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Re: Aorist

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, March 20, 2000, 14:23
At 09:39 20/03/00 -0300, you wrote:
> >"The aorist tense is used for unspecified past times, >especially in narrative speech, and also for the generic >present as in 'I work here', 'I like black coffee'." > >whereas > >"The past tense refers to punctual moments or lapses of >a continuous activity taken place in the past." >
That's quite right I think, it correspond quite well to the use of aorist I know. As far as I know, the linguistic use of 'aorist' is to refer to an aspect ('punctual', as opposed to imperfect, perfect, continuous, etc...). The grammarian use of 'aorist' is generally: indefinite past tense, as in Greek. Your use of 'aorist' seems to fit quite well with the accepted definitions of the term. Christophe Grandsire |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G. "Reality is just another point of view." homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org (ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)