Beginner question

Greek Learning Greek
1

Hi all, I am working my way through a textbook and I have the teacher’s version so I can correct my work. I noticed a brief note saying that in a passage I translated, some students will translated ἐστιν in the present tense. I was one of those students. Quote here:


“Students will have no trouble comprehending the sentence in which this clause occurs, but they may translate ἐστιν with present tense. They will see a number of examples of indirect statement of this sort and will come to translate the present more naturally as a past tense in English.”

The translated sentence was: “she learned the boy was blind.” I had “is blind”

I was wondering if anyone could expand on this a bit more. I tried Googling but had no luck. Is what this getting at that because it’s a defective verb we can have the liberty of rendering it into “was” rather than “is”? Little confused.

Thanks.

2

Indirect discourse works differently in English and Greek. In English, when you transform direct discourse into indirect, you change the tense:

He said “The door is open”. ----> He said that the door was open.

In Greek you retain the same tense, although you may change mood and use the optative.

3

Thank you, this makes the textbook’s mention of this a bit clearer