I sent the following observation about the use of theta “passive” forms, and the others that of themselves take those endings to Carl Conrad himself by email, and his response was that he didn’t didn’t really understand what I was talking about. I suppose that there is no harm posting the same thing here, (so an even greater number of people can have no idea what I’m talking about ).
The verbal infix -θη-is traditionally or conventionally understood as the morpheme signifying passivity in aorist verb-forms in -θην, θης, θη, θημεν, θητε, θησαν and in future verb-forms in -θήσομαι, θήσῃ, θήσεται, θήμεθα, θήσασθε, θήσονται. It should be noted, however, that the future forms in -θήσομαι, κτλ. are derivative secondarily from aorists in -θην κτλ. that are conjugated with active endings and that are formally identically with non-thematic aorist active voice forms such as ἔβην, ἔστην. Indeed, the so-called “second passives” are clearly older and formally identical with these non-thematic aorist active voice forms, e.g. ἐφάνην “I appeared” (or “I was made to appear”), ἐβλάβην (“I got hurt”). While these forms in -θη-have, as I said above, traditionally or conventionally been deemed as markers for passive forms and meaning, they are essentially intransitive and were never used exclusively to express passive sense but rather to form normally intransitive aorist forms that could represent the aorist for either “middle” verbs (ἠγέρθην “I rose,” aorist of ἐγείρομαι) or “passive” expressions of transitive (causative) active verbs (ἐποιήθη “was created,” aorist of ποιέω). While in fact the greater part of -θη- forms in ancient Greek do represent passive semantic force because they appear in the aorist- or future-tense forms of transitive causative verbs, nevertheless a very great number of the -θη- forms are simply the intrasitive aorist- or future-tense forms of “middle” verbs as defined in §3 above.
Replacement of older aorist middle-passive forms by “passive” θη/η forms: It is important to understand that over the course of time aorist middle-voice forms in -μην. -σο. -το and future middle-voice forms in -σομαι, -σῇ, -σεται came to be supplanted by --θη- forms in -θην, -θης, -θη (aorist) and -θήσομαι, -θήσῃ, -θήσεται (future). This process began early and is already apparent in Classical At > http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/Pics/ic > in the verbs that have conventionally and traditionally called “passive deponents.” In the κοινή one may readily recognize this process in alternative forms in the LXX and the Greek NT such as ἀπεκρινάμην = ἀπεκρίθην and ἐγενόμην = ἐγενήθην. This process continued on in the course of the development of Byzantine and later forms of the Greek language. Rutger Allan has shown the distribution of θη forms over the categories of middle usage in the Homeric era and in the Classical era in (sic.)*
*[The reference is not given on the webpage.]
In that page, he offers no explanation as to why both forms - traditionally known as middle and passive - co-existed in a system in which there was only two categories - unmarked and explicitly marked as subject-affected.
The theta stem passive forms (and what Carl refers to as “active endings and that are formally identically with non-thematic aorist active voice forms such as ἔβην, ἔστην”, and importantly I might add also ἦν) serve a clear function within the system of the vocabulary moieties within the dual and alternating speech styles of Greek. Formulating that succinctly into the 6th or 7th most important rule that appears to have been followed in alternating speech styles, it can be said that:
The theta “passive” forms (and the other verbs just mentioned) serve to change a second moiety verb for usage in the general or first speech style contexts.
In other words, when used in the theta passive (or one of the other forms mentioned just now) a verb belonging to the second vocabulary moiety (grouping) is legitimately used in the first (general) speech style.
[Barry, in anticipation of what you may be thinking, it is like that some words are issued with a temporary id card or hall-pass, so they can be in the places, where they would usually be restricted from.]
You have introduced terminology foreign to classical philology.[1] It is somewhat risky to attempt an exposition of Carl Conrad’s thesis. Reading your posts is kind of like trying to understand Standard Theory (early Chomsky) by observing how transformational grammar was used in the mid-20th century bible translation literature, Eugene Nida and others.
There are moments when I run into difficulties with your terminology. I am uncertain about the topic under discussion. At certain points the history of the verb morphology seems to be the focus. But the semantics of the middle-passive is what I see as the central issue in Conrad’s thesis.
Well, no-one could accuse Barry of making stuff way too complicated. εκηβολε, I’m afraid you’re unlikely to find anyone here who will even try to figure out what you mean and give it real consideration.* A catablepas finds it hard to raise his head above the ground. Though I won’t properly engage with them myself (I’m pulling back from textkit) I do want to say that I think your posts deserve better, a lot better.
*Perhaps I should except Stirling whose post I now see. But I fear you won’t get anywhere with him either.
Michael, I do hope you’ll drop in from to time to time. I sincerely appreciate your sharing what is essentially a lifetime’s worth of learning and thinking and teaching about a subject that everyone here is at the very least passionate about. I don’t know if you care for the term “resource”, but you are perhaps one of best “resources” in this forum, which leads me to the point I’d like to make. Quite often, in the “heat of battle”, we allow our discussions to get a little too personal, which leads to defensiveness, poor choice of words, emotionally charged statements and counterproductivity (what’s our product? helping people learn.) Back in my previous life, we had a program called “Crew Resource Management”. One of the key concepts of this was to engage in behaviors that break the error chain leading to accidents.(Not breaking the error chain could and did have fatal consequences.) One of those behaviors was to handle disagreements on the basis of what is right, not who is right. None of us is perfect, but we should make an effort to remember it’s really the question that’s important.
P.S. I hope this doesn’t get me kicked out, but I’d really like Michael (MWH) to stay.
Thanks Aetos. I do sometimes wonder if I’m just wasting my time here. I doubt I’ll be disappearing just yet (I’ve already written two other posts in other forums today!), but I feel I should lessen my participation, if only for my own good. Of course it’s what’s right rather than who’s right that’s important, and I always try to focus on that, as I hope you can see from my posts. But there are certain behaviors that are flagrantly counterproductive (to use your word) and the opposite of helpful, and now and again I do venture at least an implicit criticism of them in hopes of remediation. Perhaps that itself is counterproductive, but I would hope not, and you can have no idea of how much I suppress in the interests of maintaining civility!
I’ve discovered since our last discussion that ἑκηβόλος’s more mysterious postings generally refer back to this theory of his about Greek. Once you understand that he’s pushing a theory that Greek is composed of two separate vocabularies, used alternatively by individual writers, what he’s saying becomes much easier to understand. Here, for example, he’s claiming that these alternating vocabularies are the real reason behind the linguo-historical trainwreck that is Greek verb forms.
His references back to this private theory, and his use of his private vocabularly for the development of that theory do make him hard to understand, but you’ll find that the above link is quite the Rosetta Stone for decoding him.
In total agreement. Michael is one of those people from whom it’s impossible not to benefit, even when in disagreement. A bit curmudgeonly at times, but that’s part of his charm.
The new order came into play with grand hopes and lofty ideals, but soon degenerated into a power structure, purging, subjugating or ignoring the sounds that fell through the cracks of classification. The legendary digamma was the first to go, and left a deep emotional scar on the zeta that had been standing next to it at the time. In the days before the new technology of writing, with its great ammounts of data being available, and the lessened need for professionals to recite the old texts the /i/ sound had never conceived of itself as a letter. It had always thought of itself as a mere sound, distinct from others, but now along with the nasalised and palatalised /i/ sounds, had been designated as iota. If that wasn’t enough, this purely spoken /i/ sound had then unexpectedly been designated as the representative of the other /i/ sounds.
After the introduction of the alphabetical order and the purging of theta by zeta, fears had risen in the hearts of the /i/ sounds, but after meeting together and discussing the situation, they consoled themselves with a few facts. Mu and omicron were the only two letter designations for sound groups that followed the ζηθ sequence in the language. Therefore this newly-formed band of iotas were safe. Unbeknowns to them, the alphabet had become a power structure. The history of that is worth an aside:
The power and dominance of the alphabet had originally been in the hands of the first two letters - those letters lent their name to the whole alphabet, also known as the corn chips and the double town. During the migration, the double town found his own direction and the then single corn chips, now finding itself with a candy colour and many new roles to fill. The candy coloured corn chips needed a rest, so more of the letters became candy coloured. Eventually, the new order of hierarchy starting from zeta, who had risen to prominence with promises of access and help to the little letters, was established. The old order of titulary hegemony that had rested with the candy coloured corn chips, existed in tandem for some time, but finally broke down with that letter’s enfeeblement. Thereafter, in keeping with the practices of many power structures, where the powerful control the little, new little letters joining the group were vetted ever more stringently.
Besides not recognising that the freedom of language had been replaced by the “foreign” alphabet, the iotas were misguided in their reasoning about how safe they really were in the language. With the purging of theta, it was not the sequence ζηθ that they should have been concerned about, but actually only ζη. In this case, the iota was not immediately purged, but rather, for a while was removed from its place as an equal on the line, and subscripted, unable to make a sound except when allowed by one of the other letters. That situation of subjugation by subscript lasted until 1976, when it was purged. It still remains, however, in texts printed before that date.
Not pushing. I don’t have an interest in whether or who else understands / accepts these observations.
The idea (theory or observation if you like) - making statement, further development or giving examples of the patterns of vocabulary use wuthin the alternating styles- was censored from another place. Besides that, the record of my.thinking that was stated is not complete there, because a number of the posts I made were deleted, altered or rejected from publication. The ultimatum given in a email was that if I could not accept American cultural norms of discourse, I could not post further. That got the bird.
The positive results of that reaction to new or alternative ways of reasoning and approaching Greek studies could be two things. First, as you (Joel) say, they are my private ideas, and far less than being not understood by anybody else, they are not even understood either. Of course, not being understood is not a good thing. Second, through censorship of a certain idea, a restrictuve side of study within Biblical Greek, has clearly manifest itself.
I’m wondering if Isaac Newton might not be a good person to help out. He puts a lot of good effort into trying to read Greek out. My two aims in develooing and practicing these rules through composition are idiomatic use of vocabulary in composition and fluency in reading aloud. I hope to read more fluently, by understanding the patterns that produce the phraseology. Furthermore, he seems unlikely to be the kind of person to bog those aims down in some quest for scholarly acceptability.
Development of understanding by manipulating terminology is for people who can not conceptualise abstractly. As you no doubt know, I have little regard for terminology, and that is basically for two reasons. First, terminlogy is usually a fudge. It usually contains too much simplification Secondly, it is open to interpretation and reassignment. The conceptual understanding if something should always exceed the ability of terminology to contain it. If one simply learns the definition and usage of terminology they are intellectually moribund.
I am not working from Carl’s research as a starting point. Whatever might have been where he started or where he tarried, I haven’t considered. I was just looking over his page a couple of months ago, and noticed that a point he didn’t make, related to a small aspect of what I had discovered some time ago.
I regret having said pushing. It was clearly a mischaracterization. However, it was pleasant to have a number of formerly obscure things fall into place. Honestly, I was very annoyed by our last discussion. At the time, I felt that it veered off its initial course and resented the unexplained “dual speech style” references that came in at the middle, which you suddenly took as the main subject of debate. Now I see that this was actually the subtext from the first post, and from your viewpoint, there was no veering off-course of the discussion.
The B-Greek crowd tries to maintain a level of discourse that we obviously don’t. Over here it’s more of a free for all. We only send actively crazy people or the (more annoying) idée fixes over to the Academy.
I don’t read B-Greek though, so I wasn’t aware of your epic thread there. I only Googled some of your unique technical vocabulary because your original post in this thread seemed reasonable enough and then stopped making sense to me at the line: “The theta stem passive forms…”
So I’d ask everyone to refrain from the nonsense posting in ἑκηβόλος’s threads. I would also ask ἑκηβόλος to remember that his own choices have considerable influence over the character of the discussion in these same threads.
Which discussion was that? Was it when you made strange mention of autistic-level physicists and cheap food? If that, then no problem. I deal with disaffected people every day. There are common patterns to challenging patterns of knowledge - annoyance is one of them.
The first post was couched in traditional terms. I had thought through the vocabulary patterning requirements of the alternating speech styles before posting it, but didn’t include reference to that in the first post. There was no subtext. I didn’t expect much more than a yes or no answer to that previous synoptic parallel question, if that’s the thread, which you’re talking about.
In addition, ignoring for a moment Michael unexpectedly carving his own headstone in the middle of this thread, I’m surprised it got any air time at all. Barry’s good natured riddle was a welcome diversion though.
It appears you’ve read that a different way, but without your misreading, you may not have shown your hand.
There are common patterns (of people’s reaction) to challenging (or new) patterns of knowledge - annoyance is one of them.
Academia perpetuates itself on the premise that it is possible to arrive at knowledge by logic, deduction and proof. Culturally valuable knowledge is rational, and can be tested. The challenge to “prove” something, is an a requirement to genuflect to that idea. These patterns of language were not arrived at by applying logic and proof, but by observation. Nobody working from the basis of logic and proof provided me with this useful tool the observation that certain words in certain senses are used in one or other of the speech styles. To pretend that logic had produced this knowledgefalsification and concoct some proof or derivation for it, would be a falsification and a sham.
Stuck between your designation as “crackpot” and dishonesty, I choose to be discredited. A singer with naturally beautiful song, who performs in an advertisement as a proof of a singing studio’s method of instruction OR a model who eats a csrtain food for the first time during the photo shoot for it, present us with a similar dilemma. I have consistently said that I am willing to explain, but not prove the observations of patterning in the language that I have noticed.
If or when it comes time to discuss the implications of this for word order, your belief in the need for internal consistency will be something that you may trip you up, like the need for definition of terms did in the previous discussion.
I’ve asked this question before, and never gotten an answer, so let me ask it again.
Does everybody already agree that Greek is composed by making general statements, followed by specific ones? In other words there is more specificity at the end of a sentence, phrase or couplet than at the beginning, or is that a new and personal observation too?
My point of departure in discussion is that there is broad acceptance of this point, and that what is new in my observation is vocabulary patterning - either words or the senses of words. Is that a reasonable assumption to make in discussion?
This bears a certain resemblance to Topic → Focus which has been kicked around in Functional frameworks (S. Dik, T. Givon) for at least several decades. Topic will be more general and Focus will be more specific.
I’m only attempting humor. Always dangerous in text-only communication. I think that Greek often follows up general statements with specific examples. But I wonder if there is any language that doesn’t. I suppose it’s possible that there are word that tend to be used in general statements and other words in specific statements. It would have to be demonstrated to me. And again, I’m skeptical that it would be a greek-only phenomenon.
But shouldn’t this be its own thread?
And yes, topic->focus is definitely what I think of.
).