21st Century Classical Greek -- Thucydides redux

If you are me, and you just found Herodotus using progressive aspect in ergative structures, you would now obsessively go back over Thucydides and Xenophon to see if you can catch them doing it. Why is it “if”? because languages change grammar over time. That’s why you hate reading Shakespeare in high school English literature. The grammar has changed – the vocabulary has changed even more – and you need inches of footnotes at the bottom of every page to tell you what the characters said.

And here it is, Thucydides II.65.8:

καὶ οὐκ ἤγετο μᾶλλον ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ ἢ αὐτὸς ἦγε,…

It’s a progressive eventive; Pericles was not led by them (the dimos) but led them himself. The verb is ago which has an imperfective intransitive eventive. It’s a case of identical forms in the progressive for use in different structures – you have to look at the structural context to see what is going on.

And the same in Cyropaedia 1.4.3:

…ἅμα μὲν διὰ τὴν παιδείαν, ὅτι ἠναγκάζετο ὑπὸ  τοῦ διδασκάλου…

It’s a case of identical forms in the progressive, which are used in different structures – you have to look at the structural context to see what is going on. This is the same thing I said very early on in this thread with, I think, afairisetai, if you can remember back that far.

The point being that you cannot determine the grammatical assignment of a word until you  examine the context and identify what role the word plays. What’s more, using “imperfect tense” in such structures has gone unrecognized (Goodwin 1250ff) because a) it does not fit the “ongoing action that is interrupted” definition on which the grammarians were fixated and b) ergativity is a new concept deriving from studies of Sumerian (1850 CEff) and Hurrian (1880CE ff), which were unknown to the old sources. Besides, c) Greek scholars isolated themselves from other linguistic studies and are only now looking outside their pipeline.

Herodotus was 20 years older than Thucydides, and grew up in Halicarnassus which had been under Persian domination for 70 years or so (Thucydides was Athenian). That’s nearly three generations and, if you read my Fact-Checking thread, you would know that the Jews of Babylonia recorded their scripture in Biblical Hebrew even as their next generation was growing up to speak Aramaic. Out of Biblical Hebrew, an aspect language with oblique structures and epistemic morphology and structures, developed Mishnaic Hebrew, a tense language which had neither. But Mishnaic Hebrew was not a hybrid with Aramaic, the way Samaritan Hebrew hybridized with Arabic (as I claim in The Real Difference). There may have been an ergative in Ancient Persian that survives in Kurdish today (Karimi) but the ergative in Classical Greek is not a sign of hybridization with Persian, quite the contrary; its source lies in NE Anatolia in the 4000s BCE.

The point of having an ergative seems to be that you can say somebody specific did something specific on purpose to bring about the ordinary results of that action (using executive voice), where the action had to be done and the person in the hupo phrase just happened to be the person who did it.

This is related to the passive, which can have the connotation that anybody in the same position would have done the same thing, or that the same action is incumbent on everybody in the same position. The latter approaches how Biblical Hebrew uses agentless verbs in both narratives and legal material, and hints at the reason scholastic material uses passives: to imply that every expert in the field agrees on a given definition or evaluation.

There is a purpose to everything in the grammar of a language, which is to communicate with those who use the language and put information across to them. Grammars that don’t teach what the language is trying to communicate, are a waste of time and money. Professors using such grammars tacitly admit that they don’t know what the language is trying to communicate. THAT is why we have to learn languages on our own.

Karimi, Yadgar. May 2012Acta Linguistica Asiatica 2(1):23 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272651632_The_Evolution_of_Ergativity_in_Iranian_Languages