21st Century Classical Greek -- mi verbs

Book I section 13.6 lets me start a topic that most of the grammars leave until last, which is a real shame.  

καὶ Ἴωσιν ὕστερον πολὺ γίγνεται ναυτικὸν ἐπὶ Κύρου Περσῶν πρώτου βασιλεύοντος καὶ Καμβύσου τοῦ υἱέος αὐτοῦ, τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἑαυτοὺς θαλάσσης Κύρῳ πολεμοῦντες ἐκράτησάν τινα χρόνον. καὶ Πολυκράτης Σάμου τυραννῶν ἐπὶ Καμβύσου ναυτικῷ ἰσχύων ἄλλας τε τῶν νήσων ὑπηκόους ἐποιήσατο καὶ Ῥήνειαν ἑλὼν ἀνέθηκε τῷ Ἀπόλλωνι τῷ Δηλίῳ. Φωκαῆς τε Μασσαλίαν οἰκίζοντες Καρχηδονίους ἐνίκων ναυμαχοῦντες:

Anethike is a prefixed form of the verb τίθημι, so copy that and paste it into Wiktionary to see the conjugation.

Tithimi, “put, place”, like histimi, has an intransitive imperfective eventive (“second aorist”). The two belong to a subclass of non-mai verbs called -mi verbs. Eimi, both “be” and “come, go”, belong to this group, although they don’t have the i.i.e.

Another -mi verb is δίδωμι, “give”. It has an i.i.e. as well.

Do you notice anything about the -mi verbs? Their meanings are some of the most frequently used in any language.

They also conjugate differently from most verbs. Where have you seen this phenomenon before?

Well, if you have studied other languages, like I have, you know that these simple words are classed as “irregular” in most languages. Personally, I feel as if they are the most ancient, and the speakers of languages just sort of made up how to say words, until the number of words they used had multiplied so much they started copying conjugations instead of making up new ones.

Learn tithimi and didomi and notice the other similarities with histimi. You can apply these similarities to other -mi verbs – although not to “be” and “come, go” as you already know from learning them.

And remember, these verbs that have the i.i.e. may show up in ergative structures. When you find one with an agent expressed as hupo X where X is in the -on case, look at it carefully for a logical object in the -oi case. And let me know if you find them.

I can’t say that only -mi verbs have i.i.e.s. If you already knew Greek, you may know whether it’s true or not.

The old grammars mostly leave -mi verbs until last, as if they’re too hard to learn. Being high-frequency and quite regular within their own province, -mi verbs should be addressed early on. And that’s why I’m doing them now, a little over a year into the posts – there are lots to come.

Notice the reference here to Cambyses, son of Kuros, who sponsored the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Some people claim that Judaism didn’t exist until the time of Cambyses, which begs the question what religion was practiced in the Second Temple in the time of Kuros.  The claim fails the Test of Occam’s Razor, however, due to the reference to Israel as an ethnic group on the Merneptah stele of 1220 BCE, and those pigless highland settlements of the 1100s BCE; if you ignore part of the data (a fallacy called sampling bias), you fail the Test.