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.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 5, imperatives

Classical Greek has three types of order-giving.

1.         Indirect, using an auxiliary verb like keleuo.

2.         Indirect using an impersonal gerundive to indicate an action that is due and owing.

3.         Imperatives which are rare and may have a nuance that relates them to Biblical Hebrew.

In Biblical Hebrew, true imperatives indicate whether the person who uses them has authority to do so or not, but it does so in the context of a narrative. Read the story of Avraham buying Machpelah: Efron uses multiple imperatives, but none of them work out. He is not authorized to issue imperatives to Avraham.

Thucydides seems to use imperatives more to emphasize how wrong-headed somebody is. The best examples are the ultimata issued by the Korinthians, supposedly in support of the treaty that existed during the events of Book I, but contradicted by the fact that treaty members get to vote on actions as explained in the same book. I hope that you Greek geeks can offer up examples and citations from your favorite author with evidence that the imperatives were carried out. This would be a demonstration that the person issuing the ultimatum had authority over the people he issued it to.

Or, you could tell us about examples where the imperative was carried out. It’s entirely possible that keleuo in particular is used in all of these contexts. I am in Book III of Thucydides and haven’t seen examples of this yet.

Imperatives are all indicative and show aspect:

1.                  Imperfective: perform an action.

2.                  Progressive: get into a situation or habit.

3.                  Perfective: produce a result. Periphrastic and very rare.

The fact that imperatives refer to an action that has not yet been carried out creates a cognitive dissonance in the old tense system, particularly for aorist, perfect and pluperfect. In our aspectual system, with imperfective being the default verb form, the cognitive dissonance disappears.

In Thucydides II 81.1 we have keleuontes with an impersonal gerundive, “ordering him to X”. Use of an impersonal gerundive gets us two things: one is that the action is due and owing upon receipt of the order; the other is that possibly it can’t be carried out immediately or the person issuing the order has no authority, thus it is indefinite. LSJ does not say that keleuo must take an impersonal gerundive, but all its examples work out that way.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 4, gerundives

Greek does not use a conjugated verb in every phrase or clause.

• --  Equational sentences can leave out the copula, a feature Greek has in common with other aspectual languages like Russian, Chinese, and the Semitic languages.
• ---When an author chooses not to be definite about an action, he uses a gerundive. The lack of definition may involve persons, places, and timing, but gerundives either describe or substantivize the action.

Every vector that applies to verbs applies to gerundives, except certainty; all gerundives are indicative modality.

Personal gerundives indicate person, number, and gender and agree with some antecedent. They act as adjectives, describing actions, or as substantives, usually with a definite article.

Personal gerundives have standard indications of voice:

1.                  -antes, -ontes, -untes for executive voice

2.                  -entes for passive voice

3.                  -men- for base voice

Impersonal gerundives have all the vectors of a verb except certainty or person/gender/number agreement. All impersonal gerundives are indicative modality.

There are four sets of endings for impersonal gerundives:

1.                  -sthai for all base voice i.g.s

2.                  -ein is the progressive conceptual i.g in executive voice. There is no progressive eventive i.g..

3.                  -sai is the imperfective conceptual in executive voice.

4.                  ­-ein is the imperfective eventive for executive voice.

5.                  -nai is the ending for the perfective conceptual executive voice. There seems to be no perfective eventive i.g..

Impersonal gerundives are used

1.                  To substitute for conjugated verbs as the name of an action.

2.                  Complement of:

a.                   Dunamai – able

b.                  Dei – possible

c.                   Khri – necessary

d.                  Dei or khri -- obligatory

3.                  Instead of an imperative when an action is due and owing based on specified considerations. Avoids issuing an ultimatum or giving a nuance of immediacy.

4.                  Reported speech and question in the same aspect as in the original question, sometimes using the imperfective conceptual for a promise.

5.                  In a result clause starting with hos[te].

6.                  In purpose clauses. The i.g. will be the complement of another verb. It may have what Hurrian calls an instrumental/ablative, which is an -on case expression, and be negated using mi to express “so that X does not happen”.

7.                  As the complement of a conjugated verb or personal gerundive in an anti-passive. There may be a subject for the impersonal gerundive; it will be in whatever case is needed either for verbal nuance or to connect the anti-passive to an antecedent.

In Book II.80 of Thucydides I came across the following structure:

βουλόμενοι [object] καταστρέψασθαι

It’s obvious why you have a base voice for the personal gerundive; the planning wasn’t undertaken just to do planning. It was undertaken for the sake of something else. But that is also in base voice, not executive voice, and it has a lower level of definiteness, an impersonal gerundive. So while the people involved might have deliberately performed the action of the complement, they weren’t there yet, they were only in the planning stages, and that’s also why it’s an i.g. not a p.g. In fact the planned action did not succeed. This may look like a place where Thucydides should have used an epistemic, but that is for not signing up to the truth of something which later does turn out to be false.

In this case, Thucydides is completely certain about the planning and its intended goal, and he knows with complete certainty that it did not pan out. So does his audience. He doesn’t have to mince words with them by using the epistemic.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 3, definitions

Last week I just listed the skeleton for defining verbs. This post gives brief definitions for terms in the verbal system.

1.                  Aspect – nuance of verbal meaning such as simple action, habit, or result.

2.                  Voice – also called diathesis, carries the nuance of deliberate decision or intransitivity, and base voice for everything else

3.                  Definiteness – stating the action, describing the action, or substantivizing the action

4.                  Certainty – knowledge of whether the action occurred or is likely to occur

5.                  Transitivity – whether the grammatical subject of the verb is the agent or the logical object

6.                  Verb class – ending of the dictionary entry and whether the verb root contracts during conjugation

Each of these vectors has three parts, although under aspect we have two flavors in each part.

1.                  Aspect

a.                   Imperfective – implies nothing about result, which may fade away or be reversed; used for motion in alternating directions and often for imperatives intended to produce an action.

b.                  Progressive – formation or existence of a habit or situation; used for imperatives intended to produce a state.

c.                   Perfective – action creating a permanent result. Imperative is periphrastic and very rare.

2.                  Voice

a.                   Executive – action deliberately undertaken to produce its ordinary outcome. Exists only for non-mai verbs

b.                  Passive – intransitive action in a specific structure. Exists only for -mai verbs and imperfective non-mai verbs.

c.                   Base – all other uses

3.                  Definiteness

a.                   Conjugation – statement of the action

b.                  Personal gerundive – description of the action

c.                   Impersonal gerundive – substantivized action or complement expressing purpose; used for actions that are due and owing, a quasi-imperative lacking the nuance of immediacy.

4.                  Certainty

a.                   Indicative – direct statement of action, including imperatives.

b.                  Oblique – statement of highly probable action or used in an attempt to persuade.

c.                   Epistemic – speaker is not heavily invested in the truth of what is said.

5.                  Transitivity

a.                   Transitive – agent and object are distinct and use different cases, often -oi and -ous cases respectively. Case of object affects meaning of the verb+predicate phrase.

b.                  Ergative (intransitive imperfective or perfective) structure – object in -oi case, agent in hupo plus genitive. verb has an “aor. 2” form but can be in any aspect as we saw in III 11.2.

c.                   Intransitive (passive voice) structure – a noun in -oi case which is both subject and object.

6.                  Verb class

a.                   -mi – high-frequency verbs like give, take, go, “be”; histimi and tithimi have intransitive imperfective and perfective morphology.

b.                  -mai – no executive voice; if there is a non-mai verb with the same meaning, the -mai verb will be used to evaluate the action. Formerly called “deponent”, some -mai dictionary entries actually belong to suppletive verbs.

c.                   non-mai verbs with all voices, except that progressive and perfective have no passive. Some like timao and poieo lose vowels in the 1^st or 2^nd syllable of the root

The flavors of aspect are eventive, which is often marked by augment, or conceptual.

Some verbal vectors require a specific structure, as well as specific morphology:

1.                  Ergative – a verbal plus hupo plus the agent in the -on case, where the verb is a specifically intransitive form (“2^nd aorist” or “2^nd perfect”), with an object in the -oi noun case

2.                  Passive – specific verbal morphology with a noun in the -oi case as both subject and object.

3.                  Anti-passive – a verbal plus an impersonal gerundive which is its complement; the object of the verbal is the subject of the i.g. and comes between them.

Mendel Beilis -- it's always something

One of the things I learned when I was translating the 1913 trial transcript, was something I brought up in my "murder mystery" version of the trial, The Anvil. Some of the things that came out at trial appeared to rely on forgeries in 1912, that failed to take into account calendar variations from 1911.

This would be understandable if the people creating the forgeries weren't literate. The illiterate witnesses who testified up to about day 10 lived in a subculture that didn't buy newspapers, which put the date on the front page. They didn't have bank accounts, although they might have postal accounts like the British. So they didn't get those nice checkbook calendar inserts to help date a check. 

They mostly associated events with seasons -- "it was still cold", "that was in the summer" -- or with religious feasts. But in the Russian Orthodox calendar there are a lot of movable feasts and at one point the judge had to verify that the Feast of the Forty Martyrs was March 9. 

So whenever the prosecution wanted to nail down a date, they were in trouble. They had to ask leading questions and you can almost see the witness shrug when he or she says "I don't know."

You can't forge trial documents if you're illiterate. You can, however, do it despite your ignorance.

So, for example, on Day 2, Alexey's teacher testifies sbout a register of his absences. It turns out that the dates given for the register a) are copied from February or b) only make sense for the same months in 1912. One example is reporting Andrey absent on March 27. There are two problems with that. One is that it was a Sunday in 1911; he didn't go to school on February 27, which was also a Sunday, but was reported absent on February 28, a Monday. The other is that of course Andrey was absent on March 27; that was the date of his funeral. In 1912, March 27 was a Tuesday. Looking up from his writing, the forger might see this, but obviously he never thought to look at the 1911 dates -- or the history of the case which would have showed it was the funeral date. I talk about this in my "murder mystery" version of my translation, The Anvil.

Last week I was looking over a posting about the Day 8 testimony of Lyuda Cheberyak, which was cooked up by the government to try to get a conviction. And I stopped and stared at the part where I showed that Passover was weeks after Andrey's murder. 

In 1911, Passover was April 12, one month after Andrey's death. There was no way to keep blood liquid for a month, let alone the fact that the blood libel is exactly that, a lie. In fact blood won't stay liquid for more than a few hours. Jewish law knows this perfectly well; Mishnah Yoma 4:2 discusses the actions taken to keep blood from congealing during the Yom Kippur service. 

But in cooking up the murder case, the government never stopped to think about whether the blood should be liquid or not. The blood libel doesn't say. It was cooked up hundreds of years ago by Christians with slander on their minds, not by people interested in dotting i's and crossing t's.

The government never produced evidence of catching Andrey's blood. They had no receptacle for capturing it as evidence. The Christian medical experts showed that only the head wounds produced a flow of blood, which was caught in the boy's hair and shirt. And in fact most of Andrey's blood remained in his body; the liver was not exsanguinated and the positions of the wounds on his body would not have allowed a heavy flow of blood. The heart was not autopsied but turned into a preserved specimen and no conclusion could be drawn from it.

Nobody has commented on this that I know of, but then hardly anybody has read the entire transcript, let alone associated documentation like the work of Tager. The point is that the government started with a theory of the case and forged or planted or suborned the evidence they thought would make twelve muzhiks vote to convict. They never stopped to examine whether their theory COULD be proven; they weren't competent to do that. This ought to sound familiar after the dozens of US lawyers who have filed court cases without evidence and even without logic as a basis -- and been caught, and been sanctioned. And maybe watching these lawyers get sanctioned over the last two years is what made the timing on the Beilis case leap out at me.