Re: What's the aorist tense?

On Tuesday, June 29, 2004, at 07:45 , Philip Newton wrote:

> On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 07:02:16 +0100, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> wrote:
>>
>>   There is still only one present indicative, but two past indicatives:
>> the
>> imperfective known as the 'imperfect tense' and the perfective known for
>> historical reasons as the 'aorist tense'.
>
> Hm? Modern Greek does have something I'd call the "perfective", though
> it's constructed synthetically (using the present indiciative of the
> auxiliary verb exw (to have) + a form which looks like 3rd person
> singular aorist subjunctive but could be called an infinitive or a
> participle).
Yes, there's some argument on the origin of the uninflected form used
after _exw_ /'exo/. I fail to see how it could've been derived from any of
the earlier participles. I think the most common explanation is that it's
a fossilized form of the old 'present infinitive' with the final -n
dropped. But I've never seen a convincing explanation of the origin of
this construction, nor am I sure how widely it's used.

>
> So if you include synthetic tenses, you have e.g.:
>
> 8a desw - future
> 8a denw - future imperfective?
Yes - the correspond very much to the perfective & imperfective futures
found in the Slav langs. The forms after _8a_ /Ta/ are the so-called
'subjunctives' you show below. In this case we do know the origin of
/Ta/ - it evolved from _&elw na_ "I wish that.." and its evolution can be
traced in written texts.

> denw - present indicative
Identical with the present subjunctive in pronunciation & in the current
spelling (but Katharevousa used different spellings for the two sets of
endings)

> edena - imperfect
> edesa - aorist
> exw desei - perfect
(present of _exw_ + _desei_)

> eixa desei - pluperfect
(imperfect of _exw_ + _desei_)

> plus the subjunctives na denw (pres.subj.) / na desw (aor.subj.) which
> indicate aspect rather than tense.
Indeed - just as they do after _8a_ (the particle indicates futurity, or
rather 'irrealis', see below).

The distinction between indicative & subjunctive is not really there in
modern Greek. The term subjunctive remains in (most?) descriptions for
historic reasons. What we find is that the two stems, traditionally called
the 'present stem' and the 'aorist stem', have two conjugated tenses: a
past & a non-past. In the case of the present stem tenses both are can be
used as main verbs - the so-called present & imperfect tenses; but with
the aorist stem only the past tense (the 'aorist') can be used as a main
verb with no prefixed participle. However, with both stems, the non-past
tenses are used after the particle _8a_ and in certain subordinate clauses.

That we're not talking about a separate subjunctive mood is IMO shown in
that _8a_ /Ta/ may also be followed by the imperfect to denote a
'conditional tense' (I _know_ this is not a tense in the strict sense of a
'time reference'; I use 'conditional tense' in the way it's used in
descriptions of the Romancelangs & Esperanto, inter alia). No one, as far
as I know, has labeled the imperfect after _8a_ as the 'imperfect
subjunctive' - and nor should they IMO.

Ray
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