The Greek Optative in Constantine of Preslav's Didactic Gospel

Adamantius 26, 2020

One of the functions of the optative in ancient Greek – though quite a rare one – was the expression of an attenuated order or wish in directive clauses. From the analysis of the examined material it appears that in supplications addressed to a superior, from the Indo-European period on, the optative mood was used with a directive force. The expression of a directive act in the optative allows to express a request while its realization does not depend on the agent of the action itself. In this regard, we have evidence of such use in ancient Greek, Vedic and Avestan. Moreover, this phenomenon can be also traced in the Septuagint, especially in the Psalter. In this context, we can observe a striking similarity between the use of the optative preceded by an imperative in a supplication-like situation in Homer (Ilias II 24,555-557) and in the Psalm 84,8 (LXX). In both cases the utterance can be understood as a kind of request while the addressee is perceived as superior in their social status to the one who speaks. Furthermore, the analysis shows that here we deal with an archaic phenomenon present both in Indo-European as well as in Semitic languages. With respect to Psalm 84,8 we ask ourselves whether the occurrence of the directive optative in the prayer is due to the interference from the source Hebrew text or whether it is rather motivated by the Homeric reminiscence. Finally, we discuss briefly how the nuanced usage of the optative and imperative in the Greek Bible is reflected in the writings of some Early-Christian authors.

Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2022

In epic Greek both the optative and the indicative (the so-called “modal indicative”) can be used in contexts where the degree of realization is uncertain or even impossible, while in Attic Greek only the indicative is used. In these two articles I discuss whether there is a difference between the optative and the modal indicative in these contexts and/or if it can be determined which was the original mood. As there are about 1500 optatives and 250 modal indicatives in Homer, it is not possible to discuss them all and, therefore, I focus on the passages in which aorist forms of γιγνώσκω, βάλλω and of ἴδον appear, and those conditional constructions in the Odyssey in which the postposed conditional clause is introduced by εἰ μή with either a “modal” indicative or optative. The corpus comprises 100 forms (80 optatives and 20 indicatives), but in each example I also address the other modal indicatives and optatives in the passages, which adds another 50 forms to the corpus. In this part (part 1) I address the optative. First, I provide an overview of the research on the optative in Homeric Greek, discuss the different suggestions for the co-existence of the optative and indicative in these uncertain and/or unreal contexts, explanations which can be summarized into two categories, those assuming that the indicative replaced the optative and those arguing that both moods were original, but had different meanings. Then I explain why this corpus was chosen, prior to the analysis that focuses on two elements, namely the temporal reference (does the mood refer to the past or not) and the degree of possibility (is the action described likely, pos¬sible, remotely possible or unlikely/impossible). Initially I consider the optatives with a past reference, then the optatives that could be interpreted as remotely possible or unlikely/impossible (“irrealis” in the terminology of Classical Philology) and conclude by discussing two passages that have been reused in the epics in different contexts with different protagonists and, consequently, with different modal meanings for the same forms. The conclusion of the first part of the article is that the optative was at the most unreal extreme of the irrealis-continuum and could initially refer to the present and future, as well as the past, but that the instances in which there was an exclusive past reference were (very) rare.

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Slavia, 2013

In Old Church Slavonic the distribution of aorist and perfect tenses is problematic: it appears for the most part to be semantically motivated, but the distinction in meaning does not correspond exactly to what is found in modern Slavonic languages and therefore has to be inferred from Old Church Slavonic material. It has sometimes been suggested that in the second and third persons singular, which coincide formally in the aorist tense, variation between aorist and perfect forms may to some extent be correlated with explicitly marked distinctions of person in Greek, and may therefore be a side effect of translation; but such correlations are not regular, and the frequency of second person singular perfect forms is higher in some types of text than in others. This analysis attempts to elucidate the reasons for these patterns by considering, in addition to the semantic account of the perfect tense put forward by Bunina and Dejanova, several other factors: context, discourse type and verbal morphology. It starts with an examination of second person singular aorist and perfect forms in the Euchologium Sinaiticum. These are found almost without exception to be semantically motivated, as the formulaic structure of the texts usually precludes ambiguity. Investigation of usage in the Old Church Slavonic psalter translation is complicated both by variant readings in the Psalterium Sinaiticum and other early manuscripts and by the less predictable linguistic organization of the psalms. Although a semantic account can explain the choice of perfect or aorist in many places, it seems not to be fully adequate in a number of instances where second person perfect and aorist forms are used in close juxtaposition and similar context. Moreover, the incidence of these forms differs markedly between verbs in-iti, where second and third person aorist forms coincide in writing with the imperative and the perfect tense is frequent, and verbs of other conjugations, whose aorist forms are distinct from the imperative and occur freely. It is concluded a) that avoidance of ambiguity between aorist and imperative, in a text where these verbal forms co-occur unpredictably, was a supplementary motivation for the use of the perfect tense, b) that the perfect forms of verbs which were not subject to this ambiguity offer more reliable evidence for the semantically based use of this tense than the numerous verbs in-iti, and c) that the translator's choices of tense depended on his understanding of the meaning, not on a concern to reproduce the formal distinctions of Greek.

Eerdmanns Publishing House., 2010

Porter, Reed, and O’Donnell’s Greek grammar and workbook introduce and provide a complete study to the grammar and vocabulary of the Greek New Testament for students of first-year Greek. It explains all the forms and essential syntax of Koine, including extensive paradigms, examples, and elucidations of the Greek language. The book has thirty lessons that can be summarized in three major sections. Grammatical forms are examined and explained in detail, often with instructive examples from the Greek language of the New Testament.

ICGL 13 Proceedings, 2017

This paper will begin with an overview of the various forms of the Greek Perfect, including synthetic and periphrastic forms, along with the range of uses observed throughout the history of the language, while situating both the forms and usages to a timeline. The morphology of the Perfect will be compared to that of the Present and Aorist in order to determine that the aspect of its verbal stem is perfective to match the Aorist and oppose the Present. Next, the reduplication on the stem of the synthetic Perfect will be shown to produce the imperfective aspect, opposing the aspect of its lexical core. This imperfective aspect matches the Present and opposes the Aorist. An overview regarding reduplication as a process of grammaticalization will be provided next, while situating the reduplication of the Greek synthetic Perfect within that process. Attention will be given to the particularities of reduplication in the Greek language. Finally, a complex verbal aspect will be explained for the Greek Perfect indicating that the action belonging to the lexical stem is perfective, while the imperfectivity produced by reduplicating the stem belongs to state logically following the action. The complex aspect analysed for the synthetic Perfect will be shown to mirror that of the Neohellenic periphrastic Perfect. The complex verbal aspect model described for the Greek Perfect is suggested for analysing the Perfect cross-linguistically.

Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies, 2012

Journal of Greek Linguistics, 2013

Humanitas, 2022

In this article I address the use of the optative (appearing alone or in in contrast with the subjunctive or indicative) in Iliad 2,1-493 (the part before the Catalogue of Ships starts). This part of the book describes Agamemnon’s (failed) attempts to rouse the army and Odysseus’ intervention to restore the damage caused by Agamemnon’s blunder(s). In these lines there are about 110 subjunctive and optative forms, and they provide a small but reliable corpus of instances in different constructions and are therefore sufficient to serve as basis for an investigation and can be used to check if results acquired in other investigations can be confirmed or refuted. As the optative is the mood with the widest array of uses (from the unreal to the almost-certain-future), I focus on the passages in which the optative is used, either alone or in contrast with the subjunctive or indicative.