21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 13, syntax 2

I apologize for being so late with this, but I had to report for jury duty, which happens about every 3 years. There were 100 of us going for voir dire on a criminal case but it got continued and they let us go. 

Syntax is supposed to help you analyze material so you can understand the meaning. My 8^th grade English teacher made us diagram sentences so we could see where modifiers had to go where to mean what you intended the sentence to mean, and also how to understand the sentence. Sequence is important in English because it doesn’t have cases. It’s important in Classical Greek, too, but for a different reason. Your real clue to meaning is what kind of verbs are where in your text.

When you analyze one of Thucydides’ sentences, look for the conjugated verbs.

1)         They are the most definite forms of action. If they are indicative, they are also the most certain facts he has for presentation.

2)         They will have for subject the agent or the topic on which the sentence focuses. Note that an agent will be the subject of an executive voice verb. Other verbs have a subject but, since they are not actions deliberately undertaken for the sake of their results, the subject isn’t really an agent.

3)         You will sometimes find your conjugated verb at the end of the clause that uses it.

If all the verbs you find are gerundives, this is an explanatory piece of text about its topic and what happened relative to that topic. Trace personal gerundives to the substantives they agree with in case and gender to know who did what. Watch out for an when multiple substantives are involved, to tell you which of them goes with the action in which clause.

So for example, Thucydides I 2.2 doesn’t get around to a conjugated verb until afairisetai, and then it’s an oblique, not an indicative. It is base voice, and so is the next conjugated verb, apanistanto. Why conjugate these two and none of the others? Because the point Thucydides is trying to make, is that while the population of the Peloponnese was still mobile and not settled, there is an associated reason: the probability that any crops one raised might be taken over by a stronger clan. But the takeover did not have the purpose of making the owners move, and the move was not done for its own sake but under compulsion.

While verbs are critical to understanding Thucydides’ Greek, there is one thing Biblical Hebrew has in spades, and which is common in Arabic, but not in Greek. The verbal sentence.

A verbal sentence starts with a verb, which is followed by its subject. The subject may be compound, but the verb can be singular. The most common example is when the compound subject is moshe v’aharon, Moshe and Aharon. You won’t see this in Thucydides. I don’t think I found such things in Mahabharata either. Maybe it is a Semitic thing.

Finally, remember that because Thucydides uses verbs aspectually, his equational sentences will not always contain the copula. When he does use it, analyze the aspect for the nuance he is trying to present.