21st Century Classical Greek -- the anti-passive

So here we are back with the text of our first subsection, and I have bolded the material for this post. And I said I was going to tell you why the grammars are wrong to say that the subject of an “infinitive” is in the accusative.

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.

What we have here is a structure known in the 21^st century to exist in a number of languages, the anti-passive.

The anti-passive is a useful structure in languages with a lot of cases. It simplifies sentences. It allows the object of one verb (or verbal derivative like elpisas) to be the subject of another verb,  without changing case or explicitly telling the audience that the grammatical object is the same physical object as the other verb takes for its subject.

We have them in English, even though our case structure is so simple: “he set the pot to boiling”.

Notice that the end of that phrase uses an -ing word, normally considered a gerund, in a phrase that looks like an infinitive.  That makes it more comfortable for English speakers that I call esesthai a gerundive, but it does nothing for speakers of other languages and that’s why I didn’t list it among the features of the impersonal gerundive in last week’s post.

Impersonal gerundives don’t take person/number/gender endings; they are more limited: -ein, -sai, -nai and -sthai. 

Impersonal gerundives have a number of uses, including replacing conjugated verbs. In the case of the anti-passive here, esesthai refers to something that hadn’t happened but which Thucydides expected to happen based on other information.

Like personal gerundives, impersonal gerundives can represent substantives, but the type of substantive is limited by aspect to event, habit or situation, and result (imperfective, progressive, perfective, respectively).

In a later post I will give you more evidence that the subject of an infinitive is not necessarily in the accusative.

What ending an i.g. has depends on its voice, and now I can give you a 21^st century definition of voice.