21st Century Classical Greek -- gignomai

To start out this week properly, go to Thucydides on Perseus, click on progegenimenon in this first subsection. Copy the top left word in Word Tool. Paste it into Wiktionary. Use Backspace to get rid of the English. Now go to the start of the word and delete the first three letters, pro-. Now hit enter.

You get the entry for the root gignomai.  Memorize the conjugation; you will need it, because this word, sometimes with a prefix, shows up a lot in Greek.

There are two important notes about gignomai. The first is that there is no sigma marker of the imperfective in the eventive, only in the conceptual.

Second, there is no executive voice for gignomai. Wiktionary pretends that there is, in the perfective aspect, but if you copy gegona, which is the only blue entry for that aspect, you can use your search engine to see if there’s anything on Perseus using it. There isn’t. This form isn’t attested in Classical Greek, it’s in the koine of Christian scripture. So we’re going to forget about labeling anything as executive voice for this verb.

The important thing about gignomai is that it’s the best possible paradigm for a deep split in Greek verbs. No verb with -mai in the dictionary entry (except one, and tell me you didn’t see that coming) has an executive voice in Classical Greek.

Instead, all of them have that intransitive passive voice, and a separate voice. This other voice is conjugated the same as the middle or middle-passive in non-mai verbs.

This is my other reason for calling the third voice “base voice”. It is common across all verbs, with the same conjugations and the same nuance.

So progegenimenon is a perfective conceptual personal gerundive in base voice, substantivized with a definite article, in genitive, as a plural referring to prior wars. When Goodwin and others claim that it is a “genitive absolute”, the timing actually comes from the pro- prefix, not the morphology of the root. As I said, Thucydides uses a perfective conceptual here to get the nuance of 1) something over and done with, 2) with emphasis on the existence of those wars, not the events involved.

And now just one tweak more, and you have it.

Only -mai verbs and the imperfective aspect of non-mai verbs have passive morphology. Progressive and perfective aspects of non-mai verbs have only executive voice and base voice. The reason that the old grammars call the latter “middle-passive” is something we’ll see in a later lesson.

This means you can only talk straight intransitive structures in -mai verbs and the imperfective of non-mai verbs. Otherwise you use base voice, unless you are talking about a deliberate action, which you can only do in non-mai verbs.

In the progressive and perfective aspects of non-mai verbs, you can only express deliberate actions or something that can be transitive but not deliberate. You can’t be intransitive in these aspects in a conjugated verb.

And since -mai verbs don’t have executive voice, they don’t express an action deliberately taken to achieve the normal results of that action. This has an important impact that I will discuss in a later post.