21st Century Classical Greek -- reported speech

Thucydides Book I section 5.2 starts with a verb you were supposed to learn. Stop and review it if you don’t recognize the form.

δηλοῦσι δὲ τῶν τε ἠπειρωτῶν τινὲς ἔτι καὶ νῦν, οἷς κόσμος καλῶς τοῦτο δρᾶν, καὶ οἱ παλαιοὶ τῶν ποιητῶν τὰς πύστεις τῶν καταπλεόντων πανταχοῦ ὁμοίως ἐρωτῶντες εἰ λῃσταί εἰσιν, ὡς οὔτε ὧν πυνθάνονται ἀπαξιούντων τὸ ἔργον, οἷς τε ἐπιμελὲς εἴη εἰδέναι οὐκ ὀνειδιζόντων.

The grammarians claim that reported speech always uses the same “tense” as the original speech. Last week I pointed out how reporting speech by tense can lead to an inaccurate report, but reporting speech by aspect is more accurate.

Actually in this subsection we have a reported question, but the same rule applies: Thucydides is reporting a past event when people living on the litoral were in the habit of asking anybody who made landfall whether they were in the habit of pirates.

And here we have our third level of certainty, eii [eidenai]. Thucydides is not signing up that the questioners wanted to know if they were under threat. The modality related to investment in the truth of a statement is epistemic.

Biblical Hebrew has two epistemic morphologies, one for certainty and one for uncertainty. The certainty epistemic shows up in the creation narrative and the one about making the tabernacle. A narrator can’t use this form unless his audience has tangible or cultural evidence of the truth of what the narrator says. The truth of the creation narrative lies in the evidence of Gd in His works. The truth of the tabernacle narrative lies in an audience that has a tabernacle before them – some time before the Pelishtim attacked Shiloh and stole the ark of the covenant. The uncertainty epistemic is widely used in giving orders or commandments; it gives the commander the option of refusing to punish people who don’t carry out the command. This is important in Deuteronomy where for the first time, Judaism expresses the out that a person might not have learned Fear of Heaven and that, in addition to four outs expressesd in Leviticus 5, means that either an earthly court or a Heavenly court might refuse to punish them.

In Classical Greek, an indicative verb is as certain as it gets. The epistemic here is as uncertain as it gets. Why would the people ask if they didn’t think they were under threat? Well, everybody went a-viking in those days, so they were’t casting moral aspersions. They just wanted to know the habits of the newcomers.

So now, one of Goodwin’s categories of conditionals has ei plus an epistemic, the dreaded “future less vivid”. In 21^st century terms, it’s a “condition in the truth of which the speaker has not invested.” If there was an apodosis, it would be an plus another epistemic. This makes sense because if you’re not sure the protasis occurred, it’s impossible to be sure the apodosis occurred.

Goodwin points out that an imperfective conceptual epistemic cannot be used in either protasis or apodosis, except in reported speech or questions, and then the structure would have to be eventive plus whatever plus ei plus i.c.epistemic plus an plus i.c.epistemic, if the original speech used i.c. indicative. What sense does that make?

Well, it doesn’t. Remember I said that the idea of substituting one aspect or flavor for another fails because there are strict usage lines between them. The same is true for modality. So if the reported speech uses an epistemic in the protasis and apodosis, the original speech used them too. That only makes sense. You meet a stranger, you ask “are you a pirate”, you can’t be sure they are and you don’t want to arrogantly imply that you know all about them.

With an original i.c. indicative, the speech would be “if I promise to do this, then you have to promise to do that.” The reporter can’t turn this into an epistemic because that would invalidate the reporter’s credibility; if he’s not invested in accurately reporting what was said, what is he even talking about?

So now go through Goodwin or Smyth or whatever reference you are using, and black out all the notes on reported speech that have “tenses” converting back and forth. It doesn’t happen in aspectual usage. Now you have more brain cells freed up for other things.

There’s more to the epistemic and I’ll discuss it when I get an example.