21st Century Classcal Greek -- voice continued

So I’m working on objective definitions of voice such as executive (deliberate action) and passive (defined for now by a structure with specific uses), and I just showed that middle and middle-passive conjugation endings are nearly indistinguishable within each flavor column of our aspectual table.

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

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..

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, and – you guessed it -- -sthai otherwise. There is no perfective eventive i.g.

Personal gerundives break out 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.

Now let me show that -men- cannot mark reflexive morphology. In our first subsection we have:

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.

None of these personal gerundives is reflexive. Each of them points at an action that was neither deliberate nor intransitive.

So look at arksamenos. Because it’s imperfective, it gets a label of “middle voice” in the Perseus Word Tool, and the old grammars tell you that middle voice is reflexive. What is reflexive about Thucydides starting to write? Nothing. What nuance was he trying to give his audience when he used this form?

Well, he deliberately did the actual writing intending to produce a written work (ksunegrapse), but he did not begin for the purpose of making a beginning, it’s just that there would be no writing at all if he hadn’t made a beginning, and so he did not use executive voice. By using a personal gerundive, he references the start or describes himself as starting; maybe he made some notes or wrote in a journal “They’re fighting again in Achaia province”, assuming that it was just another border war. He deliberately turned it into a serious history when he could tell it had gone beyond that.

Next week I’ll discuss the other reason why it’s base voice.