Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek and Latin

7. Finite Verb Forms: A Closer Look at Tense and Mood

116 7 Finite Verb Forms A Closer Look at Tense and Mood In the previous chapter, we considered five major questions that verbs answer about the event (action or state) that the clause or sentence describes. From these five questions, we eventually arrived at the grammatical categories of voice, person, number, mood, and tense.1 Of these five, the ones that are most complicated , and the ones on which Latin and Greek diverge the most from English, are tense and mood. Accordingly, in this chapter I will examine these categories in some detail. Tense: The Interplay of Time and Aspect As I mentioned in the previous chapter, “tense” is not a synonym for time. Rather it is a technical term for the identifiably distinct forms of verbs. The “tenses” of Greek and Latin verbs convey something about the time and the aspect of a given action. This is true in English as well, but not in the same way. Because the classical tenses do not correspond closely to the tenses of English verbs, it is better not even to name the English tenses at all in discussions of Greek or Latin verbs. There is little point in studying a tense in English that does not correspond well to a Greek or Latin tense, and even if the tense corresponds reasonably well, the tense’s name may not correspond. Accordingly, in this sec1 . Notice that it was not the case that each question led to one category in a one-to-one correspondence. Rather, the five categories were the end product of a line of reasoning that involved five sequential questions. Finite Verb Forms 117 tion I would like to discuss the ways time and aspect relate in general in any Indo-European language,2 and then specifically the ways Greek and Latin verb tenses handle time and aspect. In the process, I will give English translations for the ideas of the various tenses, but I will not name English tenses, because doing so, in my opinion, simply creates confusion.3 Let us consider what we learned about time and aspect in the previous chapter. Obviously, the time of an action can be past, present, or future. Furthermore, the aspect of an action can be completed (called “perfect”), ongoing (called “imperfect” or “progressive ”), or unspecified. (In the third case, the action is viewed as a whole without reference to its aspect. Aspect that is not specified is usually called “indefinite” or “simple.”) If we put time and aspect together into the various possible combinations, we come up with something like table 7-1 (page 118). Notice that in this table and throughout this section, I use nontechnical words such as “ongoing,” “completed,” and “unspecified” to describe aspect, rather than using the technical linguistic terms “imperfect,” “perfect,” and “indefinite.” By doing this, I hope to help you avoid confusing the aspect names with the tense names that I will introduce shortly, some of which include the words “perfect” and “imperfect.” From this table we can see that an ideal Indo-European language might have nine tenses—nine different combinations of time and aspect. In fact, English has even more—twelve different tenses, the way many grammarians classify them. Here, 2. It is worth noting here that non-Indo-European verbs often bear very little similarity to Indo-European verbs on these points. For example, Hebrew verbs, considered in themselves, have little time referent at all. They primarily indicate aspect, and one must normally use the context to determine the time of the action. 3. Notice that to some degree, this is what I have done all along. When I introduced the case system, I discussed the three English cases only to show you that the idea of cases is not completely foreign to you. I did not draw any connections between Greek/Latin cases and English cases, nor did I argue that certain cases in the classical languages worked like certain English cases. Instead, I explained cases on their own, with illustrations of how to translate them into English, but not with reference to English grammatical categories. What I am about to do in the case of verb tenses is another example of the pattern I have tried to follow throughout the book. 118 Part 3: Verbs: The Heart of Communication though, one should consider an important difference between English, on one hand, and Greek or Latin, on the other...