21st Century Classical Greek -- conditionals

 I'm posting tonight cos on New Year's I wouldn't post.

Now we can start getting into conditionals. And what we are going to do is eliminate what, class? That’s right, the useless categories, especially the nasty confusing “future more/less vivid”. We’re going to show that modality and not aspect drives what a conditional means, and we’re going to eliminate a lot of Goodwin’s notes. I’m going to move to section 9 subsection 4 for now.

[4] φαίνεται γὰρ ναυσί τε πλείσταις αὐτὸς ἀφικόμενος καὶ Ἀρκάσι προσπαρασχών, ὡς Ὅμηρος τοῦτο δεδήλωκεν, εἴ τῳ ἱκανὸς τεκμηριῶσαι. καὶ ἐν τοῦ σκήπτρου ἅμα τῇ παραδόσει εἴρηκεν αὐτὸν “πολλῇσι νήσοισι καὶ Ἄργεϊ παντὶ ἀνάσσειν:” (Hom. Il. 2.108) οὐκ ἂν οὖν νήσων ἔξω τῶν περιοικίδων (αὗται δὲ οὐκ ἂν πολλαὶ εἶεν) ἠπειρώτης ὢν ἐκράτει, εἰ μή τι καὶ ναυτικὸν εἶχεν. εἰκάζειν δὲ χρὴ καὶ ταύτῃ τῇ στρατείᾳ οἷα ἦν τὰ πρὸ αὐτῆς.

The bolded phrase may look like it uses an impersonal gerundive with that -sai ending, but the word tool will show you that the same spelling can be labeled epistemic. There’s no provision for using “infinitives” in a protasis that Goodwin lists. He says “indicative” but the “infinitive” is not thought of as being indicative. See the distinction used in this article.

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008.02.24/

The old label for tekmiriosai was not only optative, it was aorist optative. Aorist was a past tense. This creates a cognitive dissonance with the old category “future less vivid” which is what Goodwin calls it when the protasis has an “optative”. The label is adopted from Latin. If you also know Latin, here's your chance to examine whether such conditionals always refer to future events.

Is Thucydides talking only about people in past times trusting what Homer said? This is where aspect works better than tense. As an imperfective eventive, tekmiriosai does not have to refer to a past event. It can refer to an event occurring in multiple places at multiple times involving multiple people, with no requirement that any of the people experienced the event at the same time or in the same place. We will see later that it didn’t have to occur in the past either.

If this is a conditional then a) the protasis and apodosis are reversed and b) the apodosis does not have an at the start. In fact the apodosis is only sort of hinted at, the audience that doesn’t trust Homer’s evidence won’t believe what Thucydides is saying.

We can see why we have an epistemic – not even an oblique – in the protasis. Everybody in the audience knows that Homer was a poet, not a historian. They also know that Homer was not alive when Agamemnon ruled, and had his information at tenth hand or something like that. Thucydides knows it too, and he is not signing up to the “witnesses” knowing what they were talking about.

Now look at Goodwin page 297, section 1393 bullet 2 at the bottom. Goodwin proposes a past tense in the apodosis but not only do we have no past tense in the apodosis, we don’t have a stated apodosis. There’s no evidence here for what Goodwin says.  In 1395 on page 298, he says you can have basically any mood [except infinitive] in the protasis for a general supposition. IOW having a non-indicative modality in the protasis does not mean you have a “future more/less vivid”. So his claims are too fuzzy to be useful. No wonder kids in British public schools had so much trouble learning Greek.

By changing to an aspectual verb description with strict definitions, we get rid of cognitive dissonances.

By changing to modality with objective definition, we show why a protasis would have an indicative (most certainty), oblique, or epistemic (least certainty) in the protasis. And most of Goodwin’s ten pages on conditionals go away.