21st Century Classical Greek -- multiple uses for the same spelling

Today we’re going to fix two problems with the verb conjugations in the old grammars. Click on afairisetai and look at what the Word Tool tells you.

τῆς γὰρ ἐμπορίας οὐκ οὔσης, οὐδ᾽ ἐπιμειγνύντες ἀδεῶς ἀλλήλοις οὔτε κατὰ γῆν οὔτε διὰ θαλάσσης, νεμόμενοί τε τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστοι ὅσον ἀποζῆν καὶ περιουσίαν χρημάτων οὐκ ἔχοντες οὐδὲ γῆν φυτεύοντες, ἄδηλον ὂν ὁπότε τις ἐπελθὼν καὶ ἀτειχίστων ἅμα ὄντων ἄλλος ἀφαιρήσεται, τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀναγκαίου τροφῆς πανταχοῦ ἂν ἡγούμενοι ἐπικρατεῖν, οὐ χαλεπῶς ἀπανίσταντο, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ οὔτε μεγέθει πόλεων ἴσχυον οὔτε τῇ ἄλλῃ παρασκευῇ.

It’s a real mish-mash, isn’t it? How could a verb simultaneously be so many things? Well, the verb isn’t the issue at all, it’s the spelling. In the old grammars, that spelling shows up in three separate sections on conjugation. Actually, this happens in English, too; “I set the dish down” vs “I can set the dish down”, one of which is probably past tense and the other sort of a future tense.

Context is king when you want to know the meaning; morphology alone won’t get you there.

Let’s deal with the first one first. Here’s our aspect table again.

ASPECT         FLAVOR =>  eventive           conceptual

Imperfective

Progressive

Perfective

Based on what the word tool tells you, afairisetai could belong in the last row as “future perfect”. Because it’s labeled “future”, you might think it goes in the conceptual column where the old “future tense” belongs. Because it’s labeled “perfect” you might think it goes in the bottom row – but that position is already populated by the morphology formerly known as “perfect tense”.

And in fact Goodwin, page 156, section 704 says that “future perfect” is passive voice.  The only reason this verb form was labeled “perfect” is because in Attic Greek it has the same reduplication as the perfect and pluperfect tenses (perfective conceptual and eventive in our schema). You can see this in White, page 241, section 770, alongside the imperfective passive.

Remember, only imperfective has a passive in non-mai verbs; progressive and perfective aspects do not have a passive. With -mai endings, verbs have only passive and base voices.

Now remember that you use passive structures for complete intransitivity. This subsection of Thucydides refers to strangers showing up and taking away produce of those who settled the Peloponnese ahead of the Hellenes. By definition, if you take X away, you have a transitive structure. So “future perfect” or “imperfective conceptual passive,” that’s the wrong label to assign this verb in this context.

The second choice is imperfective conceptual indicative in base voice. That has the nuance that the taking would not be deliberate; I hope you can come up with a citation to a context where it is used that way. While technically it’s a form you could generate, that doesn’t mean any surviving texts use it. Same thing happens in Biblical Hebrew.

That leaves only one option, and that gets us into the subject of modality (formerly known as “mood”).

21st Century Classical Greek -- noun case quiz

This week is a quiz on noun cases. Go through these and identify where they go in my system – oi, -on, -ous, -ois. Some of them have articles and you were supposed to memorize those. Some are plural so it’s obvious. Go for it.

I.1.

τὸν πόλεμον

τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων

τῶν προγεγενημένων

τῇ πάσῃ

τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν

τοῖς Ἕλλησιν

τῶν βαρβάρων

τὰ …τὰ

τοὺς πολέμους

τὰ ἄλλα.

 

I.2.

τὰ πρότερα

τὴν …ἀπολείποντες

τῆς ἐμπορίας

τῆς .. τροφῆς

τῇ ἄλλῃ παρασκευῇ.

 

These you should be able to tell because they are plural and the endings look like the definite article plural.

I.1

ἀμφότεροι

ἑκατέρους

ἀνθρώπων

τεκμηρίων

 

I.2

πλειόνων

χρημάτων

ἀτειχίστων

 

By the way, notice in 2.2, that khrimaton ouk ekhontes is another negation taking the -on case.

So don’t you feel a little better about knowing noun cases?

I am going to leave the “gender” labels alone even though, as I said, they do not predict declension. It won’t matter  because you are going to learn each noun as you come to it instead of memorizing categories that don’t apply to all similar nouns and end up being more confusing than helpful.

21st Century Classical Greek -- declension categories

All right, section 2, subsection 2. This is long so go through it first and mark everything you’ve seen before.

τῆς γὰρ ἐμπορίας οὐκ οὔσης, οὐδ᾽ ἐπιμειγνύντες ἀδεῶς ἀλλήλοις οὔτε κατὰ γῆν οὔτε διὰ θαλάσσης, νεμόμενοί τε τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστοι ὅσον ἀποζῆν καὶ περιουσίαν χρημάτων οὐκ ἔχοντες οὐδὲ γῆν φυτεύοντες, ἄδηλον ὂν ὁπότε τις ἐπελθὼν καὶ ἀτειχίστων ἅμα ὄντων ἄλλος ἀφαιρήσεται, τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀναγκαίου τροφῆς πανταχοῦ ἂν ἡγούμενοι ἐπικρατεῖν, οὐ χαλεπῶς ἀπανίσταντο, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ οὔτε μεγέθει πόλεων ἴσχυον οὔτε τῇ ἄλλῃ παρασκευῇ.

Having learned the declension of the definite article, you know what case emporias is.

But why is it the -on case? Check ousis. It’s from eimi, “be”. How could you have “be” with anything but the -oi case?

It’s not the “be” guiding the grammar here, it’s the ouk, a negation.

Goodwin does not discuss this issue.

But it’s familiar to me because I know Russian, another Indo-European aspectual language. In Russian, nyet yeyo means “she’s not here” and uses the negative particle plus the genitive of the pronoun.

Which is an important illustration of how confusing case labels can be.  The same pronoun form yeyo is also accusative. You have to look at the context to know which case you’re using.

The old Greek grammars try to place nouns into categories (“o declension” etc.) that are supposed to predict what the declension is. But there are so many categories, and so many variations within the categories, and so many nouns that you would think fit in one category but actually belong to a different one, that once again, the categories stress your mind without helping you memorize the actual nouns.

You have to learn the noun just like you have to learn the verb.  

So I will give you high-frequency nouns to memorize, and since Thucydides is about to analyze the history of the Greeks, you need to know thalassa, sea, and gi, earth. These are the two theaters of operation in wars of the Greeks throughout their history.

And of course, as I said several weeks ago, I’m going to use different labels for the cases.

Nominative becomes -oi;

Genitive becomes -on (meaning omega nu);

Dative becomes -ois;

Accusative becomes -ous.

21st Century Classical Greek -- base voice personal gerundives

There are three base voice personal gerundives in this subsection. Let’s pound home what these gerundives do.

φαίνεται γὰρ ἡ νῦν Ἑλλὰς καλουμένη οὐ πάλαι βεβαίως οἰκουμένη, ἀλλὰ μεταναστάσεις τε οὖσαι τὰ πρότερα καὶ ῥᾳδίως ἕκαστοι τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀπολείποντες βιαζόμενοι ὑπό τινων αἰεὶ πλειόνων.

Nun … kaloumeni means “now called”. The Hellas in the middle is what the personal gerundive refers to.

This is part of a definite noun phrase, “the [region] now called Hellas.”

Notice that the timing derives from the context, that nun. The old grammars would not have called kaloumeni an “absolute” because it is in the -oi case, not an oblique case. However, they give no reason why only oblique cases could be termed absolutes. And as I already showed, things that might be absolutes don’t indicate timing because it’s present in the context, not the morphology.

As a progressive conceptual, kaloumeni means people being in the habit of calling a specific region Hellas.

And being in base voice, kaloumeni shows that the name was not deliberately adopted for the purpose of naming the region, which would be executive voice.

Oikoumeni refers to a non-deliberate settling of Hellas, as if people just spontaneously wandered into the region and settled there.

Now we have some wording which shows how the phrasing has to break out. Apoleipontes is an executive voice personal gerundive. Tin eauton apoleipontes means “each one his own [property] leaving.” Thucydides can’t be definite about any individual who did this, so he can’t use a conjugated verb.

Then biazomenoi, “constrained”, meaning nobody deliberately forced them out. In the next subseection Thucydides will talk about why people felt constrained to leave beyond the fact of tinon aiei pleionon showing up.

The entire phrase is ekastoi…biazomenoi upo, etc.

Remember, the only conjugated verb in this subsection is fainetai. All the other events, Thucydides refers to by description. He recognizes their modern effects, but he can’t conjugate his verb.

By the way, go to White, page 235, section 760 and if you didn’t already learn eautou, the real reflexive pronoun, do it now. If you did learn it, go to page 236, section 763 and learn tis, which  you have seen in tini ton barbaron. The Middle Liddell entry will show you that it’s one of the most flexible words in Classical Greek, so it’s worth learning just for itself.