So I skipped most of Thucydides Book I section 7 and I’m going straight to section 8, subsection 2 to discuss an important use of the “second aorist”, which is intransitive for histimi.
καταστάντος δὲ τοῦ Μίνω ναυτικοῦ πλωιμώτερα ἐγένετο παρ᾽ ἀλλήλους (οἱ γὰρ ἐκ τῶν νήσων κακοῦργοι ἀνέστησαν ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ, ὅτεπερ καὶ τὰς πολλὰς αὐτῶν κατῴκιζε)
We have what looks like a subject in the -oi case, and an agentive phrase hup’ autou, and in English we have structures like “the drawing was done by him.”
But anestisan is not passive. It’s “aorist 2” and it’s executive voice.
How do we get a passive nuance from an executive voice verb?
Well we don’t. Remember, passive voice appears in the structure for intransitivity.
What Thucydides does in 8.2 is use an intransitive structure, both by his use of case and by his use of a second aorist verb form known to have intransitive use. There’s only one way to translate that in English, and it’s called passive, not intransitive.
What’s the connection? A language of northeast Anatolia, where the Indo-Europeans (and Semites) developed.. It’s called Hurrian, and it is classed as “ergative”, which means that the object of a transitive verb has a marker and the subject doesn’t. However the “subject” of a “passive” structure in Hurrian has a marker – and we know that the grammatical subject of a passive verb is the logical object of the verb.
For Hurrian, there is no passive verb morphology. There are intransitive structures. Greek retained this for histimi and a few other verb roots, and developed a special verb form to make these structures express deliberate actions, as well as a separate intransitive verb form in all other contexts where it wanted both intransitivity and non-deliberate expression. It just so happens that this last verb form sometimes looks like the non-deliberate transitive verb morphology (base voice) and so we get labels like “middle-passive”.
This gives us a new triplet in Classical Greek, the transitivity triplet.
1)
Passive structures which
are completely intransitive.
2)
Ergative structures which present
action intransitively and allow as how the action was deliberate. The verb may
be a second aorist that Greek uses in intransitive structures. The object of
the verb in an ergative structure is in the same case as the grammatical
subject/logical object of a passive voice verb. Includes an agentive phrase.
3)
Transitive structures with
a verb in some voice other than passive. The agent is in the -oi case. There
may be an object in some other case that is dictated by the meaning of the context.
Semitic languages don’t appear to have ergative structures. I read a paper which claimed that the nifal in Hebrew does that but there are no case markers in Hebrew. If the N-stem in other Semitic languages appeared with a “nominative” object and an agent in some other form, that would show that other Semitic languages definitely have ergative structures. But, however, it doesn’t mean Biblical Hebrew does, analogous to the fact that Aramaic has no nifal.
I have found a paper on ergativity in Indo-European languages at Jstor. But – there’s always a but – the author over-emphasizes the role of voice and has no concept of aspect. If you still want to read it (you’ll need a Jstor login), let me know.
I have also found a paper on ergativity that describes its use in terms of something called valency; use of ergatives increases or decreases the valency of an expression. I don’t remember which, I didn’t bother to memorize it. It’s another one of those useless categorizations that makes you look smart in front of other linguists by throwing around the latest jargon.
I can assure you that Thucydides never thought of valency when he used an ergative structure. He knew that this was one of his options for expressing a deliberate action. Why he went for it may become clear when somebody finds all the ergative structures in Classical Greek of the 400s BCE and identifies how else they could have been said, and what nuance of meaning the ergative brings to the table.
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