Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Harold,

I agree with your assessment.

But it is exactly BECAUSE that is not always the case that the Greek 
aorist is claimed to be tenseless by some these days. Rodney Decker, for 
example, in his monograpgh follows Mari Broman Olsen in looking for 
uncancellable meaning and so rejects anything to do with tense.

Regards,
David Kummerow.


> Dear Rolf,
>  >
>  > When I ask the question: "Is past tense an uncancelable part of the
>  > WAYYIQTOL form?," I seek a scrupulous distinction between semantics and
>  > pragmatics when I answer the question, and I use "scrupulous" as 
> defined by
>  > Websters.
>  >
>  >
> HH: What you are seeking for seems unrealistic. An essential idea of the
> Greek aorist is that it is a preterite; it expresses past meaning. But
> that is not always the case. Sometimes the aorist can be used in
> contexts which indicate a present meaning. And it can be used in
> contexts which imply a future meaning. I was just reading about it:
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=BExv_MTYrZkC&dq=uses+of+aorist+Greek&pg=PA22&ots=gXedHFoi0S&sig=Xpoo7X4iOYetqTTFLw0tPx4R2u0&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Duses%2Bof%2Baorist%2BGreek%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=2#PPA16-IA4,M1 
>
>
>
> Language is not as rigid as you seem to propose.
>
> Yours,
> Harold Holmyard