As someone pointed out, wouldn’t future perfect be accented τεθνηξομένος and future τεθνηξόμενος?
That doesn’t seem to be the case. According to Smyth, there is “only one sure example [of the future perfect participle] in classical Greek”, and that is apparently accented recessively (although of course the accentuation of our texts is frequently a matter of dispute in small, obscure matters and there’s really no way to be certain):
Ok, so for all practical purposes, future perfect participle doesn’t exist, and the one or few cases we have are more or less aberrations. Thanks for that, I didn’t know!
You know, I don’t really speak English. Although I read it almost as easily as my native language and I don’t feel much of a handicap when I write here, I’ve never spoken English much. I’ve never been in an English-speaking country. I hear English on the TV, but unless I really concentrate I have a hard time to follow without reading the subtitles. I have no problem using English with other non-natives, but native speakers of English (which I meet quite rarely) are a sometimes a serious pain – they speak too fast (and some take you for an idiot when you don’t understand). And since I mispronounce vowels and stress wrong syllables, native speakers have a hard time understanding what I say (pérmit – noun, permít – verb, or was it the other way round?), although, strangely enough, non-natives understand more easily mistakes of this sort.
But my point was that I think there might be a tendency here to exaggerate the importance of audio and speaking here for learning to read a language that is long dead. Reconstructed audio is interesting for it’s own sake, but I don’t think it’s necessary for the reading part.
If we are going to admit Qimmik’s suggestion that learning the language without early grammar study may make things harder later on[1] surely there is room for the idea that learning without speaking and listening practice may make things harder? Especially in a dead language where there are so few ways to get input.
Also, I would be interested in the stories that Paul might have to tell about the people he knows who have failed to learn English, despite investment of time and money. What were their methods?
[1] Actually this statement, unlike most of what he says here, is somewhat bizarre to me. What would be the mechanism? I could certainly see how the opposite could be true. Studying grammar before your mind has a mental database of usage that corresponds to it could easily mislead a learner.
Failing to learn English is rare here. In the capital at least, you’re unlikely to find anyone under 50 who doesn’t know English. People are very motivated, and you have the TV (which I don’t watch so much, which is one reason for my bad oral skills…), the Internet etc. You can’t study at university level without reading English. But I know plenty of people, myself included, who have failed to learn other languages. I think the common factor is lack of motivation. Mindlessly going through grammar drills because the teacher tells you so, as if language study was just learning grammar rules by heart. People study a language at school for years and they never read a single page in that language in their free time, never even think that they could actually use the language they’ve studied for anything at all. (I suspect 95 % of language learners in English-speaking countries belong to this category. That’s human nature.) For example, here Swedish is compulsory at school, but most of us talk English with Swedes (including myself).
This has been discused for ever on b-greek. I think the tendency on both sides is to consturct a straw man and demolish it. Randall Buth’s framework seemed to me at first to be hopelessly impractical. He sent me a demo CD of his restored pronunciation 15 years ago. I listened to it and decided Erasmus was good enough for my purposes. Now days I agree with Buth on the question of metalanguage. It is perfectly useless to become an expert on traditional grammar metalanguage. You need some of it to get by in your classes in school. But reading texts doesn’t require it and if spend your time reading texts rather than reviewing metalanguage you learned several decades ago you will forget the metalanguage fairly rapidly.
The other hassle with metalanguage is frameworks. On b-greek there are a multitude of frameworks which all have a metalanguage. Most of linguistically inclined are highly eclectic. Randall Buth and Stephen Levinsohn taught workshops together on discourse analysis decades ago but they don’t use exactly the same framework nor do they use the terminology with exactly the same meaning. Younger guys like Michael Aubrey are from a different galaxy. Stephen Carlson can discuss things with Michael Aubrey and I don’t have a clue what they are talking about.
Arguments about frameworks and metalanguage are a dead end. Waste of time.
Another issue with frameworks is the unit of analysis. If you are in habit of viewing the nuclear clause as the primary focus of syntax analysis then you will be left out of discussions which look at higher level structures. Some of the same terminology will be used but it doesn’t mean the same thing.