21st Century Classical Greek -- voice

So I’ve promised to explain everything about gerundives once I explain everything about voice, and here it is.

“Voice” (technical term diathesis) is the label attached to one of several vectors in understanding Greek verbs. There’s 

“mood” (21^st century term “modality”);

aspect (old label “tense”);

and definiteness, the feature that drives use of gerundives instead of conjugated verbs.

The old grammars claim there are four voices: active; passive; middle; and middle-passive.

They are ill-defined; Charles Conrad says so. I mean, if “active” means relating to an action, show me a verb that isn’t related to an action. Even gerundives display action, although from a less definite, more “descriptive”, perspective than a conjugated verb.

In fact, “active” verbs all connote actions deliberately undertaken for the sake of some end result. In imperfective eventive, there is no implication that the result came about or persisted, but very few people voluntarily do something without some concept, however hazy, of having something come of it. That’s “active” voice. I have labeled this “executive voice” to make a distinction from the old way of defining things.

Passive verbs require a structure with a grammatical subject that is the logical object of the verb. Passives provide a strictly intransitive structure, which I will demonstrate later is one of three types of transitivity in Greek. As intransitives, they tend to be descriptive.

The passive uses the “subject” as an object of a single verb; the anti-passive uses the object of one verb as the subject of a different verb. That’s why I’m retaining the word “passive” as a label, although its strict meaning relates to the sufferer (“patient”) of an action.

The other two voices are mis-defined. The grammars tell you that middle voice is reflexive. But that’s not true; context is king, and without specific wording in the context, verbs in middle voice are not reflexive. I’ll give you examples in later posts of reflexive structures that use executive voice.

Conrad defines middle-passive as an action that happens spontaneously or under external influence, even force. In other words, everything that isn’t executive or passive.

Middle voice is also used where we don’t have a strictly intransitive structure, but we don’t have deliberate action.

Why did the old grammars think “middle voice” was different from the other voice? Because every verb conjugated in middle voice has the sigma marker of the imperfective. Again, the old grammars interpreted morphology as meaning.

Why did the “everything else” morphology in progressive or perfective get labeled “middle-passive”?

Well, for one thing the “everything else” morphology uses almost the same conjugational endings regardless of aspect. Where they split is on flavors (which will be important later when I change a conjugational paradigm).

Aspect             Eventive                                  Conceptual

Imperfective    μην/ο/το/μεθα/σθε/ντο            μαι/ει/ται/μεθα/σθε/νται

Progressive      μην/ου/το/μεθα/σθε/ντο          μαι/ει/ται/μεθα/σθε/νται

Perfective        μην/σο/το/μεθα/σθε/ντο          μαι/σαι/ται/μεθα/σθε/νται

The gerundives go further. Impersonal gerundives have the following endings:

1)         -ein is the progressive conceptual i.g in executive voice; -sthai otherwise. There is no progressive eventive i.g.. morphology.

2)         -sai is the imperfective eventive in executive voice; -sthai otherwise.

3)         ­-ein is the imperfective conceptual for executive voice; -sthai otherwise.

4)         -nai is the ending for the perfective conceptual executive voice. Guess what the other voice ending is?

Personal gerundives break out by voice as follows:

1)         -antes, -ontes, and -untes are the endings in executive voice.

2)         -entes is the ending in passive voice.

3)         Otherwise personal gerundives take -men- between the root and the personal ending.

Because they are the “everything else” voice, I label middle and middle-passive base voice throughout these posts. I’m going to do one more post on voice before I show another reason why bundling them together is not a problem.