21st Century Classical Greek -- -mai versus non-mai verbs

Now. Since I called the last post “negation 1”, you might think I should cover everything I learned about negation in a chunk. But I’d rather have you go sequentially through Thucydides. It lets me show you how he structured things, and that is going to bring out what’s wrong with Jowett’s translation. It does turn out later that most of what I have to say about conditional (“if-then”) statements clusters reviews 3 and 4. And there will be a consolidated roundup at the end of this thread. But how Thucydides structured his material is not discussed in any of the old grammars and it’s important to my contention that Thucydides wrote as he spoke, from the oral basis with which Greek material originated, reinforced by the theater and the agora and the basilica. If you know of an on-line work that does discuss these issues, I’d love to see the link.

Here’s another thing that none of the grammarians ever talk about, again, because they were looking at morphology, not at context, and they simply accepted that a given morphology of a given verb meant X without asking why that verb was there in the first place.

τὰ γὰρ πρὸ αὐτῶν καὶ τὰ ἔτι παλαίτερα σαφῶς μὲν εὑρεῖν διὰ χρόνου πλῆθος ἀδύνατα ἦν, ἐκ δὲ τεκμηρίων ὧν ἐπὶ μακρότατον σκοποῦντί μοι πιστεῦσαι ξυμβαίνει οὐ μεγάλα νομίζω γενέσθαι οὔτε κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους οὔτε ἐς τὰ ἄλλα.

When you click on ksumbainei, the Perseus Word Tool tells you that when used with an impersonal gerundive (“inf.”), you get “it happened to me to trust”.

But I told you gignomai means “happen”. So ou megala nomizo genesthai ought to mean “I thought they happened to not be great”.

But it’s also a pretty good demonstration of the split in use between all -mai verbs and all of the other verbs.

The -mai verbs are used to evaluate something (ou megala) and non-mai verbs are used for other purposes.

Ksumbainei pisteusai may mean “I happened”, but it’s not an evaluation, it’s soft-pedalling the deliberate decision Thucydides made not to trust some of his data.

I’ll point out other places where Thucydides could have used a -mai verb but used the other form with the same meaning, so that you know I’m not just making things up or seeing things that aren’t there.