21st Century Classical Greek -- negatives 1

Time to look at a very important part of language, negatives. Two negatives are in this third subsection.

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.

Oute…oute is neither…nor.

There are two ways to negate verbs, ou which we have here, and mi, μὴ.

One of the big problems with White is that he never discusses negation. It’s not listed in his table of contents; it’s not listed in his index. Leaving out such an important part of language is a serious flaw in a book that is preparing you to read Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, which is some 800 pages long in the Loeb Classics Library edition. You know that such a long work will definitely have negatives in it.

Goodwin claims that there are two forms of verb with which ou is used, but we can see here that ou negates megala, not a verb. Goodwin says ou occurs with adjectives when they are not part of a conditional statement and when they refer to definite persons or things. He gives one example of definite and one of non-definite. He puts the cart before the horse, as so many grammars do with autos: when an author wants to designate specific persons or things, he uses ou[k].

So in I 1.3 ou megala relates to the two ta’s at the start of the subsection, which relate to kinisis auti at the start of subsection 2, a specific action.

I am going to have to revisit the topic of negation more than once because Goodwin gets into things we haven’t had examples of yet and when we do, I’ll explain why the negation works the way it does.

For now, see section 1611, page 346 about impersonal gerundives. Goodwin admits that the context determines which negation to use by distinguishing between quoted speech and direct speech, and then saying that there are exceptions. He gives no examples and no citations so we are on our own. By analogy with what he has already said, we can expect ou with an i.g. in a specific context and mi in a context where you can’t be specific.

Go through your favorite author and see if what Goodwin says pans out. One thing is for sure, in subsection 3 we wouldn’t have known megala’s antecedent was specific until we got to the start of subsection 2.  You can’t rely on a narrow context to support Goodwin’s claims