hard practice sentence in Morwood

Greek Learning Greek
1

Please remember that I’m still struggling with the basics of grammar.

οὐκ ἀπορήσετε τῶν ἐθελησόντων ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν κινδυνεύειν. (Morwood, Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek)

Translation: You [plural] will not be in want of those willing to run risks for your sake.

The things that gave me trouble were:

  1. I guessed that this is not imperative. What do I need to know?

  2. For quite a while I tried “of the willingness” as a translation for τῶν ἐθελησόντων. Once I decided to try “of those willing”, it unlocked the sentence for me, and opened up the role of the infinitive. Should I have seen right away that the article+participle probably was referring to persons?

I have a paper copy of Smyth, if anybody wants to give me references to it.

2

Hugh, here’s where really nailing your paradigms and knowing the principal parts of your verbs pays off.

ἀπορέω, ἀπορήσω, ἠπόρησα…

  1. Take a close look at ἀπορήσετε. Notice the sigma and the -ετε ending. It can only therefore be future tense indicative. Look up the present and aorist imperatives for contract verbs and compare them.

  2. Why did you try “of those willing” (which is right)? Notice that you have the article with the participle, which makes it substantive, and that it’s genitive plural. That explains why your translation is right.

You don’t really need Smyth here, just a good handle on your forms.

3

Many thanks to Barry for the quick reply! Let me ask another question:

Does the imperative not exist in the future tense?

4



Imperative Mood

You have already learned two moods of Greek verbs: the INDICATIVE and INFINITIVE. This lesson presents one more mood: the IMPERATIVE.
The imperative mood conveys a COMMAND for someone to perform the action of the verb. The imperative mood exists in all voices, but occurs in only TWO TENSES:
present
aorist

https://ancientgreek.pressbooks.com/chapter/41/

BTW, “Ancient Greek for Everyone” is an online textbook that is very easy to reference for basic questions such as this. I googled “Future imperative Greek” and that’s one of the first to come up. I did this to help you see how you can research some of the answers to your questions yourself (not that anybody minds helping you, but when you do it yourself, it tends to have more sticking power, sort of like oatmeal vs. frosted flakes… :slight_smile: )

5

Many thanks, Barry.