Talk:Aorist/Archive 2

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Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4 Archive 5

Unintended edit

Just so everyone knows, I didn't mean to make this edit: [1]. I hadn't even noticed that I had made it until now. I'm confused as to how I could have made the edit, actually; I was on an iPod touch at the time, and never had an editing window open. Apologies for any inconvenience caused. --Akhilleus (talk) 00:00, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

No problem. I do stuff like that all the time. (Usually in the wee hours of the morning.) — kwami (talk) 00:03, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Hermeneutics

This is a problematical section in this article since it is tied to using a particular Greek aspect in a particular method (evangelical Christian) of argumentation. I think that the article should stand or fall on its grammatical description of aorist and leave its use in Christian evangelization to other web sites. --Taivo (talk) 03:06, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Well, it is under the Greek section. Personally, I imagine quite a few people might come here specifically for this question. I don't know about the "hermeneutics" links (I haven't followed them to read those articles), but quite a few of the refs I dug up were concerned about bad translations of the NT stemming from poor understanding of the aorist, such as translating future events with the past tense. I don't think a summary is undue. — kwami (talk) 07:24, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Mentioning the differences between Classical Greek and Koine - which includes not using textbooks on Koine to source unqualified statements about "Greek" - would help. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:41, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Past Simple

The aorist is used in a way we associate in the English language with the past simple (also known unofficially as 'finished past'). I expected to see some mention of the 'past simple' in this rather demanding article. Politis (talk) 22:25, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

It isn't, really. About 20% of the time it's present. It may be translated as past because English does not have an aorist. We could expand the hermeneutics section, explaining the difficulties in translation. (Campbell give a verse of the NRSV of the NT in which the aorist was translated as past tense, when it only makes sense as the future.) — kwami (talk) 23:21, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Politis is talking about Demotic, his native tongue; a section on it should say what used to be crammed into the intro, that in Demotic it does have preterite force. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:09, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Old versus New

The above differences of opinion clearly relate to differences between new and old grammars. The sensible thing to do is make room for both. I've seen arguments like this before as a school teacher - a new English grammar was introduced that was supposed to be more user-friendly but it never found favour among teachers. By the time it was finally abandoned, teachers had got out of the habit of teaching the old grammar as well and now it is rare for any grammar to be taught at all. The case is even more curious with ancient Greek. My Greek grammar was published in 1879 but it works just fine because the language it describes died long before that. There is no reason to abandon it - unless there is a militant dogmatism abroad that compells me to adopt new ways. Is this a militant article or can we have a difference of opinion? Amphitryoniades (talk) 00:34, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

It's not (necessarily) a difference of grammatical analysis, just an evolution of terminology. We need to write articles for a general audience, and that means general terminology. Traditional terminology should of course be included, but we need to be clear which we are using when. Since all the interlinked articles use modern terms, this article will only be compatible with them if it also uses modern terms. It's not much different from giving distances in km rather than in stadia. — kwami (talk) 01:20, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
I agree with Kwami. His analogy of km versus stadia is quite apt. The distance is the same, but our terminology must match modern usage and the articles that this one links to. "Tense" doesn't mean the same thing it meant 100 years ago just as "computer" is no longer someone like Uriah Heep. --Taivo (talk) 02:03, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies! A couple more points: First, 'modern terms' suggests we are dealing with a recent attempt to rationalize grammar and this invites the question - who is the authority or authorities behind this attempt? I'm wondering if we are dealing with just an individual, a small group of grammarians, an education department somewhere or a wide international movement. I notice that there are citation needed tags all over the articles covering these new terms (though I am not saying the tags are warranted, merely that they arouse suspicions). Second, I don't agree that this article has been written for the 'general audience'. The general audience is more likely to be people familiar with a few traditional grammatical concepts. I'm as smart as the next person but when I first read this article my response mirrored that of Berty Wooster after Jeeves has tried to explain something - "The brain seems to flicker and I rather miss the gist." I don't think I'm the only Wooster here. The general audience is largely an assembly of Woosters. Amphitryoniades (talk) 02:18, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

These terms are all very standard in the linguistic community, there's nothing at all fringe about them. Many of these articles were written back a few years ago when the Wikipedia requirements to footnote everything were not in place. Many articles were written without references at all. It is still a long process to backfill footnoting for these articles. But kwami and I have read many, if not most, of these other articles and there's nothing controversial at all about them or the terminology. But we have to use the correct terminology, with a few digressions for those who may not be as familiar with it. We cannot write these articles with imprecise terminology or else we will cease to be an encyclopedia. Read an Encyclopedia Britannica article in a field that you don't know and you will see just as many unfamiliar words. We write for a "general audience", but we don't write down to that audience. We must use the correct technical terminology. If they don't know what a term means, then they can click on the wikilink to learn more. --Taivo (talk) 03:05, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
I'm sure these terms are standard in the linguistic community. However, that's not the only community that uses these terms—if you step into any of the beginning Greek classes that are starting up in colleges all across the U.S. this week, you'll find uses of "aorist" and "tense" that differ from what you're calling the "correct terminology". So it's not clear to me why you can claim this is the correct terminology—rather, what the article needs to make clear is that terminology differs depending on context. --Akhilleus (talk) 03:17, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Grammar is the realm of linguistics, just as the periodic table is the realm of chemistry, and atomic structure is the realm of physics. Would you ever suggest that imprecise terminology be used in describing the structure of the atom? No. When we teach beginners something, it is not uncommon to use imprecise language, like comparing the "orbits" of the electrons around the nucleus to the orbits of the planets around the sun. But this is not appropriate for an adult encyclopedia. Electrons exist in energy states around the nucleus, not in orbits like the planets. So, too, based on traditional teaching methods and comparing other languages to English structure, it is usual for language teachers to teach "tenses" to children and learners in order to tie the unfamiliar to something familiar (just as using the orbits of the planets ties the unfamiliar structure of the atom to something more familiar). That doesn't make them tenses any more than the analogy of the solar system makes the structure of the atom like the solar system. As an encyclopedia, we have a responsibility to describe things accurately and not to just tie the unfamiliar to the familiar. Bats are not birds or mice with wings, electrons are not planets, the aorist is not a tense. We are not writing a beginning Greek grammar, we are writing an adult encyclopedia. This article, especially, is not a compendium of the Greek aorist, but of the Indo-European aorist. While the sections on Sanskrit, Bulgarian, and Proto-Indo-European are still in early stages of development, it is absolutely necessary to use precise terminology in comparing these different languages. Without using precise terminology, describing and comparing these aorist aspects becomes impossible. --Taivo (talk) 05:18, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
It doesn't to Taivo; if this were consensus in theoretical linguistics as a whole, we should explain it here by saying that they do things differently. We are optimized for laymen, not for specialists. But this is as yet unsupported; several linguistic sources are inconsistent with Taivo's position. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:46, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
There are quite a few fields where attempts at standardization have not been fully implemented. The IPA is the international phonetic alphabet, yet many US sources (though fewer each year) continue to use a hybrid Americanist system (just as NASA until just a couple years ago continued to use Imperial rather than metric), and Uralic-language scholars might still use a idiosyncratic system for Uralic. You will find these things on WP, because they're used by our sources, but they need to be presented in a way that is comprehensible to the reader who is only familiar with the international standard. Likewise, our grammar articles may include terms like 'preterite' and 'aorist' which are idiosyncratic to specific traditions. The problem with that is that the reader often has no clue what they are supposed to mean. If a (non-Greek) grammar article uses "aorist", does that mean past perfective, as in Lezgian? Or does it mean gnomic, as in Swahili? The past few days, as I redirected articles from "perfect aspect" to "perfect (grammar)", I realized that a fair number of grammar articles didn't actually mean perfect, but perfective (aorist), but since they didn't define their terms, you wouldn't be able to figure that out without outside knowledge. This can be a severe problem; the solution IMO is to always attempt to clearly define your terms, or to link to a centralised article that gives a standardized account. That's what we need here. If the situation were more complex, we might want a table correlating the trad terms of Greek scholarship with general linguistics, but the correlation is pretty straightforward (aspect is subcat of tense in the former but not the latter). — kwami (talk) 06:42, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Since Taivo mentioned encyclopaedic treatments of the atom as an example of what you are trying to do here, I suggest you actually look at the article Atom. It is a whole lot more user-friendly than this article even though atomic theory is a whole lot more complex than the concept of the aorist. When I read the intro there, I want to keep reading. When I read the intro here, I want to find a hole somewhere to hide in. Amphitryoniades (talk) 08:06, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

The writing style is what you are noting, Amphitryoniades, not an imprecision of technical terminology or the use of archaic technical terminology. We may need to polish the writing, but we don't need to switch to archaic and incorrect terminology used only in primary teaching. --Taivo (talk) 12:55, 31 August 2010 (UTC)


As long as Taivo doesn't address this apparently flagrant contradiction (maybe it's somewhere in all this mess, but I don't see it), I have trouble taking his/her contributions to the controversy seriously. (I think Akhilleus' point, that, whoever claims empery over grammar in general, the classical philologists have a legitimate claim to analyze Greek grammar, is also true, but quite possibly rendered unnecessary by this larger issue, that linguists like Comrie and Rijksbaron are so far from Taivo's vehement position that apparently they "fail to understand the fundamental linguistics.") Comrie and Rijksbaron are good reliable sources on aspect and Greek grammar, right? Wareh (talk) 13:44, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

This has been addressed before. I started a comparison of scholars who have concluded the aorist was aspect or aspect+tense vs those who concluded it was just tense. I got to a dozen of the former before losing interest. No-one has been able to come up with an example of the latter. Comrie discusses the aorist as a perfective. Within that context, he says that it is primarily past tense: that is, a perfective past. As soon as I find my copy, I'll post the quote in its context. — kwami (talk) 18:46, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Ah, here we go. It's amazing what I can lose in plain sight.
Comrie, Aspect, p. 12. This is in §0.3 Terminology, in the second paragraph, which covers how the term 'perfective' is to be used in the book:
In place of the term 'perfective' some linguists use the term 'aoristic'; in the traditional grammatical terminologies of some languages, however, the term 'aorist' is restricted to perfectivity in the past tense (e.g. Bulgarian, Georgian, also some writers on Spanish), and to avoid this possible confusion the term has not been used as part of the general linguistic terminology here.

The quote above is from the footnote.
(Personally, I wish he had decided on "aoristic", to avoid the more serious confusion with "perfect".)
If Comrie did mean simply that the Ancient Greek aorist is simply past tense, which would disagree with all of our other sources, we could add that as another analysis of the aorist indicative in Ancient Greek. However, on p 19 he discusses how languages use perfective forms with ingressive meaning, especially with stative verbs, and he says,
In Ancient Greek, for instance, the Aorist (perfective past) of the verb Basileúō 'I reign' can refer to a complete reign, as in ebasíleusa déka étē 'I reigned for ten years, had a reign of ten years', but it can also refer to the start of the reign, i.e. ebasíleusa 'I became king, ascended the throne' versus Imperfect (imperfective past) ebasíleuon 'I was king'.
He then compares this with the Spanish "Simple Past (perfective past)". — kwami (talk) 19:22, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
I think you're missing two important points. (1) The substantial disagreement seems to be between the two alternatives "aspect only" vs. "aspect+tense," but you seem to lump those together and create an alternative (tense only, nothing to do with aspect) that I don't think anyone here believes. (2) "If Comrie did mean simply that the Ancient Greek aorist is simply past tense..." misses the point, because he didn't mean that, and I don't think anyone else has misunderstood him in that way: rather, he believed (correctly) that the aorist indicative was primarily a past tense. So I don't believe he's "disagree[ing] with all of our other sources"; rather, he's simply taken enough trouble to arrive at an understanding complete enough that he doesn't over-simplify to the point of discarding things understood by linguists who have taken enough trouble to understand the particularities of the aorist in Ancient Greek (which is why he agrees with a more specialized-in-Gk. linguist such as Rijksbaron). Wareh (talk) 19:37, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Ah, then we agree with each other.
I haven't missed those points. In fact, I've said both myself, apart from no-one thinking the aorist is a tense: Isn't that what this debate is about? (Septentrionalis insists that it is a tense, and that the linguists who say otherwise "appear to have ceased to study languages.")
Taivo correctly stated that the aorist is not a tense, given the current definition of "tense", which you appear to subscribe to. He has apparently accepted the analysis of the Ancient Greek aorist as a pure aspect, which is only supported in some of our sources. I don't know which is correct. We have numerous RSs that it is perfective past, but also very detailed analyses which purport to demonstrate that that characterization is inaccurate. Taivo has also characterized the phrase "aorist tense" as a simplification for pedagogy, whereas I assume that it's due to a change in the meaning of the word "tense". Regardless, given your and my (and Taivo's) understanding of the word "tense", the phrase "aorist tense" is not an accurate characterisation.
Rijksbaron, BTW, says "the value [past] is not part of the meaning of the aorist indicative; it is, rather, in Gricean terms, a conversational implicature, be it a very strong one." — kwami (talk) 19:55, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
As the OED quotes from Lyons: The ‘tense-system’ may be set out in terms of the two dimensions of time and aspect. We can avoid the word tense if the modern linguistic theorists have rendered it useless; but we may not use it clean contrary to its two-millennial proper sense without confusing our readers with gibberish. To fail to call the natural classifications of synthetic Indo-European languages "tenses" is stupid enough; to deny what any school-boy knows is pedantry. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:24, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
A "tense-system" is not the same thing as a "tense", and Lyons even put it in scare quotes!
The term is far from useless. Also, we go by RSs; you may dislike them, but you don't get to override them. "Gibberish" is not defined as "words which Septentrionalis dislikes".
What we are arguing against is an attempt to impose a misleading term across the article. My point throughout has been that we can simply say "aorist" without imposing one convention or the other. — kwami (talk) 20:36, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Not so far you're not. You are imposing Comrie's invention - apparently against his text - throughout the article. Please stop. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:51, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps you should read the lit yourself before asking me to stop respecting it. — kwami (talk) 21:01, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Dubious text

The aorist describes a perfective aspect of the verb in the grammatical tradition of Ancient Greek and in languages whose description has been influenced by that tradition
  • This is not true. The Ancient Greek aorist is a formal category, the first and second aorist. These usually have an aspect, but tended to lose it as the language evolved; but where the aorist - as often - is used as an unmarked verb form, or - as sometimes - as interchangeable with the imperfect, it is still an aorist.
  • It is not supported by the page given, which is Timothy Shopen, Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN 0521588553, p. 302 Page 302 doesn't mention Greek - and the book as a whole does not support so strong a statement.
  • Since the actual source is Timberlake's paper, a contribution to Shopen's book, it is miscited. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:00, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
    • Doubly miscited; this is the third volume of a set, which should be indicated. This is a symptom of Research by Google. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:04, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
It is common to to use grammatical terms for formal categories. That's typically part of applying the term to a specific language, part of the common entanglement of syntax and morphology. Although the term started out as Greek, it has since been applied to other languages, first to forms in Sanskrit and pIE which were thought to be cognate with the Greek aorist, then to forms in languages such as Bulgarian, Lezgian, and Georgian which have similar aspectual distinctions, then to unmarked verb forms in other languages, such as Turkish and Swahili, which are not very similar to the Greek aorist. The term "aorist", therefore, is more than just the Greek aorist. I'm sure you can reword the offending line to capture all of this.
As for the aorist being unmarked, that doesn't make it neutral. In English singular number is unmarked, but that doesn't mean that it's not specific for number. There is a lot of debate in the lit over much semantic force the aorist has (Comrie appears to think it did not have much perfective force, though he goes into no detail, Campbell that it did not have much past-tense force), but that's a discussion specifically for different stages of Greek. — kwami (talk) 18:57, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
You're not applying "aorist" to Greek; you are attempting - and failing - to generalize aorist from Greek. You are also attempting to generalize the use of "tense" by claiming it applies only to the sort of temporal distinctions Latin and English make, which is anglocentrism. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:08, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Neither are my generalization, and the later is not anglocentric: Comrie is a Slavicist, and much of his approach to aspectual terminology was to harmonize Slavic traditions with traditions from the rest of the world. Again, what I'm hearing from you is, "this isn't how I learned it, so it must be nonsense, even though I know nothing about it". — kwami (talk) 20:29, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
The sentence quoted makes claims about Greek (explicitly) and Sanskrit (implicitly); both are false.
More seriously, you are writing about a subject with a two-millennia old tradition, and imposing upon it a systematization that would make most Indo-European verb forms "not tenses". That is not consensus of the scholarship; it is not what the scholars you cite actually say; and it is not useful for the reader. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:48, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

clarity of language

This is an extraordinary heat generated from trying to clarify a technical term. Several interlocutors new to the discussion have attempted to bring in some fresh perspectives, and they've been pretty briskly stamped on. I rather agree with Amphitryoniades that a way to resolve this is to think of who's most likely to be coming to the article — and that would be neither professional linguists nor ancient Greek specialists researching their next article on the aorist in Pindar, who are unlikely to use WP as a source.

For instance, the first sentence states "The aorist describes (?) a perfective aspect of the verb." What does "describe" mean here? How does a verb form describe anything? Do we mean "represents", "expresses," something like that? And let's say the Mythical User Most Likely to Come Here (MUMLCH) clicks on the blue link because she doesn't know what "perfective aspect" means. The MUMLCH learns that "the perfective aspect … sometimes called the aorist, is an aspect that exists in many languages." So the aorist is the perfective aspect, and the perfective aspect is the aorist. There is no link to grammatical aspect in the lede, nor to grammatical tense, nor are the meanings of those terms brought to bear in sorting out how "aorist" is used and why common usage is not technically accurate. The MUMLCH who doesn't already fully grasp the difference between aspect and tense should, upon reading the introductory section on "aorist", have a better understanding of all three through the example of the aorist. The article shouldn't be written for people already in full command of all relevant terms. This is not dumbing down; it's a matter of communicating a difficult concept clearly to the readers for which it is intended. Cynwolfe (talk) 15:44, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Also, I agree with Amphitryoniades that the introductory section of Atom is a fine example of readability. I feel included as a reader there without having to be a physicist. Technical terms are used luminously, not as barriers to keep out the uninitiated. Cynwolfe (talk) 15:53, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Thank you, Cynwolfe for your contribution. Those are good points and a good point of view. I made a couple of changes to the introductory paragraph to clarify these points. --Taivo (talk) 17:51, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Yes, it takes skill to retain the precision of technical terms while making them accessible to the naive reader. More than I have. — kwami (talk) 18:59, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Actually Cynwolfe has a valid general point, which applies equally to all too many mathematical articles. Advanced students write at the level of abstraction useful to them - or, all too often, the one beyond that - whether or not it is appropriate to the subject matter or the audience. By cutting back to observables, we can provide a text generally intelligible and not tendentious; if "not a grammatical tense" means only "not asserting a time" in the jargon, we can say so. I shall rewrite accordingly. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:14, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Yes, he does have a good point. However, although you simplified the language, you made it very unclear: You said the aorist indicates "action done at a given time", which is factually incorrect, and from your examples a reader would likely conclude that it is past tense, which Wareh at least thought we all agreed it was not; Campbell even paraphrases Hewson and Bubenik as saying that "the aorist must never be considered as a past tense". Cynwolfe proposed that we simplify without dumbing things down. — kwami (talk) 20:53, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
The OED ends by comparing it to the English simple past; but that is not all. What part of "the Greek aorist does not imply that the action took place in the past" did you fail to understand? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:57, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
If the OED text says, "the Greek aorist does not imply that the action took place in the past" then it is, ipso facto, an aspect and not a tense. Tenses only deal with time. --Taivo (talk) 21:28, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Stop spreading the neologistic usage of a particular subfield as though it applied everywhere. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:02, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Uh, PMAnderson, you are correct, correct linguistic terminology does not apply to chemistry or physics. But it does apply to grammatical discussions such as this one. --Taivo (talk) 22:05, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
  • What the OED says, quoted above, is One of the past tenses of the Greek verb, which takes its name from its denoting a simple past occurrence, with none of the limitations as to completion, continuance, etc., which belong to the other past tenses. It corresponds to the simple past tense in English, as ‘he died.’
  • Observe the use of "tense", as common English usage; observe the repeated use of "past"; and observe that although this text and the text of the proposed revision are both quoted on this page, Taivo has mistaken the one for the other. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:13, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Simple language

Before it is reverted again, I quote the proposed simplification here:

The aorist (abbreviated AOR, /ˈeɪ.ərɨst/, from the Greek: ἀόριστος, aóristos, "without boundaries, indeterminate"[1]) referred originally to certain forms of the Ancient Greek verb. By extension, it is used of related forms in other Indo-European languages and to forms of similar function in other languages, Indo-European or not;[2] since many related Indo-European forms, especially those in Sanskrit, have similar force, it is reasonable to conjecture that it had the same meaning in the parent speech.
The principal uses of the aorist refer to action done at a given time, rather than to continuous or completed action, much the same distinction as English "I climbed" against "I was climbing" or "I had climbed"; Greek has other special forms for those, whereas the aorist is unmarked. Unlike "I climbed", the Greek aorist does not imply that the action took place in the past, although most uses of the aorist do refer to past action.[3] In describing non-Indo-European languages, the word "aorist" has been used to mean various unmarked forms of the verb, such as the gnomic present in Turkish and Swahili.

Since "aorist" is both a formal description - hence its application to Demotic - and a generalized term for various unmarked verb forms (generalizing either on aspect, or the gnomic aorist, at least), I doubt anything more specific can be said in the intro. We can add more jargon, of course, but that won't add to specificity, merely to word-length. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:03, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Per WP:Bold, you are now edit warring. Please stop.
You're right, I missed that sentence, which does help. However, you explanation is still wrong: the aorist does not principally "refer to an action done at a given time", according to all of the sources I have read. Rijksbaron says that the aorist does imply past tense, or most specifically that past tense is an implicature of the aorist. And I can't believe that your source is the OED! Your lede is dumbed down, not just simplified: you never say what the aorist actually is, and most people coming here probably want to know what it is.
As for being more specific, the aorist is generally used for PFV.PST in various languages. There are relatively few authors which use it otherwise, and when they do, reviewers often complain that this is an unclear/confusing/inappropriate use of the term. That's why we don't have a section on Swahili & Turkish; we could probably relegate them to a footnote. — kwami (talk) 21:15, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
What sources? If you have read them, you have not understood them; if they said what you claim they do, they would not be reliable. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:37, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

The above is what I came up with for a rewrite. (The pronunciation, abbreviation, and refs can be added in.) I've replaced "tense" with "time" to avoid controversy. — Eru·tuon 21:32, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

That's a lot better. A couple points, however: I would link to perfective aspect up front, as we all agree that is correct, rather than just for Ancient Greek, and I think we should note that it is specifically past tense (PFV.PST) for most of those other languages, including Modern Greek. — kwami (talk) 21:58, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
(ec)Any definition of the aorist that says "the principal uses of the aorist refer to action done at a given time" is wrong. The principal use of the aorist is as a contrast to the imperfect (multiple quotes are already present in the article). This is an aspectual distinction. Usage of the aorist is focused on the action being bounded or punctual, and any "past" meaning is purely implicational and not the primary meaning. And the OED is not the authority on the aorist, aspect versus tense, Greek grammar, etc. While you may be reading the second edition of the OED, the wording you cite is probably a retention from the first edition of 1888. --Taivo (talk) 21:36, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Conjecture heaped upon falsehood; not that it would matter if the OED decided that they were right the first time. The corpus of Ancient Greek hasn't changed much since 1888. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:42, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Any version which denies that the aorist usually applies to past time is wrong; the reason it's an "aspect" (or, more correctly, has an aspect) is that it doesn't have to. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:42, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
You clearly don't understand what aspect means and, thus, are not contributing any positive to this discussion. I'll make it simple since your only source appears to be the OED. Aorist is an aspect. As an aspect, it marks an act as a single point (not specifying the "size" of that point). It bounds that act. In the indicative that act has been completed. Since the only logical time for an act to have been completed is in the past, then "past" is part of the implied meaning, although that is not always the case. The aorist aspect, as a completed aspect, can't help but refer to something in past time, but the time marking is only implied. Thus, aorist is a completed/perfective aspect that in the indicative implies past time. It's not a tense. --Taivo (talk) 21:57, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
The aorist aspect, as a completed aspect, can't help but refer to something in past time, would also demonstrate that future perfects always refered to events completed in the past. But that does not follow, as Rijksbaron $12 would show Taivo; section 8.3.3 on the jussive aorist shows an aorist dealing only with the present and near future. I will attempt to ignore his falsehoods, his inventions, and his personal attacks; but this cries out for answer. I would be glad to see him back at this discussion when he has learned a synthetizing language. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:14, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for continuing to issue personal attacks, PMAnderson, keep crawling deeper into that gutter you've crawled in. "Future perfect" can perfectly well be an event in the future, because "perfect" doesn't relate something to the present, but relates the event to one event that precedes another. "When I will have eaten, I will speak". You keep taking comments out of context. In the context of the preceding discussion the issue was clearly one of dealing with the indicative. Keeping twisting words, PMAnderson, and issuing those personal attacks. --Taivo (talk) 20:34, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
So can the aorist; the gnomic aorist is timeless. See also the Alcestis, line 386, with an aorist in apodosi, and a future protasis. The complete, or in this case, instantaneous, effect will take place in the future, if the cause does. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:42, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
  • You are engaging in neologism; you are also quoting a discussion of the New Testament as though it applied to all Greek. Please stop this. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:00, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
I'm sorry, PMAnderson, if correct technical nomenclature is not part of your world. This article is not solely about Attic Greek. It's about "aorist". --Taivo (talk) 22:04, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
But it ought to be about the primary sense of aorist; and where it discusses Greek, it should not express falsehoods and absurdities. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:10, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Yes, PMAnderson, we agree, and the primary sense of the aorist is completion as an aspect. I don't get my knowledge of Greek from the OED, by the way. Perhaps you should find another reference. --Taivo (talk) 03:08, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Where do you get your knowledge of Greek from? Google? Much of the Greek section is simply wrong in anybody's language; it takes generalizations from linguists discussing something else as though they were absolute and unqualified facts. I have cited the OED solely for English usage; writing this English wikipedia in English (by which we mean the language "understanded of the people"). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:10, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I had several years of Greek in college including Koine, Septuagint and Classical so I find your reliance on OED to be humorous for someone who wants their arguments taken seriously. I find Cynwolfe's discussion far more enlightened and helpful than your blind insistence on ignoring linguistic accuracy and relying instead on OED's 1888 definition. --Taivo (talk) 15:34, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I don't believe you; no one who had done so would distinguish the Septuagint, which is in the language of its time, from Koine. Someone who had passed any course in Greek grammar might assert, as Taivo has done, that the conventional meaning of "tense" doesn't exist, or should be ignored; nobody who had passed such a course would assert that "aorist tense" applies only to the indicative, as the article now does. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:04, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
So, too, I don't believe that you've had any Greek training other than reading definitions in the OED. Any person who has spent ten minutes looking at the details of the evolution of Greek from 500 BCE to 100 CE knows that there are differences between the Koine of the Septuagint and the Koine of the New Testament. There are even textbooks specifically focused on the Greek of the Septuagint and called "Septuagint Greek" or "Greek of the Septuagint" or some such. Since the term "Koine" is quite often focused on the New Testament and Church Fathers, "Septuagint" is a common way to distinguish that Greek from later koines. Perhaps you should focus on the fact that your understanding of Greek grammar is not based on linguistic principles, but on reciting your beginner's level paradigms without understanding the underlying science that focuses on the issue. --Taivo (talk) 18:38, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Real scholars do not limit Koine to Judeo-Christian texts.
Taivo is defending nonsense with worse nonsense: the differences between, say, the Gospel according to John and his Revelation are larger than any differences between the hypothetical averages of the New Testament and the Septuagint. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:07, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

(outdent) Perhaps you should tell the authors of texts labelled "Septuagint Greek" that they don't have a legitimate field of study. I never said that the New Testament was a unified style of Greek, you are reading that into my comments. I said that the language of the Septuagint can be studied separately from later koines (plural) and that it is possible to have a Greek course focused completely on that particular koine. You're just sounding more and more bitter and ill-informed by your comments on my Greek coursework. I doubt that you have had any similar level of study in the language, especially when your main cited source is the OED. --Taivo (talk) 19:15, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Since I know what I've read, and it ranges from Homer to the Apocrypha, I don't need to care what Taivo thinks; that's the problem with claiming credentials on Wikipedia.
"Septuagint Greek" is certainly a subject; it will differ from "New Testament Greek" in the examples and reading lessons. Both have the endemic problem that trots are too easy to come by. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:55, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, PMAnderson, that's the problem with making personal attacks as you did above. --Taivo (talk) 20:37, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I didn't make any attack; I said I didn't believe you - and your claims since have not convinced me otherwise. Vanity posts are a bad idea. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:12, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
LOL @ "vanity post". If you recall, you asked, "Where do you get your knowledge of Greek from? Google?" I simply answered your question. But I'm done with dealing with your personal attacks. You, on the other hand, have demonstrated no knowledge of Greek beyond the OED, so I guess we're even. --Taivo (talk) 21:45, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
And I still see no evidence of any actual knowledge of Greek. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:32, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
The feeling is mutual, I assure you. --Taivo (talk) 23:49, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

tense and aspect

I thought the rewrite was more accessible, and encourage Taivo to try again. I'd agree with K., however, that the first sentence had become too imprecise when it said "certain forms". The article is organized badly, with modern Bulgarian stuck between ancient Greek and Sanskrit (a very meager section), no mention of Phrygian, and the PIE horse following the cart in the rear. In terms of historical linguistics, this makes no sense. In terms of how ancient Greek is taught to students, it's muddled and confusing. The aorist is one of the principal parts of a verb; the stem itself has the quality of aspect, and "tense" comes into play depending on how it's conjugated, since it's in the indicative with the augment that it refers to the past. For a Latin student coming to Greek, it's grasping the difference between the aorist indicative and the perfect indicative that's the trick, which was presented to me as aspectual: "I died" vs. "I am dead" as described here also. The intro needs to deal with both "aspect" and "tense" and why (at least as far as the study and comprehension of ancient Greek goes) the two are difficult to disentangle. But for me the way to do this is to explain the aorist as an aspectual stem characteristic of PIE verbs, and functionally a tense in Greek when conjugated in the indicative with the temporal augment. Therefore, elementary Greek grammar books usually refer to the aorist as one of the tenses. Cynwolfe (talk) 21:54, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, Cynwolfe, I'll give it another shot this evening (I don't have time for the next few hours). I'll work on incorporating your comments on improving readability. --Taivo (talk) 22:00, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
That sounds like a sound approach, Cynwolfe, and you mention several critical details which are currently missing. My only reservation is in calling it a tense because of the past augment; my understanding is that the augment is typically fused, and it is this fused form which is addressed as the aorist indicative in our sources, including those sources which argue that past time is only an implicature. My understanding is that it is called a "tense" because this is part of the tradition of calling all grammatical encodings of time "tense", which I personally find intuitive but which conflicts with the modern treatment of 'tense' and aspect as independent parameters in encoding time. — kwami (talk) 22:07, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Actually, it doesn't conflict seriously; this is why some authors speak of a "tense" - the morphological entity - as "having [an] aspect". But we should use, or at least recognize, the common sense of "tense", while providing links to the theoretical articles. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:59, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Whether the augment is fused depends on the dialect of Greek; there are dialects where there is none
I would like to see the argument against using the intuitive and common meaning of "tense" in an article addressed to the general reader made explicitly. This is probably the chief source of the unintelligibility of the article. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:17, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
We're not going to spend much time calling it a tense or noting that it's not a tense, so that has little to do with the clarity of the article. That's also what we have links for. We can certainly work on a way to do that that is clear both to readers who think of "tense systems" as being tense, and to those who think of only points on a timeline as being tense. That's a minor issue overall. — kwami (talk) 22:24, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
I agree that it ought to be minor; this is one reason I used certain forms, to avoid the word. But we should be clear that we are using "tense" in two senses, and what they are. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:02, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
If I may, Kwami may be missing only one slight point in what I'm trying to say (emphasis on 'trying,' since I have a hellacious headache at the moment). The PIE aorist is an aspectual stem, as far I understand it at my rather rudimentary level; it is retained in Sanskrit, ancient Greek, evidently Phrygian, and presumably since Bulgarian is an IE language it inherited the aorist from a Slavic ancestor. Conjugated with a temporal augment in the indicative and given personal endings, the Greek aorist becomes functionally a "tense" as the word is commonly used in language classes, and is therefore treated in elementary grammar books as one of the seven tenses. This is demonstrably so. (In my link above, the second page gets into how usage of the aorist and the perfect grows indistinct.) Because a significant number of the users who would look up "aorist" would be coming here having seen it referred to as a "tense," IMHO it's important to explain why. Explaining this conventional usage of the word "tense" is not to endorse it as correct in the context of scientific linguistics. Cynwolfe (talk) 23:17, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
I would agree with that. All of the combinations of tense and aspect are called "tense" in probably most treatments of Greek, just as they are for many treatments of English. The Spanish preterit is also commonly called a "tense". I rather wish the word "tense" hadn't been chosen for timeline marking, since it's so convenient to use it as Septentrionalis would prefer. — kwami (talk) 01:13, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
There's a discussion in a paper by Issatchenko on JSTOR of the aorist in Old Russian, which had the aorist from the earliest times, and lost it about 1600, when it begins being misused in the same way the Jacobean verb-forms are in modern English. The form quoted is ězdāxu "they rode", which looks like a zero-grade stem form with augment. The same paper mentions the Rumanian aorist (a "new past tense", formed after the break-up of Latin; another example of "aorist" as a functional category - and a past tense). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:02, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Assuming that by "new past tense" they mean past tense. — kwami (talk) 01:13, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I believe so; it's one of a string of examples of similar function, which include the Spanish preterite, as it happens. But Romanian is not one of my languages, and this is chiefly a reminder that we may need a sentence on it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:15, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
The Spanish preterite is not a simple past tense either, but perfective past. In fact, some have called it "aorist"! — kwami (talk) 19:53, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

As for the introductory section, it should be written according to WP:LEDE: "The lead should be able to stand alone as a concise overview of the article. It should define the topic, establish context, explain why the subject is interesting or notable, and summarize the most important points—including any notable controversies." So our elementary Greek student should feel the dawn starting to break as she reads these first two or three paragraphs, and not be more confused than when coming to the article. This must surely include an explanation of why she's seen "aorist" referred to as a tense. Many years have passed since I learned Greek, and if Greek textbooks no longer use the term "tense," the need to explain it lessens but doesn't disappear, given the presence of so many classic Greek grammars online that use the word. The rest of the article in my view should be presented historically, because I don't see how to make sense of "aspectual stem" without explaining this as a PIE concept, and noting the languages that retained the aorist. Mention should be made of Latin losing it, or why not all ancient IE languages had it. The section on Sanskrit could be better. The section on ancient Greek needs to make sense to your average low-level classics prof teaching future seminarians how to conjugate verbs. And to the future seminarians. Without causing linguists to slam their espresso cups indignantly. Cynwolfe (talk) 23:17, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

This by Cynwolfe seems a sensible program; but I do not see that aorist tense is in fact disappearing from textbooks of Greek, or other languages; it is some forty times more common than "aorist aspect" - and some books, quite sensibly, use both, one for the morphology, the other for the meaning. I will be consulting Rijksbaron shortly; he appears to be the most recent general book on Greek syntax in English. If this distracts from a discussion of Cynwolfe's proposal, I will make it a subsection. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:43, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, it is very commonly used in reference to Greek. However, it is inappropriate to simply call it a "tense" when if the reader looks up what a "tense" is, he comes up w s.t. contradictory to what the aorist is; we also have several Greek-studies sources which either put "tense" in scare quotes or are otherwise careful to clarify that it isn't really a tense. — kwami (talk) 01:13, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
That's a problem with the tense article, not with this one. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:17, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
That's a problem with using words for contradictory meanings. We can't just call a form a "perfect" because that's the tradition for some language, when the "perfect" of that language is not a perfect. We can call it the "perfect", and explain that it isn't perfect but simply past tense, or we can just call it "past tense". — kwami (talk) 01:20, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I think the problem might be that we aren't allowed by WP rules to decide the matter. We can only describe and explain the materials that are out there in the public eye, in accordance with WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE.. That is why we must explain that in elementary Greek grammar books the aorist stem conjugated with personal endings and with the temporal prefix is given as one of the seven tenses. This is a separate matter from what "tense" really is, or whether that's the correct term, which requires its own linguistic explanation. Since the only languages treated in this article are Indo-European, I've proposed that the solution (after the introductory section) would be to present the (P)IE aorist as a verbal stem that expresses aspect, and proceed from there to individual languages. The purpose of the article is to explain the term "aorist" so that someone encountering it knows what's meant in whatever likely context it's used. (Let me add as trivia the amazing fact that the word "aorist" appears sporadically in the New York Times archives up through about 1922, after which time Greek grammar books — of Gleason's primer it is noted "The author admits that there is no workless Greek book, even in this age of horseless carriages and wireless telegraphy; to attain the little knowledge requisite to carry on the study of Greek in school or college careful attention, common sense, and some study are necessary" — cease to be noticed, and with them and the ideal of a classical education as aspirational the aorist vanishes. With two exceptions: an interview with I.F. Stone in 1978, and a 1984 review in which Jorie Graham chastises Rachel Hadas for "intellectualized posturing" in a poem: remain / aorist, dear icon, / precious as captured time. Nor can I resist revisiting the 1904 review of Gleason's primer: "The second aorist, one of the stock bugaboos of the young explorer into this dead language, is met and vanquished within the first few lessons, instead of impending as a vague danger till the long-drawn-out development of the regular verb is finally passed, only to fall on the student with crushing force at last." ) Cynwolfe (talk) 14:46, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I like this approach. There are two complications:
  1. The IE aorist-stem is only the first aorist; the second aorist in Greek and much of the aorist in Sanskrit is a reformulation of IE imperfects (see Buck). As Gildersleeve reminds me, the functions of the first and second aorist differ slightly.
  2. If we're going to describe how "aorist" is used in English, we should have a section on cases like Romanian, and presumably Turkish, where some verb-form of similar function has been called aorist.
This can presumably be covered by a sentence of the shape "Aorist" has also been used for forms of similar function; Greek...second aorist; modern linguists have applied "aorist" to verb-forms in other languages (although it is entirely possible that Romanian "aorist" is native terminology devised by Phanariots, I suppose). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:33, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

(outdent) Since this article is about aorist in general, placing the Indo-European discussion first is a very good approach and should be implemented. Then, within the Greek section, the discussion about how this aspect fits within a system traditionally called the "tense system" is appropriate. Since, by reordering, we clearly shift the focus from Greek primarily to Indo-European, then the comment about how Greek teachers traditionally call this a "tense" can be minimized in the lead (as it is now) and referred to the Greek section with appropriate wikilinks to grammatical aspect and grammatical tense for the person who wants to know the difference. --Taivo (talk) 15:41, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

A proposal to impose a POV. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:01, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I just looked up "POV". It means "something that Septentionalis disagrees with". You have given no rational reason for your objections. — kwami (talk) 18:12, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Is that a claim that rational = "something Kwami agrees with"? Otherwise it is false. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:29, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps I am misunderstanding both PMA and K. Walking into this naively as I am, I don't see what's wrong with Taivo's outline, unless we too much minimize ancient Greek and its teaching, since I'm still inclined to think that ancient Greek primers are a likely path to the article. I'd reckon that at minimum a third of those coming to the article would be there because they're studying ancient Greek, and so it wouldn't be disproportionate if a third of the introduction were devoted to usage in relation to Greek, in keeping with the WP:LEDE instructions that "the emphasis given to material in the lead should roughly reflect its importance to the topic." Cynwolfe (talk) 19:42, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
As usual, your suggestions are sensible. — kwami (talk) 19:52, 1 September 2010 (UTC)


Why not offer "aorist", "aorist tense", and "aorist aspect" as variations of the same term in the introductory paragraph, and explain the possible distinction between them later, as above? — Eru·tuon 19:37, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Fine, in principle. We would need to phrase it carefully; aorist aspect describes (one kind of) function; aorist tense describes morphology; and they are not exactly coterminous. We don't need to say that in the intro; but we do need to avoid saying anything actually false. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:45, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
That's not how the terms are used either, except in the Greek trad, and this article is more general than that. "Aorist stem" is the term for the morphological base.
In general, the aorist is not an aspect either. The better sources claim that only for Ancient Greek, but the term is more widely used for a conflation of tense and aspect. — kwami (talk) 19:52, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
"Except in the Greek tradition"; the living room is fine except where the elephant ran through it. Not to mention the Sanskrit tradition and Indo-European comparative linguistics. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:00, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
If Kwami holds that the term "aorist" is used as a conflation of tense and aspect, I'm left as puzzled as I was at the beginning about why this topic is proving to be so contentious. I would say that this is a problem of writing by committee, except that a committee might assign parts to be drafted or written by various members depending on expertise and interest, or might funnel ideas through a single person assigned to produce a draft. Why is the article locked down? I missed the discussion that led to a consensus on this action. My feeling is that everybody interested in the topic needs to start contributing positively to the article space, through actual writing and revision, not tags and deletion, and especially not reverts, all of which tend to make other contributors feel insulted. I don't see what can be accomplished through further debate on this talk page. Cynwolfe (talk) 20:22, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Because efforts to rephrase this were persistently reverted. Tags are at best an effort to defeat that tactic by embarrassing the reverters and drawing public attention - not likely here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:28, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I'm not aware that any of us had anything directly to do with the lockdown.
The problem with the article appears to be that Sep does not wish it to reflect general linguistic terminology, whose legitimacy he denies, even though he appears (it's difficult to tell) to accept that the aorist is a conflation of tense and aspect.
But you're right, debate is getting us nowhere. We've all had our say, and it's not possible to compromise when you reject the legitimacy of the other POV. — kwami (talk) 20:33, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Depends on what you mean by conflation; the aorist has a number of uses, some of them diagonal to the tense-aspect mapping. If you mean nothing more specific than that, yes, I agree.
But I deny that this "general linguistic" terminiology is useful to the reader, or appropriate to the article, except as links. I would as soon write calculus in the language of category theory, or addition as an exercise in formal deductive calculus. Both have been done; but neither belongs in an encyclopedia. (Articles about them do.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:47, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Greek

This is, of course, my principal concern. The section is not only inaccurate; it is much too short. We should distinguish between the functions of the aorist in Epic, Attic, and Koine - since they differ - with sources applicable to each, not citing statements out of Koine textbooks as though they appplied to Homer. We may as well discuss the morphology of Demotic in the same place; I think the ancient dialects can be left to their several articles. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:59, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Also, the aorist infinitive does convey time in indirect discourse. Wareh (talk) 17:15, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Thank you, sir. So it does. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:21, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
The same is true of the aorist optative and participle in indirect discourse. It's the case because all three represent an aorist indicative in direct discourse. But they convey time relative to the time of the main verb (i.e., more distant past under a past verb, past in reference to the future under a future verb). Does that fall under the definition of tense in linguistics, or aspect? — Eru·tuon 17:48, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
According to our article it does; one is absolute, the other relative, tense. I don't really feel impelled to look further. But this demonstrates another problem with "also called aorist tense"; it can be read either as an example of the technical sense of "tense" or as a belated acknowledgement of the traditional sense; and it's wrong either way. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:11, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, relative tense is still tense.
According to Campbell and others, the temporal reading is implied, not inherent in the aorist. According to other (but less specialized) accounts, the past tense is inherent. We have multiple refs that the aorist is not (only) a tense; the only ref that it is a tense is Sept's personal opinion. — kwami (talk) 18:16, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
And we were getting along so well. I do not claim - and do not believe - that the aorist is a "tense" in the theoretical sense; however, it is unquestionably one of the "tenses of Greek" (none of them, of course, without aspect) and is principally used of events in the past. Both can be cited to Gildersleeve, which I began with; his section on the aorist tense begins with that assertion. Septentrionalis

PMAnderson 18:27, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

If you now admit that the aorist is not a linguistically defined "tense", then what is your issue? The lead paragraph needs a mention that traditional grammars often call the aorist a tense (which it currently does), then we move on to a proper linguistic description that focuses on aorist as an aspect. --Taivo (talk) 18:41, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
If you now admit that the aorist is not a linguistically defined "tense". I reply as the Lacedaemonians did to Philip; If. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:20, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Um, "I do not claim - and do not believe - that the aorist is a "tense" in the theoretical sense". Do you deny you wrote those words? — kwami (talk) 19:48, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I deny that theoretical linguistics (especially any one school of theoretical linguistics, these days) = "linguistics". It seems hybris to confound one's textbook with a field; no wonder Taivo's expressions are so violent. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:04, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
We're not talking about a textbook, but any of hundreds of linguistic texts, surveys, and journals which follow the typology laid out by Comrie in the 1970s. This includes NT Greek scholars who are careful to note that the aorist isn't actually a tense; in fact, Zerwick made this point as far back as 1963 in Biblical Greek, so it would seem that Comrie had plenty of company. — kwami (talk) 20:25, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

I do not admit that the preferences of Taivo and Kwami are "linguistics"; they may be the textbooks they read most recently. They are inconsistent with the actual usage of scholarship on the Indo-European languages (for example, Roth's book on the "Mixed Aorists" in Homeric Greek (1990), which uses "tense" in the traditional sense), with the usage of dictionaries, and the reasonable expectations of our readership. We are not optimized for specialists (if either of these paedants be a specialist), but for lay readers. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:20, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Still used?

Is the aorist still used in today's languages, such as in modern Greek? In Sanskrit it has become somewhat old-fashioned and is not in common use except for a few verbs (although it is still taught in grammar lessons), and it has been this way for centuries — there's some work of literature (I don't remember it now, but can find a reference) in which a character talks too pedantically, and this effect is achieved using the aorist. I'm wondering if it similarly fell out of use in other languages as well? Shreevatsa (talk) 00:00, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

We had a Greek editor modify the lead some time ago from "Ancient Greek" to "Greek" on the basis of the aorist still being used, so I guess it is. -- Radagast3 (talk) 01:38, 26 June 2010 (UTC)
That is to say, recognizably similar forms are used (there has been some change in spelling and much in pronunciation), but with a distinctly different function; the Demotic aorist does assert past action. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:51, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Classical Greek

Rijksbaron discusses the following uses of the aorist (since he uses Herodotus and twice Homer, I can't head this Attic); I append sections from the 2002 edition, in the hope of portability.

  • In narrative, the aorist alternates with the imperfect, the aorist showing completed action, the imperfect incomplete. In particular the aorist may describe individual steps within the framework of a general action described with the imperfect. $6,1
  • In narrative, the aorist may show an earlier action, which may or may not be marked with tote. $6.3.1
  • The aorist with verbs of state may indicate entrance into that state enosēse "became sick". $6.3.2 Ingressive aorist.
  • Unrealizable wishes about the past only. $8.2
  • In direct speech, actions completed at the moment of utterance; umeas...nun sunelexa "I have called you together". $8.3.1
  • In tragic dialogue, performative verbs are in the aorist when immediately followed by a change of topic: epēnex', alla steiche dōmatōn esō "I thank you, now come let's go into the house". $8.3.2 Tragic aorist.

[More follows] Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:27, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

discussion

Note that only the second one has a tense meaning (although it is "tense" only by implicature), all the others are aspect. --Taivo (talk) 19:06, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
Is this baiting? On the contrary, the narrative use has both "tense", or rather time, and aspect; the use for impossible wishes has time explicitly; and several with time follow. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:22, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
No, it's not baiting, but as detailed as you want to get this isn't the article for it. These details belong in a separate article: "Aorist (Greek)". This article is about aorist in general, not Greek specifically. The Greek section of this article should point in general to the development of the Indo-European aorist aspect into Homeric, Classical, Koine, and Modern Greek with a hat note to a new article that deals with the Greek aorist in detail. --Taivo (talk) 22:13, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
No; the article called Aorist should cover the principal meaning of the word; that's WP:PRIMARYUSAGE. I doubt that Taivo's pet project of a general article on the "aorist aspect" should have an article at all; but if it does, it should not be this one. I am prepared, however, to let one exist if he goes away and writes it; it would be nice if it were supported by its sources - but we can see about that when he's done it.
And neither article, whatever its title, should be filled with nonsense about the aorist in any language concerned; which is the reason for this section.
But I will grant that although Taivo has claimed ownership of this space before, this was at least unpredictable. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:23, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
More personal attacks, PMAnderson. Tsk, tsk. No, this is the article about aorist, not the article about all the details of Greek aorist. It should be organized as Cynwolfe suggested--general lead, Indo-European aspect, developments of the aspect in Sanskrit, developments of the aspect in Greek (from Mycenean up through Modern--where it has become a tense from what you have said), evidence of the development in other Indo-European branches (or loss), the use of "aorist" in other languages based on its usage in Indo-European linguistics. Go write your article "Aorist (Greek)". --Taivo (talk) 00:39, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Aorist is a general linguistic term (whether it is best characterised as an aspect I don't know), not limited to Greek grammar. A general article about "Aorist" should make a general overview of the usage and definitions of the term in linguistics while providing examples from multiple languages that have been claimed to have an Aorist aspect, including but not limited to Greek. It could also contain a history of the usage of the term showing that it originated in the descriptionn of Greek grammar, and that it has since become a general linguistic term.·Maunus·ƛ· 01:10, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
That's what we were planning on; but certain editors have done their best to make it impossible, while revert-warring for claims their sources do not support. That leaves few choices. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:24, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi Maunus - I hope you can add to the collaborative spirit. I got this from the intro to Linguistics (italics mine) - Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach to the study of language, but language can be approached from a variety of directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to it and influence its study. The difficulty with this article at present is the narrowness of the definition - much of it is incomprehensible to anyone outside the linguistic community. Amphitryoniades (talk) 02:24, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't agree - a narrow defition is not problematic if it is well written and correct. In this case the problem seems to me to be firstly that the entire definition is couched in jargon and doesn't even attempt to communicate what aorist means to a lay reader, and secondly that there is a wish to overemphasize one particular part of the general topic (the greek aorist).·Maunus·ƛ· 23:36, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply! The reliance on jargon results from a narrow focus on 'the scientific approach'. The introduction should be addressed to a wide audience of laymen. There should then be sections where the different disciplines can use their separate jargons. The problem here is an inter-disciplinary feud that won't be settled except in general terms - laymen terms. That's how it seems to me. Amphitryoniades (talk) 00:21, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

No, wikipedia is supposed to communicate the scientific approach to laymen without using jargon - this is a question of good writing not of approach or definition, both linguists can write without jargon and so can greek grammarians. We must be able to write a good article adressed to laymen and still give a good definition of what the scientific concept we are handling is.·Maunus·ƛ· 00:25, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes but the scientific approach doesn't represent all sides here. You wouldn't write an article about the automobile using a scientific approach - science is just a part of the whole story. Same with the Aorist. Anyhow, that's my last shot. Good luck! Amphitryoniades (talk) 00:49, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Jargon isn't really the issue. Both traditions use the terms "tense" and "aspect"; the only difference is whether one is subsumed under the other. Greek scholars have themselves noted this discrepancy. I don't think it should be a problem to say that in Greek studies the aorist is commonly called a "tense", though technically it's an aspect, or a conflation of tense and aspect; that's exactly what several of our sources do. As for whether we call it a "tense" or "aspect" in the text, why use either? We can simply call it the "aorist", which would confuse nobody. This whole storm in a teacup is due to an insistence on using the conventions of one subfield of the topic. — kwami (talk) 00:52, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, indeed, it is the usage of a mass of provincial jargon that is despoiling what could be a perfectly clear article, phrased in the language that has always been used and is (see Cynwolfe's citations far above) still in use.
Comrie and Rijksbaron are compelled to treat "present" and "aorist" as adjectives with an understood substantive - but Comrie's index and Rijksbaron's chapter headings make clear that the word understood is "tense". We should state it; we are not writing for the narrow body of specialists which practice "transformational linguistics" - and thanks are due for that blessing. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:52, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
This definition "is a perfective aspect (not to be confused with the perfect) of the verb in the grammatical tradition of Ancient Greek (where it is usually called aorist tense) and in languages whose description has been influenced by that tradition." is full of jargon and does not explain anything to the layreader.·Maunus·ƛ· 11:17, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Aorist (Greek)

Taivo asserts above: These details belong in a separate article: "Aorist (Greek)". This article is about aorist in general, not Greek specifically. The Greek section of this article should point in general to the development of the Indo-European aorist aspect into Homeric, Classical, Koine, and Modern Greek with a hat note to a new article that deals with the Greek aorist in detail.

Does anyone else agree with him? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:00, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

I do.·Maunus·ƛ· 22:28, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
I'd be inclined to ask the question in light of WP:CFORK. Cynwolfe (talk) 22:58, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
I do as well. I also agree that content forking could be a problem, but by the tone of the argument, I'd be more worried about a POV fork than an accidental one. — kwami (talk) 23:23, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
I dn't think forking would be a problem - I think that Aorist (greek) coulkd easily be a spinnout article from a short section on the greek aorist in the general article.·Maunus·ƛ· 23:33, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, as long as the purpose for splitting is not to present a POV rejected on this article. (It could, of course, deal more with traditional terminology, but would still need to be compatible with how "tense" is defined elsewhere.) — kwami (talk) 23:36, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Obviously the definition of the linguistic term aorist should be the same in both articles - it would be a matter of giving a deeper level of detail to the probably best described specimen of the aorist than is due in the general article.·Maunus·ƛ· 23:58, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
The only rejected POV is the persistent unsourced falsehood that the aorist is an aspect. It can have an aspect, but need not. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:30, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

tense

Grammatical tense isn't very helpful. Until my recent edit, it wasn't even grammatical. From the discussion (or "discusssion") so far, I'm gathering that linguists understand tense as a reference to time, whether absolute or relative, but classicists trained from standard textbooks think of tense as a combination of time + aspect. Am I right about this? If not, what is the single work I should turn to to correct my misunderstanding? (N.b., dogmatic assertions that one terminology or the other is "correct" are very unlikely to solve my confusion, so please avoid such assertions.) --Akhilleus (talk) 05:44, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

I think that's right. The Greeks themselves I think subsumed them under a common term which we translate as "tense". Note that the twelve "tenses" of English follow that tradition. However, we also have several instances now of Greek scholars, some predating the publications by Comrie that pretty much fixed the terminology of tense and aspect within general linguistics, which were careful to note that the Greek "tenses" were not really tenses, or were more than tenses, etc. Also, beware of descriptions that state that tense encodes "time", in contrast to aspect, which encodes something else. Both tense and aspect encode time; the difference is that tense encodes the when of time (future, hodiernal, anterior, etc), whereas aspect encodes the how of time (inchoative, progressive, habitual, iterative, etc). Position vs. shape, if you will, or in the case of (im)perfective, point of view (interior/exterior). — kwami (talk) 06:43, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, the word in question is chronos (LSJ sub voce, V,1). "Tense" is the French descendant of Latin tempus. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:20, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
However, my answer would be that classicists think of tenses as collections of forms, which normally mark both time and aspect: egrapsa is the (lst sing. act.) first aorist of grapho, no matter which function of the aorist it's being used for. There is a strong implication that it is an undivided act of writing, a weaker implication that it's in the past - but both depend on context. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:42, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
I partially agree with you. Both "tense" and "aspect" are grammaticalized: that is, they are grammatical forms, like case. As with case, they may not always be used for their prototypical functions, though I don't know that they're nearly as variable as the Greek cases. That's all normal and part of the individual-language variation of any purported cross-linguistic grammatical form; compare the use of the "dative" in Greek and German, for example, or internally within Greek or German.
However, in the sources above I've read that while past tense is an implicature of the aorist, the perfective aspect is not. That is, a past tense reading may be canceled by context, but the aspectual reading may not be. Of course, in Greek the aorist is the unmarked aspect, and so is often used simply because there is no particular reason to use another aspect, thus weakening its aspectual force. This, however, is a normal consequence of markedness, not essentially different from any language with an unmarked perfective. — kwami (talk) 23:33, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
But of course the "perfective aspect" may be cancelled by context; when the meaning is past-within-past (Rijksbaron $6.2 above), the significance is purely temporal. Kwami's second sentence even admits this; to contend otherwise would be make the whole structure unfalsifiable - and therefore meaningless. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:21, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Kwami, thanks for the explanation above, which I found very helpful, especially the correction that tense and aspect both involve time. Pmanderson is right that classicists think of tenses primarily as collections of forms—at the most tedious level, they're blanks to fill in on a synopsis or paradigm. If I can't call the collection of aorist forms a tense, what do I call it? The phrase "tense-mood-aspect" is highly unsatisfactory, and I don't think it would help in teaching beginning Greek at all. --Akhilleus (talk) 03:16, 5 September 2010 (UTC)


Glad you found it useful.
Zerwick back in the 60s called them "tenses", using scare quotes. I can certainly understand just calling them tenses for the sake of the prose; the problem is making sure the reader follows when we really mean tense, and when it's shorthand for something more. I agree with tense-aspect-mood being unsatisfactory, though perhaps tense-aspect isn't so bad: I've seen that in some Greek grammars, since they treat tense-aspect separately from mood. Also, if we expand "tense" to the broader meaning, there is no word that I'm aware of for tense proper; in some grammars I've seen it as "time", but that leaves us even worse off because not only does that redefine "time" to mean specifically position on a time line in order to exclude aspect, but because "time" includes words like "yesterday" which aren't tense at all.
I've commonly seen temporal vs aspectual for the adjectives of tense and aspect; it's only context that allows you to know that temporal doesn't have the broader meaning, which I'm sure it has in other texts.
Because tense-aspect-mood is so awkward, it's commonly abbreviated to TAM, and TAM gets thrown around as a regular noun. You can see a generational difference: linguists of Comrie's era will almost never speak of "tams", or if they do, they do almost sheepishly. The next generation of linguists will speak of tams colloquially, because what else are you going to use? But that's *way* too jargony to be used in an encyclopedia article. — kwami (talk) 06:25, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Then use "position on a timeline"; or rather, since "yesterday" is a position on a timeline (-1 day from the origin), use "past, present, or future", which is - if anything - what you mean. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:41, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
Generally, when a science gets this far into a priori reasoning, the next generation abandons a large proportion of the abstract structure, on the grounds that it isn't talking about anything outside itself; that's how you know they are the next generation. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:21, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
"position on a timeline" as a n explanation of tense-aspect is wrong. It is not just the position but also the duration and the perspective on the action. Past, present, future is worse because it only applies to tense and only in languages that have that particular division of temporal space. I don't understand what you mean to add to the discussion by your comment about generations and apriori reasoning. ·Maunus·ƛ· 14:40, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
"Position on a timeline" was suggested - by Kwami, not by me - to represent "tense" (in the "general linguistic" sense) by itself. I agree that it does not fit.
Since we are discussing, so far, Indo-European languages, the worry that the description will not fit some highly non-Indo-European language can be postponed until we get a language which is described using aorist and also does not use past/present/future (or a subset of them). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:32, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

"Bounded"

What does "bounded" mean when it is used in this article to define the aorist? It isn't used in any of the three refs that are placed after it. — Eru·tuon 13:38, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree it's not very helpful with your edit that "without boundaries" is not the operative definition; your edit is an improvement. Presumably it comes from the LSJ article on ἀόριστος, but LSJ gives one non-grammatical example (the unassigned land on the Athenian-Megarian border, in Thucydides), so this is the wrong part of the lexicon entry to cite. For that matter, the ancient grammatical uses of the word are not terribly illuminating. Given the debate here, folks might be interested to know that Dionysius Thrax actually agrees with modern linguistics that tenses are three (past, present, and future), but then he makes ἀόριστον one of the diaphorai of the past; he also uses the word for the indefinite ὅστις.[2] Wareh (talk) 14:25, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
Excuse me, I was looking at Erutuon's edit to the etymology and not responding at all to the question about the term "bounded." While it is a curious fact that the etymology and the linguistic term echo each other, this coincidence has absolutely no bearing on whether the modern term in its proper use applies to the aorist or not (so, without opining on whether the application of the term is dubious or not, I do agree with Kwami that the etymology is not the reason to cite). Wareh (talk) 14:37, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
(As a side note, I think the kind of ancient usage that Wareh refers to is indeed both interesting and pertinent, and ought to be in the Greek section.) Cynwolfe (talk) 17:00, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
(ec)"Bounded" is a linguistic term that means the action has a perceptual beginning and end, that it is a unit, that is it not limitless or unbounded. The references following the use of the term in the article clearly define a bounded action in their descriptions of aorist. It is the difference between "I ate fish for dinner" and "I eat fish" or "I was eating fish" or "I have eaten fish". The "eating fish for dinner" is a unitary action that has a clearly perceived beginning and end, thus it is bounded, unlike the other examples which are open-ended or incomplete. --Taivo (talk) 14:29, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
Aha, thanks. So the term does have a clearly defined meaning. But perhaps we should use a different phrase (perhaps based on the sources), since the term is not commonly used outside linguistics, and is not defined on Wikipedia, except in passing in Lexical aspect.
On the Greek meaning of aorist, the explanation in one of the sources made sense: that the aorist is indefinite because it is not defined as to whether it has duration or a continuing result, as the imperfect and perfect are. — Eru·tuon 15:56, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
"Indefinite" implies that there is no aspectual usage, but most sources clearly state that there is an implication of boundedness, even if they don't use the term "bounded". Sometimes the term used is "punctual", sometimes something else. Rather than abandoning the bounded term, we should more clearly describe what bounded means in term of the aorist. The aorist is rarely, if ever, truly "indefinite", because it nearly always implies the completion of an action, therefore bounding it. --Taivo (talk) 16:02, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
Right — I was talking about the Ancient Greeks' perception of the aorist, based on the word (aoristos) that they used to describe it. — Eru·tuon 17:29, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
without boundaries or limits would seem to be the relevant sense of aoristos; the sense is that the aorist is not subject to the limitations of the other chronoi; it need not have the aspect of the perfects or the temporal limitations of the present, imperfect, or future. Translating as "unmarked" would probably be going too far; but it is the same idea. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:26, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
Hey, we're pretty much in agreement there. — kwami (talk) 19:37, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
If the two of you agree, don't let what I wrote stand as an objection. Really, I was just being a literalist in parsing LSJ: they mean to say that modifying γῆ the word has to do with status in relation to land boundaries, vs. the transferred meanings. Obviously, the "boundary" metaphor is there in all the word's senses, especially since the literal usage does not mean "without boundaries" the way that sounds to me in English ("sweeping over all limits") but rather an ambiguous unassigned status. Wareh (talk) 19:54, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
No, I like your edit, I'm just not in disagreement w Sep. Trans'n as 'w/o boundaries' does clash a bit w def. as 'bounded', so IMO it's best avoided for ease of reading. — kwami (talk) 23:52, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
"Without boundary markers" ( horismata) would cover the idea. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:26, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Attic vs Koine

Isn't the Classical aorist identical to the Koine as explained in the article — tense-aspect in indicative mood, mostly aspect in non-indicative moods? My Attic Greek course (Hansen and Quinn) presented it that way. Are there sources that disagree? — Eru·tuon 22:56, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Attic has many special uses. Even in its present incomplete state, the list above for Rijksbaron should make clear that Erutuon's assertion is inexact for Attic - and for Herodotus; it is good enough for a two-sentence intro to the aorist in a first Greek class, but I doubt it is correct even for Koine. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:19, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
Several of those uses do not follow the generalization, but the most basic ones (aorist in narrative and ingressive aorist) do. The more specialized uses are extensions of the aspectual meaning. Would adding qualifying terms (the aorist indicative in general expresses tense and aspect) satisfy you? — Eru·tuon 17:38, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
No; while the generalization is not groundless, it is a topic sentence rather than a statement which can stand by itself without qualification. The aorist indicative in one use is a pure relative "tense", in another a pure aspect; in the most common, that of mere narrative, it has both an aspect and a time. The subjunctive and the optative can have all the uses of the indicative. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:04, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
As you recall above somewhere, there was some agreement that the fine details of the Greek aorist should be in a separate article. Erutuon's general assessment is accurate as a broad summary and appropriate for this article. --Taivo (talk) 21:56, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
No, it isn't. Please stop clouding counsel with these pushes towards misinformation; whether or not the Greek aorist, the primary meaning, has a separate article, this one should not contain open falsehood. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:12, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
I suggest you reread all the comments above, Pmanderson. You will see that Erutuon's general assessment is a fair statement of the consensus minus you. If you carefully read your sources and the sources cited by others, you will see that they 1) describe the aorist outside the indicative clearly as an aspect, and 2) describe the aorist indicative as a combination of tense and aspect (although linguists have described the tense is only an implicature, I'm willing to compromise at indicative aorist being a combination of tense and aspect). There isn't anything "false" about Erutuon's generalization. It is an accurate generalization. Ten sentences in Herodotus don't falsify a generalization. They can be described ad infinitum in an article on "Aorist (Greek)", but such detail is not relevant to this general article. --Taivo (talk) 14:33, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
Your removal of tags is inappropriate. Your conduct is a claim to ownership of this article, which you have ruined. Its claims about Greek are simply wrong; they do not even reflect the vague generalizations in irrelevant sources correctly, much less the Greek language.
A correct, and brief, set of statements would take no more space than this fraudulent presentation. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:46, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
I would like to remind you of WP:CIVIL. This article is not fraudulent just because it doesn't mesh perfectly with your POV. The sources cited support the text. The writing of this article has been a collaborative effort and I don't own it. But you don't own it either. Your manner toward the other editors has often been uncivil and you don't assume good faith. --Taivo (talk) 14:50, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
The article is fraudulent; it declares what is not so, and what its sources (not to mention books written about the subject of the article) do not support.
Abusive claims of incivility are discussed here; they are often distractions from a discussion of substance by those who will engage in any stratagem to defend their improper texts. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:56, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps you should review your own comments in light of WP:CIVIL: "stop clouding counsel", "pushes toward misinformation", "which you have ruined", "go learn some Greek", "go edit an article on jargon". I think your incivility is clearly demonstrated and I won't say more about it. In reading the discussion here, you stand alone, PMAnderson, so using incivility as a strategy isn't my practice. --Taivo (talk) 15:31, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
No, you use revert-warring and falsehood - and charges of incivility. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:10, 10 September 2010 (UTC)


Pmanderson, your dubious tags are no good unless you explain them. Specifically, I'm interested in your dubious tag after the statement that non-indicative aorist (namely, subjunctive, optative, imperative, infinitive, participle) is purely aspectual: which non-indicative uses express both tense and aspect, or merely tense? — Eru·tuon 15:28, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Nearly anything in if-then statements. By the time you exclude both if-then and indirect discourse, you don't have much usage of the subjunctive/optative left - and the aorist imperative should be discussed on its own anyway. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:49, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
In addition, the aorist of unrealizable wishes (which is optative) has both time and mood; it implies nothing about aspect, being already heavily loaded. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:22, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
I don't see why the aorist optative of unrealizable wish can't express all three: time, aspect, and mood. What difference between present and aorist optative would there be in that construction, if not aspect? Can you point to any examples of sentences where the aorist of unrealizable wish definitely does not express aspect?
There are two main uses of the optative in conditional sentences: past general and future less vivid. Other less common uses are probably based on these. The protasis of the past general is the aorist optative that you say has tense, then? And the future less vivid has only aspect? — Eru·tuon 18:01, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
The aorist optative of unrealizable wishes definitely has aspect--it is a negative perfective aspect, "this cannot be completed". --Taivo (talk) 18:05, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
There seems to be confusion here. There is nothing "unrealizable" (or past) about a wish expressed by aorist optative; if I say ἐξολοίμην, "may I perish," my wish may well be realized. I think someone got confused by the Rijksbaron list above: but the unrealizable aorist wishes referred to there would use the indicative. Wareh (talk) 18:12, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
It turns out there are optatives of unrealizable wish, but you're right, they aren't past. See here: page 299, paragraph 1198 b in Smyth. — Eru·tuon 18:19, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
Here are references to the aspectual nature of the non-indicative:
  • "In other moods and in nonfinite forms, the Aorist is purely aspectual, not an expression of tense" Comrie (cited in article)
  • "Outside the aorist indicative...the aorist...tells us that it was a single event. The imperfect..., which usually suggests that the action should be seen as a continuing process, makes a helpful contrast with this use of the aorist to convey a single crisp event. We refer to the distinction between ways of expressing events and actions as aspect." Morwood (cited in article)
So there are two quotes that deal specifically with Classical Greek that clearly say that the aorist outside the indicative is aspectual. --Taivo (talk) 18:15, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
I don't think anyone disagrees with that general truth, though your quotes state it overbroadly, choosing to overlook the exceptions, where an aorist infinitive, participle, or optative "represents" an direct-speech aorist indicative in indirect discourse. Wareh (talk) 18:18, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
The exceptions are why Erutuon's version above says, "in general". The details can be placed in a separate article on "Aorist (Greek)" without overburdening this general article with too much. But it seems like we all agree that aorist in the indicative is generally tense/aspect while aorist outside the indicative is generally aspect. The sources strongly support that generalization, realizing that there is (as there always is with any language) some gray area. --Taivo (talk) 20:31, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
This is a misleading - indeed false - generalization, in the interest of a dogmatic adherence to an artificial theory. It would be simpler, shorter, and clearer to actually describe the Greek aorist. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:51, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

So far, we know of two constructions in which the non-indicative aorist expresses past time. Aorist optative of unrealizable wish is not included, since it does not express past time (it is the aorist indicative of past unrealizable wish that does).

  1. aorist optative, infinitive, participle in indirect discourse
  2. aorist optative in protasis of past general conditional sentence

Since the article already mentions the first counterexample, does the second counterexample make the generalization unhelpful? — Eru·tuon 21:10, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:33, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
If that generalization is unhelpful then why do we find it in reliable sources? If reliable sources use that very phraseology as a generalization, then you are wrong to call it unhelpful. Just because there are uncommon exceptions, that does not falsify the generalization. --Taivo (talk) 21:47, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
For the same reason we find many unhelpful generalizations about political parties, nationalities, and scientific theories in reliable sources; they're good enough to get by in a text which is addressed to people who already know that it's a half-truth and which is talking about something else.. If you want to emphasize one side of a truth in talking to someone who already knows it, you are likely to make claims you would not make in explaining the matter in detail to someone who doesn't. We are doing the latter. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:54, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
But you are not seeing the point to the generalization. A generalization is right and proper to express the majority circumstance. You are talking about a small minority of cases and trying to say that the generalization is false because of a small minority of cases. That is not good argumentation in either an encyclopedia or a full blown grammar. Good practice is to state the generalization and then to deal with any minority circumstances in descending order of frequency. At some point in the descending order of frequency, you hit the point where the details belong in a separate article on "Aorist (Greek)" and not in this more general article. --Taivo (talk) 21:59, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
Using a statement which is at best half-true is excusable on two conditions: that you go on to explain that it ain't so; or you return to the topic, noting the oversimplification then. Elementary textbooks, like the book cited, have space for the second; we don't. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:03, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
The generalization is more than "half-true", it explains the majority of cases. The exceptions are called exceptions for a reason--they are not the most common use or meaning. And we must deal in generalizations. People don't come here for a Greek grammar explaining ten sentences in Herodotus--they come here for a general understanding of aorist. They read a few sentences, get the generalization, and then move on with their lives. We are not here to replicate a full-blown Greek grammar that explains everything, no matter how rare. --Taivo (talk) 22:09, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
Shorter Taivo: it's all right to misstate the case and mislead the ignorant, because we're only engaged in airy froth generalizations.
We can actually explain the Greek aorist - and say nothing actually false - in less space than the text I found, if we cut the stuff wasted on the perfect, which is off topic here, and on verbose quotations from Xenophon. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:18, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

(outdent)There is no misstatement, PMAnderson. If I write, "The nominal plural is almost always marked in English by a suffixed -s" that is a perfectly correct statement. So too, "The aorist indicative in Greek is both aspect and tense, while the non-indicative aorist is generally only aspect" is a perfectly correct statement. Your insistence on placing exceptions that only describe 10 sentences in Herodotus and are not generally true is obfuscation because you don't like the word "aspect". While I don't usually like quotations, in this case they provide some useful clarification. --Taivo (talk) 23:14, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

If the two principal functions of the subjunctive were as rare as English irregular plurals, there would be no problem with the generalization. But indirect discourse and conditional statements are not rare. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:52, 11 September 2010 (UTC)
  1. ^ ἀόριστος. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project
  2. ^ OED, s.v. "aorist"
  3. ^ In the terms of theoretical linguistics, that means that the aorist is not a pure grammatical tense, but is an almost pure perfective aspect.
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