21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 6, negatives

1.                  Negation of verbs coordinates with aspect to produce several effects that translators have failed to capture. Jowett, in particular, applies his negatives to the wrong thing in sentences.

2.                  Grammatical  descriptions are, as usual, inexact. They also suffer from examples which eliminate too much context and sometimes are not cited to “live” examples.

3.                  What is being negated takes careful inspection of context due to the rounding of periods. This is partly what causes Jowett’s problems; he does not understand this rhetorical feature.

Grammars claim a strict association between ou and its derivatives, or mi and its derivatives, with morphology, which does not exist.

How to use negatives:

1.                  Negations precede the word they apply to.

2.                  An expression can have multiple negations. Since English can’t, translators have to do extra work or they leave a false impression.

3.                  Negations can be categorical (ou) or partitive (mi).

4.                  Negation of an oblique defines something as not probable.

Negation of verbs by aspect:

1.                  Imperfective eventive: negation of an action.  Negation of a conceptual would be a promise not to do something if conjugated.

2.                  Progressive conceptual: negation of a situation. It will take inspection of context to determine whether authors negate progressive eventives.

3.                  Perfective eventive: negation of a result was identified in lesson 77.  I have not seen a negated perfective conceptual in the first book of Thucydides.

Notice that negations don’t work the same way as impersonal gerundives; in perfective the eventive can be negated to achieve the right effect but the conceptual can’t, as far as my observations show. You Greek geeks need to tell me if you find negations I don’t list here.