21st Century Classical Greek -- concepts that are dead or ought to be

The change to aspect destroys a number of concepts from the old grammars, and is supported by the evidence. Thucydides never uses “imperfect tense” in a context of an interruption of an action. When an educated man who speaks a language on the streets, uses it in a way that contradicts the authoritarian grammars written by non-native speakers, the latter have to be wrong.

Several things fall out of this.

1.                  We don’t need to explain “present tense” in a past situation. Instead, the nuance is doing something out of habit or as part of an existing situation.

2.                  “Future perfect” doesn’t exist. The grammars admit that it is a passive, which is allowable since it is a flavor of the imperfective. The reduplication that created this term only occurs in Attic Greek, not in other dialects.

3.                  We can explain that passive morphology can’t exist for resultative, perfective aspect verbs. They are a one-and-done, not a continuous situation.

4.                  The scarcity of “future tense” as a conjugated verb shows that it represents a promise of future action. Most situations that have not yet happened use an imperfective conceptual i.g. as a complement to some conjugated verb or personal gerundive. The rest tend to use an imperfective conceptual oblique as something likely to happen.

We get rid of some cognitive dissonance.

1.                  Imperfective aspect being the default verb form, not a past tense, we lose the cognitive dissonance of an “aorist imperative” which commands some future action.

2.                  The cognitive dissonance of the term “aorist infinitive” disappears by eliminating terminology that references timing; the “infinitive” is an impersonal gerundive.

3.                  Reported speech copies aspect (and modality), not tense. Reported speech and questions using a “present tense” for something that clearly is in the past of the person reporting the speech, disappears.

Implementing the mantra “context is king” eliminates some concepts.

1.                  Reflexivity and causality are features of context, not of morphology.

2.                  Likewise the “cognate accusative” is poorly defined and tries to shift nuances from context onto morphology.

The “genitive absolute” and its relatives in other cases need a thorough overhaul. The descriptions are vague and differ from one grammar to the next. The examples are non-existent, mis-quoted, mis-cited, don’t coordinate with the description – or there is no citation at all meaning that we can’t track it to a surviving text. We don’t know why writers would stick a gerundive into these positions and just sticking a label on it (that comes from Latin where there are only two examples according to the Stolz and Schmalz grammar of 1910) is useless.

As a science, linguistics should follow the rule of Occam’s Razor: as long as all the data is covered, and represented accurately, the simplest explanation is preferable. With the demonstration that timing is part of context, not of morphology, a tense description of Greek becomes a useless complication. Therefore tense is also a dead concept. Taught strictly from an aspectual viewpoint, Greek becomes much easier to learn and understand. This is not an endorsement of a Nostratic family of languages encompassing Greek and the Semitic languages. It is simply an observation of function.

The 21^st century shift is difficult because every educational institution in the world is still running on old-think. It comes from the historical authoritarianism in the field of classics, not from the textual evidence. It has to end, if linguistics is going to be a real science.