In Mastronarde Unit 25, Part II, Exercise 7, I already made a couple corrections from the answer book but left a couple things in that I need to ask about. In brackets I put what kind of verb I am dealing with. I am supposed to write,
“For four days the sailors were able to prevent the hoplites from boarding [the ship], but on the fifth day a few fell ill, so that it was necessary for them to surrender themselves.”
Just a day or two ago, I was told to put infinitives in the aorist unless I had a reason not to. In this case, I thought I had a reason because ἐδυνάμηντο is imperfect. I thought I needed to write present stem infinitives κωλύειν ἀναβαίνειν to match the imperfect verb. Yet the answer book places them in the aorist. This seems to combine an imperfect continuous action finite verb with complete action infinitives. I need help with this.
ἐδύναντο is the third person plural imperfect indicative of δύναμαι. Maybe you didn’t correctly copy the answer from key?
I’m sure you know that aorist and present infinitives (but non only infinitives) are about aspect, not time. So if the action is seen as a single event, you use the aorist infinitive, as a process, you use the present. Personally, I would have translated as the key, except that I would have used ἀναβαίνειν as you did. So to prevent, an event, aorist, boarding, a process, present. But I’m not going to bet the house on it.
Well that’s interesting. I would have written κωλυειν, with you, Lukas, treating the prevention as a process extending over all four days (they prevented them and went on preventing them)—not because εδυναντο is imperfect, for εδυναντο could be just as well be followed by an aorist infinitive as by a present one—and I’d have written αναβηναι, treating the boarding as a potential one-off event that was either to be accomplished or not. So I’d have made the opposite choices from bedwere. But it’s not as if one of us is right and the other wrong. It just depends how the various actions are viewed.
I’ve seen enough translations into English by people who are not native speakers (they are native in the “from” language) to know that something can be grammatically perfect and idiomatically impossible.
In writing sentences for learners to translate into Greek, the safe path would be to use English translations of authentic Greek, perhaps lightly adapted, so that the “right answer” would be a secure match for something actually written by an ancient author. White did this back in 1896. Puzzling over a translation sentence, I am often able to find the Greek for it in the Anabasis.
Of course, if the exercise is really about flexing your morphology then the fine points don’t matter much. But I sympathize with Lukas wanting to get it exactly right.
