ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

There are a variety of reasons why the English Perfect and the Greek Perfect must be distinguished in spite of their shared name and similarities.

Greek students are generally taught to use their intuition in terms of deciding whether to translate a Greek perfect with an English perfect or with an English present. But rarely (ever?) is there any discussion of how these two grammatical forms differ in their usage in a cross-linguistic sense. That is, the English Perfect can be used in the context X where the Greek Perfect would be infelicitous or ungrammatical.

Well today, I’m going to give you at least one way that I found about two weeks ago (I had to search for it to find it again). This assumes that the Greek of Joshua is relatively close enough to natural Greek that this is a valid usage. I haven’t had time to check other texts.

Joshua 13:8: ταῖς δὲ δύο φυλαῖς καὶ τῷ ἡμίσει φυλῆς Μανασση, τῷ Ρουβην καὶ τῷ Γαδ, ἔδωκεν Μωυσῆς ἐν τῷ πέραν τοῦ Ιορδάνου κατ̓ ἀνατολὰς ἡλίου, δέδωκεν αὐτὴν Μωυσῆς ὁ παῖς κυρίου…
But to the two tribes and the half tribe of Manasseh, Reuben and Gad, Moses gave (an inheritance to them) in the land beyond the Jordan eastward. Moses the servant of the Lord gave them …

From there, it goes on to list the lands they received. What’s striking about this. Well for one, we see the Perfect’s move toward the Aorist, but we also see a significant way in which the Greek Perfect is very, very different from the English Perfect.

Moses is dead. Moses was dead when the book was written and Moses was dead when the events described here in chapter 13 transpired (assuming for the sake of argument they did – this is a linguistics blog not a history blog). The English perfect cannot be used with a subject the speaker knows to be deceased. The sentence:

*Moses the Lord’s servant gave them X.

is not felicitous in English.

And that, my friends, is one way in which the Greek and English Perfects are different. This sort of example is relatively easy to recognize intuitively when dong translation, but it is still helpful to recognize and understand the reason why you’ve used the English past perfective verb “gave” instead of the perfect. And that’s what I’m interested in here. The why of things.

UPDATE:

There is a pragmatic felicity condition on the use of the perfect: the subject of a Perfect sentence must be in a position to receive the participant property. Perfect sentences are infelicitous when this is not met. In the following well-known example the person referred to by the subject NP is not alive at the RT [Reference Time]. Consider (20), uttered in 1989.

(20) Einstein has lived in Princeton.

This sentence is grammatical but infelicitous when uttered at a time after the death of Eisten (Jespersen 1931:60), Chomsky (1970:85). We explain this in terms of the participant property. Einstein cannot bear the participant property in 1989, the time of the utterance of (20), and so it is pragmatically impossible to ascribe it to him. this is the force of the example. The felicity requirement, then, is reoughly as in (21):

(21) Felicity condition for the present Perfect
The person to which the subject nounphrase [sic] refers must be pragmatically able to bear the property ascribed to them.

The notion of ‘Current Relevant’ is sometimes invoked to explain the infelicity of sentences like this. (Jesphersen 1931: 47, 57, et seq; McCoard 1978, ch. 2).

Carlota Smith, The Parameter of Aspect (2nd ed.; Studies in Linguistics & Philosphy 43; Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1997), 108.

Also, I should note that an English Past Perfect, which is traditionally associated with the Greek Pluperfect would also be acceptable here: Moses had given…

John Benjamins is kind of like the Brill of the linguistics world — yes, Brill also publishes linguistics. I’m just making the comparison because most people familiar with Biblical Studies are more likely to recognize Brill’s name than John Benjamin’s. In any case, the two publishers are similar in that they’re both situated in the Netherlands and book chiefly sell their books to libraries.

But I just discovers something that’s rather incredible about JB:

You can browse all their books online for free: HERE.

They provide a internet browser plugin and you can read their books online to your heart’s content!

Now this is relevant to you, the reader’s of my blog, because that oh, so expensive book that I’ve talked about from time to time, On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases. The expression of semantic roles in Ancient Greek is published by JB — and thus, also available through JB’s Ebrary (again, HERE).

JB requires an account if you want to print or copy from their books — and that is what they’ll charge for. I haven’t yet found pricing for copying and printing, but I’m sure it’s there somewhere. Still, this is very exciting to me.

Go check out this great Greek book.

For some time I’ve been rather surprised by how many people struggle to understand exactly what Aspect is.

Granted it took me looking at Aspect in three different languages before it really clicked, but it seems so obvious now, after the fact. Part of me wonders if they emphasis on Aspect with relation to discourse analysis that some have proposed is part of the problem: that is, students (and profs?) are having this idea of aspect and discourse prominence thrown at them at the same time as they struggle to understand what Aspect.

Another part of the problem is the different terminology used by different Greek grammars. Mounce’s grammar in particular definitely does not help students when they come to discussions in other texts. His terminology maybe closer to traditional English school grammar teaching, but it’s not going to help when you move to other books.

And so I’m curious. How well do you feel you understand what Aspect is?

update: it appears that all polldaddy polls are down right now. hopefully this will be fixed. Please come back and vote later, I’d appreciate it — or leave a comment here!

Dan Wallace has posted a very short essay that simply surveys the major interpretive landscape of 1 Timothy 2:12. He doesn’t give much in terms of conclusions about what his view is. In general that’s very helpful considering that most discussions of this verse are so emotionally charged toward one perspective that it can be hard for people to understand exactly how many complex and unsure issues there are.

And by the way, I can think of probably another half dozen that didn’t make his list.

Interpretive Issues in 1 Timothy 2:12

So I’ve been working through a relatively recent (2008) article on Aspect in Revelation 5, criticizing and critiquing it. And I had planned to post my comments online this weekend. The Article is David Mathewson’s “Verbal Aspect in the Apocalypse of John: An Analysis of Revelation 5″ (NovT 50 [2008]: 58-77), which I only found via Café Apocalypsis’ recent post praising the article: Mathewson on Verbal Aspect and Revelation 5. I have far less praise. In fact, I would say that Mathewson has thoroughly failed in his article. He’s too dependent on Porter & Porter’s absolutely incredibly misreading of the literature (see my posts HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, & HERE <— in chronological order).

The article is currently available via Ingenta (though the PDF for the article is listed under the title for the following one): HERE.

But as I was reading through it once more this afternoon, I realized that Mathewson’s thesis is, in of itself, circular.

But before I show you this particular sentence, you need to remember a few points:

1. Mathewson accepts Porter’s claim that Greek verbs don’t have tense – i.e. verbs only express aspect (page 61).
2. Mathewson continues to use the word “tense” to refer to the wordforms – i.e. aorist tense (Ibid). But since in his view verbs only express aspect, we basically have this bizarre situation where “tense” = aspect.

Okay, now with those two points in mind, read this sentence:

It is the contention of this analysis that verbal aspect can sufficiently explain John’s usage of the tenses in chapter 5, and that appeals to temporal values (Mussies) or underlying Semitic substrates (Lancellotti, Thompson) are unnecessary, raising the need for further application of verbal aspect to other sections of the Apocalypse (page 62).

Now aside from the fact that Mathewson appears to have strangely misrepresented Mussies (his quote of Mussies view several pages [page 59] earlier is rather odd and somewhat slanted, but we’ll deal with that in another post), let’s look at this particular quote.

Remember Mathewson takes an Verbal Aspect only approach to the Greek verb & uses “Tense” to refer to the wordforms. In light of this, let’s re-read the sentence with that explicitly shown:

It is the contention of this analysis that verbal aspect can sufficiently explain John’s usage of the [Aspectual word-forms] in chapter 5, and that appeals to temporal values (Mussies) or underlying Semitic substrates (Lancellotti, Thompson) are unnecessary, raising the need for further application of verbal aspect to other sections of the Apocalypse (page 62).

That’s right, Verbal Aspect can explain John’s use of Verbal Aspect in Revelation 5!

It’s Perfect!! Why didn’t anyone think of this before???

In my next post, which because of this one will be delayed, we’ll deal more in depth with the theoretical underpinning’s Mathewson’s article, which I will show to be thoroughly flawed because of his dependence upon Porter & his minons.

As for the body of the article itself, well, it’s actually just fine even with the theoretical problems. And more importantly, it fits well with Mussies’ analysis which really has very little to do with tense and much more do to with genre (I haven’t read Thompson or Lancellotti, so I can’t speak for them).

Articular Infinitives in the Greek of the New Testament: On the Exegetical Benefit of Grammatical Precision (New Testament Monographs) by Denny Burk

This is a difficult book to review. That might sound strange to some since its not a long book, nor is its thesis particularly controversial. What makes it a difficult book to review is that I found Burk’s thesis to be quite acceptable and well argued. The parts of the book that gave me trouble were the preliminary discussions about case. But because it’s 1) such a complex issue and 2) rather peripheral, I decided that I wouldn’t spend too much time focusing on it.

Burk’s thesis is a good one and it’s well argued: When used with the infinitive, the Greek article is a syntactic marker that does not mark definiteness with the infinitive, but rather tends to clear up grammatical ambiguity in the interpretation of the infinitive. One might say that there isn’t to much revolutionary about it. And yes, that’s true, but even still, it’s a helpful guide where plenty of commentators have given too much emphasis to the appearence of the article with the infinitive (or too little).

Chapter one introduces Burk’s thesis, history of research & methodology. The history of research is a particularly helpful survey of grammatical discussions of the infinitive generally, one that probably wouldn’t be found elsewhere. Burk generally steers a helpful course between placing too much emphasis on the use of the article and two little emphasis.

The methodology section, surprised me a bit. One the one hand, there are some very good things said about how he went about his study, but on the other hand, there are a variety of statements that left me wondering. For example, were Moulton here today and read this section, he would probably respond by saying that his own work on grammar was also scientific (Burke, 17) and descriptive (21). And indeed, I doubt that any of Burk’s own work would be difficult for a grammarian of the previous generation to understand.

My other thought in reading this section was that his methodology appears to have a greater dependence upon scientific method than it does upon modern linguistic theory. And, to be honest, there’s nothing wrong with that. What is clear from the section is that Burk has done him homework in terms of reading secondary literature & his use of linguistic monographs & resources is better than a number of other studies I’ve read – though I was slightly concerned that many of the linguistic proper books were somewhat dated, but this is generally true with most NT studies that dip into linguistics.

Chapter two of the book introduces a helpful discussion of the Greek article more generally. There’s not too much for me to say here. The discussion provides a good summary of the literature and concisely describes how the article is used in the NT.

But it’s chapters 3 & 4 that pull me in two directions. On the one hand, Burk’s discussions of the article and the infinitive in these chapters are great. I really, really enjoyed them. On the other hand, I consider Burk’s discussions of the Greek cases to be both frustrating and disappointing. This, I think, has more to do with Burk’s following of Stanley Porter’s discussion of case more than it does Burk. But that doesn’t let him off the hook. There is a significant bibliographic gap with reference to the cases as used both with and without cases: Silvia Luraghi’s On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases: The Expression of Semantic Roles in Ancient Greek (Studies in Language Companion Series). This book was published three years before Burk’s was in 2006. Now, I’m not sure whether he completed his dissertation before 2003 or not, so I don’t want to push this one too hard and if this is the case, it would have requires a massive rewrite to deal with the claims & data from Luraghi. I think it the end that would have been worth it, but at the same time, I can understand how unappealing that would be to someone who has already spent years working on the original thesis.  Anyway, I’ve blogged about this book before HERE. It’s cognitive, rigorous, and written by a highly qualified Indo-European/Greek scholar who definitely knows her stuff. It’s also expensive. But if you’re going to write a dissertation on a subject closely connected to cases & prepositions in Greek, you cannot avoid it. There’s more I could say specifically, but this review would grow way too long (& it already has once).

The last two chapters provide some extra evidence from the LXX (chapter 5) for Burk’s claims and draw some conclusions with exegetical comments (chapter 6). Both these chapters were quite enjoyable.

All in all the book is a nice discussion of the infinitive and it would be a beneficial read for Greek students.

A couple days ago, I wrote:

Why in the world should we be translating generics with a “generic” he or man when even the people who claim that English hasn’t changed accidentally misinterpret English generics as only having a male referent???

Nathan Smith was interested in examples to back up this question

Joel thought such an approach might be valid for familiar phrases, but even then he wouldn’t consider it acceptable.

I agree with Joel – and I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you at all…

As for Nathan, yes, I do have a very prominent example. One that appears in a book that had the major thesis arguing masculine gender generics should always be represented in translation if possible: The Gender Neutral Bible Controversy byVern S. Poythress and Wayne Grudem (you can download it HERE, if you’d like). In this book, Grudem & Poythess in their discussion of ANER, failure to recognize the word “man” from the 19th century as generic even though, in context, it clearly is:

The Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon, Ninth Edition with Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), gives the following meanings for anēr:

I. man, opposed to woman (anthropoi being man as opposed to beast). II. man, opposed to god. III. man, opposed to youth, unless the context determines the meaning … but anēr alone always means a man in the prime of life, esp. warrior. IV. man emphatically, man indeed. V. husband. VI. Special usages [several idioms are given] (p. 138).

It is significant that neither of these two standard lexicons indicates that the word loses its male marking in any of its usages.  In the present controversy, we should be suspicious of any attempts to overthrow such well-established boundaries to the range of meanings of a word, especially in a time when major forces in the culture are pressing us to eliminate male oriented language (and therefore male markings on words!), and
especially if these attempts are accompanied by no new data, but only appeal to the same old data that scholars have seen for centuries (Page 309).

I’ve bolded the words in question. “Man,” in this case, is generic. If this entry being written today, the sense would most definitely be listed as, “II. human, opposed to god” rather than “man.” But Gruden & Poythress write in their following paragraph as if this instance of “man” is a male referring word rather than a generic. And they are wrong on this point.

So, why do we claim that these sorts of generics are still understandable today, when we don’t understand them today?

Why are they acceptable in translation?

I’ve finished two books that I plan on writing reviews for:

Grammatical and Exegetical Study of New Testament Verbs of Transference: A Case Frame Guide to Interpretation and Translation (Library of New Testament Studies) by Paul Danove

Articular Infinitives in the Greek of the New Testament: On the Exegetical Benefit of Grammatical Precision (New Testament Monographs) by Denny Burk

But I cannot decide which I should review first. The two books are very different animals in terms of method & focus – much of which can be recognized from the titles. But there is a significant relationship between them in that Burk makes some incredibly critical comments about Case Grammar, the linguistic framework that eventually morphed into Construction Grammar which Danove uses in this most recent book.

So what do you think:

In 2 Samuel 17:28, we find an interesting list of nouns that cannot translate directly into English:

28 ἤνεγκαν δέκα κοίτας καὶ ἀμφιτάπους καὶ λέβητας δέκα καὶ σκεύη κεράμου καὶ πυροὺς καὶ κριθὰς καὶ ἄλευρον καὶ ἄλφιτον καὶ κύαμον καὶ φακὸν 29 καὶ μέλι καὶ βούτυρον καὶ πρόβατα καὶ σαφφωθ βοῶν καὶ προσήνεγκαν τῷ Δαυιδ καὶ τῷ λαῷ τῷ μετ̓ αὐτοῦ φαγεῖν, ὅτι εἶπαν Ὁ λαὸς πεινῶν καὶ ἐκλελυμένος καὶ διψῶν ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ.

The issue relates to how English and Greek treat certain types of nouns. In English, we have a variety of noun classes. Two classes that we’re interested in today are Mass and Count nouns. Count nouns are nouns that you can modify with a numeral:

1 cat, 2 cats, 5 ducks, 37 coins, 39 Greek grammars, 32 Greek lexicons, and so forth.

Mass nouns cannot be modified in this way:

10 rices, 5 waters, 1 barley.

You get the idea. And you can probably tell as an English speaker that all of these nouns have similar semantic properties, right? We “count” mass nouns by putting them in a genitive phrase modifying a count noun:

5 gallons of water, 22 lbs of rice (or 10 kg, if you will), 3 jars of honey, etc.

And we shouldn’t expect this system to be universal across languages. It isn’t. The Greek sentence above has a number of nouns whose English “equivalents” don’t quite match.

πυροὺς – wheat

κριθὰς – barley

ἄλευρον – meal

ἄλφιτον – grain

κύαμον – bean

φακὸν – lentil

μέλι – honey

βούτυρον – butter

Now some observations:

There seem to be two main differences between Greek mass nouns as English ones. The first of these is pluralization: πυρός (wheat) is a mass noun in Greek, but it can also be pluralized. Something that “wheat” cannot do in English. The same is true for κριθή (barley), ἄλευρον (meanl/wheat flour), and ἄλφιτον (grain), μέλι (honey), βούτυρον (butter). The English equivalent of this appears to be “some wheat,” “some barley,” and so on. Granted there are a few mass nouns in English that can be pluralized: oats is one that seems to allow that.

The other difference is lexical. There are a number of words that in English are more like count nouns than mass nouns. Beans can be counted. Why that’s the case, I have no idea. Is there an idiom somewhere for counting beans? But in Greek, κύαμον (bean), it is definitely a mass noun. Its used collectively in the singular in Ezekiel 4:9 and as a plural mass noun in Pausanias, Description of Greece (book 1, chapter 37).

As for Lentils…they’re kind of like oats in their mass/count semantic properties. Perhaps it would be best to say English also has a mixed category. Technically one would say that we can count lentils and oats, but it just doesn’t happen in normal usage – perhaps beans are in this one too.

I had checked out and read Silvia Luraghi’s On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases: The Expression of Semantic Roles in Ancient Greek (Studies in Language Companion Series), a book that I continue to dream of owning at some point.

Her discussion of the semantics of the cases and prepositions is very helpful. Its diachronic focusing mainly on Homer through the Classical period, but she does have some discussion of Koine and Byzantine Greek as well.

She uses what are called, “mental maps” for describing semantics.

The meaning of grammatical forms is included in a ‘conceptual space’, in which it can be described as a semantic map, or mental map (se Croft 2001:92-98; Haspelmath, forthcoming). Conceptual space is universally available to human cognition, while a mental map is the portion of conceptual space which constitutes the meaning of a certain form in a certain language. The mental map of a highly polysemous form, such as a case or preposition, involves a number of neighboring concepts. The use of mental maps for the representation of meaning has the advantage that these concepts are not listed randomly, but according to their closeness and, as far as possible, to the direction of semantic spread.

The use of mental maps requires an in-depth understanding of the(presumably universal) organization of conceptual space, which in turn can be understood only in the light of accurate descriptions of a large amount of different languages. Such a task has not yet been accomplished: consequently, descriptions of conceptual space for the time being remain tentative. To my view, such limitation does not mean that one should give up the use of mental maps, because it is only by trying to understand how different meanings of a certain language-specific form relate to each other that one can reach an understanding of the structure of conceptual space. However, one must be careful in one’s assumptions about this matter (page 16).

In discussing the individual prepositions, she regular compares and contrasts similar ones. For example, here are her conclusions about ἐκ along side here conclusions about ἀπό:

In Figure 7, I give a mental map of ek; it can be compared with the mental map of apo which will be given in Figure 9 (page 106).

…

In Figure 9 I give a mental map of the meaning of apo.

having analyzed the use and the semantic evolution of both ek and apo, we can now finish the discussion started in 3.2. the two prepositions have quite distinct meanings in homer, where the more specific meaning of ek appears to make it more suitable for various types of extension outside the spatial domain: so ek is found in Time and sometimes in Cause expressions, it is the standard way to denote Origin, and its occurrences in Agent expressions is also significant. On the spatial plane too, the two prepositions appear to overlap only partially, since landmarks that can be conceived as containers normally take ek.

Starting with Herodotus, we find a process of convergence between ek and apo. In Herodotus, convergence owes to the extension of the possible uses of apo, which acquires temporal value, can be found with city names and in the expression of Origin, and sometimes for Agent. Later on, in Attic prose, some of the peculiarities of ek also disappear, as demonstrated by its use in Cause expressions, similar to those in which only apo formerly occurred. Comparison of the two prepositions shows that they ended up with much the same meaning, although semantic extension followed different paths. in particular, it can shown that the causal meaning of the two particles originated in different ways: for apo, Cause was a semantic extension of the spatial meaning, while in the case of ek the meaning extended first to time, and then to Cause. the difference between the two processes is apparent in Homer, who has concrete landmarks in Cause expressions with apo, and abstract ones (mostly states of affairs) with ek. Extension to Agent, on the other hand, seems to follow the same path, from Source to Origin, to Agent, in fact Agent expressions with apo start to occur only when Origin expressions also appear.

(page 130).

Anyway, that’s bit of a taste of the book. Its quite good and I enjoyed reading it. Hopefully I’ll have a copy to make reference to more easily (I scanned only a couple pages with charts).