Historical Linguistics: A Recommendation

I’ve been reading Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics by Hans Heinrich Hock and Brian D. Joseph lately. And contrary to two of the reviews on Amazon, it’s an incredibly accessible and readable book. It is an introduction, but I’d say that it is not really a [...]

The Aspectual Use of the Dynamic Infinitive

I recently picked up a copy of Peter Stork’s The Aspectual Use of the Dynamic Infinitive in Herodotus (that’s an Abebooks.com link—which is where you’ll find a better price). From what I’ve perused so far, this is an absolutely incredible work covering a variety of semantic verb classes that take infinitival complements from there, Stork has [...]

McMaster & B-Greek

It just occurred to me as I finished my run this afternoon (It’s a beautiful sunny day in Vancouver today!) that I’ve never actually seen either students or professors from MacDiv participating in the discussions on the B-Greek list. That doesn’t make much sense to me. I know of a number of good students there [...]

Footnotes on Middle Voice

I was looking over Wallace’s discussion of deponency this morning, primarily curious about who he cites in his discussion. Here’s the section in question: “A deponent middle is a middle voice verb that has no active form but is active in meaning.58 This is the most common middle in the NT, due to the heavy [...]

Middle Voice Quote of the Week

“If we go even further back and examine the oldest stages of the Indo-European language, it emerges that really the main opposition is between active and middle and that the passive voice is something additional that grew up and developed later. In Greek this can still be seen especially in the fact that there are [...]