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The aorist (abbreviated AOR, Template:Pron-en) is a grammatical term used for related verb forms found in certain Indo-European languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Bulgarian. The term comes from Ancient Greek aóristos "without limits, undefined" and, as the name implies, the aorist was not limited to a particular span of time, like the Greek imperfect, or to a particular result, like the Greek perfects. By analogy, the term is applied to unrelated forms which perform functions similar to those of the old Indo-European aorist.

The aorist is a perfective aspect in Ancient Greek (where it is usually called the aorist tense) and in languages whose description has been influenced by Greek grammatical traditions, such as Sanskrit and Bulgarian. In many of these languages it is specifically the perfective past (known in other traditions as the preterite). In Ancient Greek, the aorist was the unmarked (default) form of the verb, and in descriptions of other languages it has occasionally been used to label dissimilar unmarked forms of the verb, such as the gnomic present in Turkish and Swahili.

In contrast to imperfective aspects, such as the Greek imperfect, which conceive of an event or situation as unbounded, or to the perfect, which calls attention to the consequences of an event or situation, the aorist generally conceives of an event or situation as bounded. (See imperfective and perfective for further illustration of this aspectual difference.) In Ancient Greek the aorist was the unmarked form of the verb, and so was used as the default form when neither the imperfect nor the perfect was appropriate.

In the Greek tradition, the aorist is generally called the aorist tense. However, it is not a pure grammatical tense in the linguistic sense of the word (marking a position in time) but is either aspectual or a combination of tense and aspect, or the developments of a tense-stem.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). Outside the indicative, the Greek aorist usually represented a punctiliar aspect or ingressive aspect.

Etymology

Aorist comes from Ancient Greek Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) "without limits, undefined." It was so named because it is not limited to describing actions that are in progress or are completed with a permanent result, as the imperfect and perfect are.

Indo-European languages

Greek

In the Greek indicative mood, the aorist generally refers to a past action, in a general way or as a completed event. It may also be used to express a general statement in the present (the "gnomic aorist"), less commonly a future event.

In other moods (subjunctive, optative, and imperative), the infinitive, and the participle, the aorist expresses aspect, except in indirect discourse when it replaces an indicative. In these forms, the function of the mood determines time, and the aorist stem is used only to express an "action pure and simple" without the specific implications of the other aspects.

The aorist aspect is used in the imperative, for example, in the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:11, which says "Give (δὸς dòs, aorist imperative) us this day our daily bread". In contrast, the similar passage in Luke 11:3 uses the imperfective aspect, implying a sense of continuation with "Give (δίδου dídou, present imperative) us day by day our daily bread."

The general rule here is that the aorist aspect lacks the specific implications of the perfect and the imperfective aspects. A table may help to clarify the above examples of this (the table does not include all uses of the aspects listed):

Narrative

In narrative, the Greek aorist has two chief functions: as opposed to the imperfect, it demotes single actions, as opposed to continuous ones - in particular, the individual steps of an ongoing process are often aorist, whereas the process itself is stated in the imperfect. This is a difference of aspect; the aorist is also used for actions which took place earlier than the main narrative, a difference of time. An example of the first occurs in Xenophon's Anabasis, when the Persian aristocrat Orontas is executed: "and those who had been previously in the habit of bowing (προσεκύνουν prosekúnoun, imperfect) to him, bowed (προσεκύνησαν prosekúnēsan, aorist) to him even then." Here the imperfect refers to a past habitual or repeated act, and the aorist to a single one.

Hermeneutics

Because Latin lacked an aorist, there have long been difficulties in translating the Greek New Testament into Western languages. The aorist has often been treated as making a strong statement about the aspect or even the time of an event, when in fact, due to it being the unmarked (default) form of the Greek verb, such implications are often left to context. Thus within New Testament hermeneutics, it is considered an exegetical fallacy to attach undue significance to uses of the aorist. Although one may draw specific implications from an author's use of the imperfective or perfect, no such conclusions can, in general, be drawn from the use of the aorist, which may refer to an action "without specifying whether the action is unique, repeated, ingressive, instantaneous, past, or accomplished." In particular, the aorist does not imply a "once for all" action, as it has commonly been misinterpreted.

Sanskrit

Although quite common in older Sanskrit, the aorist is comparatively infrequent in much of classical Sanskrit, occurring, for example, 66 times in the first book of the Rāmāyaṇa, 8 times in the Hitopadeśa, 6 times in the Bhagavad-Gītā, and 6 times in the story of Śakuntalā in the Mahābhārata.

In the later language, the aorist indicative had the value of a preterite, while in the older language it was closer in sense to the perfect. The aorist was also used with the ancient injunctive mood, particularly in prohibitions.

Slavic

The Indo-European aorist was inherited by the Slavonic languages in general; it is obsolete, or virtually so, in all of them, except Bulgarian. In Bulgarian, which has produced a new regular formation, the aorist is used in indirect and presumptive quotations.

Bulgarian has separate inflections for aorist (past imperfective) and general perfective. The aorist may be used with the imperfective, casting doubt as to whether the aorist and perfective encode the same aspect in Bulgarian. However, several Slavic languages may double up aspectual marking, producing perfective-imperfective compound aspects, and this appears to be the case with the Bulgarian aorist-imperfective.

Proto-Indo-European

In Proto-Indo-European, the aorist appears to have originated as a series of action forms for verbs. Rather than tense, verb forms in Proto-Indo-European indicated aspect, that is, state of the action or process expressed by the verb. Later, this was partially replaced by a tense system based on temporal relationships. The verb system of Ancient Greek can therefore be described as "at the same time an aspectual and temporal system."

Many Indo-European languages have lost the aorist as a distinct feature. In the development of Latin, for example, the aorist merged with the perfect.

Formation

In Greek and Sanskrit, the aorist aspect is marked by several morphological devices, which in the indicative are supplemented with the past-tense augment ἐ- e-, which contracts with an initial vowel. Three aorist morphological devices stand out as most common:

References

1. Dahl, Östen (2000). Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe. Mouton de Gruyter. p. 141. ISBN 978-3110157529.
2. ^ Bernard Comrie, Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems, Cambridge University Press, 1976, ISBN 0521290457, p 12: "In Ancient Greek, the Aorist is in the Indicative Mood primarily a past tense, although it does have some nonpast uses. In other moods and in nonfinite forms, the Aorist is purely aspectual, not an expression of tense."
3. Buist M. Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek, Oxford University Press, 1990, ISBN 0198267290, p. 97.
4. Donald J. Mastronarde, Introduction to Attic Greek, University of California Press, 1993, ISBN 0520078446, p. 148.
5. Alfred Mollin and Robert Williamson, An Introduction to Ancient Greek, 3rd ed., University Press of America, 1997, ISBN 0761808531, p. 45.
6. Frank Beetham, Learning Greek with Plato, Bristol Phoenix Press, 2007, p. 362.
7. John William Wenham and Henry Preston Vaughan Nunn, The Elements of New Testament Greek, 2nd ed, Cambridge University Press, 1965, ISBN 0521098424, p 96.
8. Zerwick, 1963, Biblical Greek : "« aorist » ... connotes simply the action without further determination."
9. Andrew L. Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 0195083458, p. 445: "the aorist ... not a tense, but so called"
10. Zerwick, 1963, Biblical Greek : "the word « tenses » is put in inverted commas because the forms to be treated are but inaccurately called « tenses ». « tenses » express the notion of time"
11. Mastronarde, p. 192.
12. Jeremy Duff and David Wenham, The Elements of New Testament Greek, 3rd ed, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0521755514, p. 68.
13. Eugene Van Ness Goetchius, 1965, The Language of the New Testament, p 75: "In traditional grammatical terminology the imperfect and aorist are called tenses; they are actually sets of forms each of which (in the indicative mood) expresses (1) past time and (2) the particular aspect proper to the set."
14. Albert Rijksbaron, The syntax and semantics of the verb in classical Greek : an introduction §1, n.6: he chooses to call the Greek verb-stems (including the aorist stem) tense-stems, explaining that "it is often stated that Greek had no proper means of expressing relative time and that the stems are really aspect stems In general, this position is untenable"; however, Rijkbaron has also denied, elsewhere, that anteriority is a necessary part of the aorist tense in the language; it is a strong implicature.
15. James Morwood, 2001, Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek, Oxford, pg. 61, "Outside the aorist indicative...the aorist...tells us that it was a single event. The imperfect..., which usually suggests that the action should be seen as a continuing process, makes a helpful contrast with this use of the aorist to convey a single crisp event. We refer to the distinction between ways of expressing events and actions as aspect."
16. A.T. Robertson, A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (1934, Broadman Press), pg 832, "All aorists are punctiliar in statement.... The 'constative' aorist treats an act as punctiliar which is not in itself point-action.... The distinction is not enough to make a separate class like ingressive and effective over against the purely punctiliar action."
17. Eugene Van Ness Goetchius, 1965, The Language of the New Testament, Charles Scribner's Sons, pg. 262, "...the aorist is indefinite or 'ingressive,' referring, usually, to an action which is to be commenced." Pg. 268, "...the aorist imperative is used in prohibitions in which someone is commanded not to start doing something."
18. ἀόριστος. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project
19. Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar for schools and colleges, p. 413, 414, paragraph 1852 N: name of aorist
20. Kenneth Leslie McKay, A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek: An aspectual approach, Peter Lang, 1994, ISBN 0820421235, p. 46.
21. ^ Beetham, p. 116.
22. ^ Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament, 4th ed., Zondervan, 1997, ISBN 0310218950, p. 562.
23. Matthew 6:11, KJV. In Greek: Τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον.
24. Luke 11:3, KJV. In Greek: τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δίδου ἡμῖν τὸ καθ' ἡμέραν.
25. John William Wenham and Henry Preston Vaughan Nunn, The Elements of New Testament Greek, 2nd ed, Cambridge University Press, 1965, ISBN 0521098424, p 27: "The Greek Present corresponds more closely in meaning to the English Present Continuous than to the Present Simple."
26. ^ F. Kinchin Smith and T.W. Melluish, Teach Yourself Greek, Hodder and Stoughton, 1968, p. 94.
27. Beetham, p. 87: "The Perfect Tense describes an action which has occurred in the past the present effects of which are still evident."
28. Wenham and Nunn, p. 222.
29. Albert Rijksbaron, The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek, 2002 §6.1
30. ^ D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, Baker Book House, 1984, ISBN 0801024994, p. 70.
31. Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A comprehensive introduction to biblical interpretation, 2nd ed., InterVarsity Press, 2006, ISBN 0830828265, p. 69.
32. ^ William Dwight Whitney, Sanskrit Grammar: Including both the Classical Language, and the older Dialects, of Veda and Brahmana, Oxford University Press, 1950, pp. 297-330.
33. T. Burrow, The Sanskrit Language, Motilal Banarsidass Publ., 2001, ISBN 8120817672, p. 299.
34. The Slavonic languages ed. Bernard Comrie, Greville G. Corbett, passim, esp. p.212ff.
35. Östen Dahl, Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe, Walter de Gruyter, 2000, ISBN 3110157527, p. 290.
36. ^ Michael Meier-Brügger, Matthias Fritz, Manfred Mayrhofer, Indo-European Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter, 2003, ISBN 3110174332, pp. 173–176.
37. Winfred P. Lehmann, Proto-Indo-European Syntax, 1974, pg. 139
38. Maria Napoli, Aspect and Actionality in Homeric Greek: A contrastive analysis, FrancoAngeli, 2006, ISBN 8846478363, p. 47.
39. Leonard Robert Palmer, The Latin Language, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988, ISBN 080612136X, p. 9.
40. Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar, American Book Company, 1920, par. 546, 547: second aorist stem, o-verbs.
41. Anna Giacalone Ramat and Paolo Ramat (eds.), The Indo-European Languages, Routledge, 1998, ISBN 041506449X, pp. 248-251.
42. Smyth, par. 494: reduplication; par 549 (1) reduplication in 2nd aorist.
43. Smyth, par. 542: first aorist stem.

External links

• Greek tenses

• Grammatical aspects
• Grammatical tenses