Biblical Greek - Lesson 15

Dr. Bill Mounce
Biblical Greek
NT201-15
Introduction to Verbs
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:00] Well, congratulations. You're done with nouns, and we move on to verbs. And chapter 15, I'm going to give you an introduction to verbal grammar in general, much like we did with nouns in chapter five. But in fact, you already know most of what Chapter 15 has to say, because we've learned it a lot in connection with Amy in Chapter eight, but also in other bits and places throughout these first chapters. So most of this should read as a review to you. Verbs are those words that express action or a state of being. I am studying Greek. Greek is the heavenly language. So those are verbs and that's what we're going to work with now. We've already seen that verbs have both person and number first, second or third person, singular or plural. And we've also seen that verbs have to agree with their subject in person and number. So if the subject is first person singular, the verb has to be first person singular. And you would have, for example, Amy. But if the subject were second person plural, you would have to have a verb that is second person plural in its form. And for example, step. That's agreement. It's really important that you distinguish the terms time and tense. It's going to be easy to confuse them because of English, but it is critical for reasons of X to Jesus that you keep these two words separate. When I talk about the time of a verbal construction, I'm talking about when the action described by the verb occurred, occurs or will occur. When I talk about the tense of a verb, I'm talking strictly about its form. When I talk about tense, I'm not talking about time. I'm talking about the form of the verb.

[00:02:03] And so, for example, in English, we can have a verb in the past time, the present time or the future time. But how do you form a future verb? Well, you take the present tense form of the verb study. A new ad in your helping word, Will. So the future form of a verb. Whose time is future? Is formed with a helping verb and the present tense. Form of the verb. It's a little confusing, but is critical, especially fractured Jesus, that you keep the concepts of time and tense separate. But there's another thing in the verbal system in English, and as far as I know, in almost every other language. And it's called Aspect. And again, this is something that you probably can just feel instinctively in English if you're a native English speaker. And while it has some significance in English, we're going to find that aspect has a tremendous amount of significance in Greek and even more so in Hebrew. But what we're going to find is that in Greek aspect is tremendously significant. But more about that later. You probably haven't read much about aspect, whether you've learned Greek earlier with another textbook or even in your high school English class. The whole concept of aspect is relatively new and is the product of the work in linguistics. Well, let me give you a couple of terms that are important to know. In English. We have basically and again, this is a simplification, but it's good enough for No. In English, we basically have two aspects. And I call those aspects the continuous and the completed aspects. Now, those aren't the technical terms. The technical terms in linguistics are the imperfecta and the perspective. But those terms get very confusing when we're talking about Greek.

[00:04:25] Because it overlaps, or at least it comes close to overlapping with issues of temps. So what I want to talk about is the spectral significance of the continuous and the completed basically aspect refers to kind of action. What was the kind of action that the verb is describing? Well, if the verb is a continuous form of, it's continuous in its aspect. It will describe the action as an ongoing process, as something that is linear. And you might say, for example, I was eating. Now that's continuous. The completed aspect. Is the aspect that says the action was finished. It was accomplished. It was completed. And in English we would say, for example, I ate. Now I've put those in past time. I wouldn't have to. I could put them in present time or future time. But the important thing is that you see the spectral difference between I was eating and I ate. The first is continuous and describes a continuous action. The second describes a completed action. Another example might be just to kind of close your eyes and to feel the difference between hearing. I studied last night and I was studying last night. So the first simply describes the completed action I studied last night. But if you just instinctively here I was studying last night. You can hear that the person is expressing the action as a process and you're probably going to expect something else. I was studying and my friend called or something, but do you hear the difference between an action that is completed and an action that is continuous? That's aspect in English. Let's switch a bit over into Greek. How do Greeks form verbs? Well, in a sense they form the same way that they do nouns.

[00:06:41] In other words, they start with the basic stem of the word. And then they add stuff to it. Now, in this example, you don't to memorize this, but it's just an example of how Greeks construct a verb. In this particular case, you have a stem which is blue, and then you have something called the connecting vowel, which in this case is O Macron. And then you have what's called a personal ending, and it's the personal ending that indicates person and number. And so, Greg, stick all that together and you get Lululemon, which means we are destroying, we are loosing. So they take their verbs and they stick pieces together. What we will do as translators is that we will look at the inflected form. We will draw lines through it and try to extract out the different pieces and then instructing out the other pieces will be able to see what the verb form is. Now you need to understand how different my approach is on this point than just about everyone else. There's a chart in the bookstore. It's about, oh, four feet by about two and a half feet. But the itty bitty little writing on it, if you want to go memorize all the paradigms, that's the chart you have to memorize. What we're going to do in this class, though, is learn how Greeks put verbs together, and we're going to learn to look at the little triggers, the little bits and pieces, and extrapolate out from those pieces what in fact, the form is. So what we have in this class are two charts. We have the master personal lending chart, which has a whole 48 forms to learn. And then we have the master verb chart, which shows how all the pieces got together, and that's all that we're going to learn.

[00:08:30] Now, I don't want to underestimate it. There's some work there, but there's not nearly as much work as if you were to memorize all the paradigms. Okay. So we're learning how Greeks put verbs together. So we can take them apart. So once we've learned those pieces, we can look at a verb and pull it apart. And here, for example, is a paradigm of a cool. A cool means I hear a coo, ace, ace is second person. Singular means you hear a coo. He she it hears. You've seen this paradigm with Amy before, right? This is your typical verb paradigm. And finally, I need to say one thing about aspect. And I've already introduced the two aspects in English grammar. Greek aspects. Your grammar is a little different. And so I want to say something about Greek aspects. You will grammar actually in Greek and this is an area that's debated, but I think this is the easiest way to teach it. In Greek, a special grammar. We have three aspects not to. The first aspect is continuous. In other words, a Greek verb can express a linear, ongoing, improv fictive kind of idea. That's the same as in English. However, the second aspect in Greek I call the undefined aspect, and what's critical to understand is that when a verb is in the undefined aspect, it's not telling you anything. About the nature of the action other than it occurred or occurs or will occur depending upon the time. In other words, the undefined aspect is kind of the dump aspect. If you want to just kind of say something, describe a verb, describe an action. And so when you see a verb in the undefined aspect, the author is just not telling you anything about the nature, about the kind of action.

[00:10:32] It's simply telling you about an event. Now, that event could have been a linear event, or it could have been a repeated event, or it could have been what we call in English a punctilious event, an action that happened quickly in point of time. Like in the English, I hit the ball. The hit is punctilious. It just happens just like that. The action could be anything. But when the Greek author uses an undefined aspect with its verb, it's the author's way of saying It's not important to me to express the kind of action I'm simply telling you that have happened. Another example would be Niagara Falls. I'm looking at the falls, I'm looking at the water coming over. And if I wanted to emphasize that the water falling over Niagara Falls is a continuous. Event, I could use a continuous aspect. The water is falling over Niagara Falls, but I can also just as accurately say, Well, the water falls. Over Niagara Falls. In other words, I can use an aspect that doesn't specify the precise kind of action. It just means it wasn't important to me to express it. Okay, so in Greek we have the continuous aspect where it's definitely an ongoing process. Secondly, we have the undefined aspect that doesn't tell us anything about the nature of the action other than it happened. And there is a third aspect. But we're not going to get to it for a while, so we don't need to cover it now. Okay. I just want you to know there's one more aspect that we're going to fill into this slot.