar that probably sent them to the dictionary. That only works when we are focused on morphology.

Now that we are focused on meaning, with the mantra CONTEXT IS KING, we are going to find that the top part of the dictionary entry doesn’t help us with meaning. Often, the part that helps us with Thucydides is at the bottom.

You cannot read Greek while running. If you don’t know the verb, you won’t get the meaning. There’s another part to it, however, and I’ll get around to it before we hit lesson 20.

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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.

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.

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.