CLAUDIA: Hi this is Claudia Filos.
I am with the Center for Hellenic Studies
in Washington, D.C.
I am recording remotely and I am here today
talking with Leonard Muellner, who is a professor
of Classical Studies at Brandeis University.
He is also the director of IT and Publications
at the Center for Hellenic Studies.
Lenny, thanks for joining me today for a short
discussion.
LENNY: What a pleasure.
CLAUDIA: Yes, so today I was hoping that we
could just have a talk about something that
some people may or may not know about, it
is a topic called “aspect,” and this is
something that might be interesting to people
whether or not they have an interest in learning
Ancient Greek language, but it might help
us to understand, sort of, the poetry and
myth in Ancient Greek society in general.
Can you talk a little bit about how that works,
and how it is different from tense?
LENNY: So what we are talking about is – and
I hope you will interact with me about this
– what we are talking about is verbal aspect,
how there are markers on Greek verbs, on all
Greek verbs, okay?, and there are markers
for voice – like active and passive and
middle – but there are also markers on aspect,
which is kind of an elusive concept, but,
it can take various forms.
In other words, in some languages, aspect
is, “I heard this third hand from my cousin,”
as opposed to, “I witnessed this, what I
am reporting to you myself,” or stuff like
that.
But in Greek, it is about the overall thing
at issue is whether you are reporting action,
or you are describing action as an on-going
process, or a completed one, or – and this
is the hardest part of it – or you are reporting
action and not specifying whether it is a
completed process or an on-going one.
CLAUDIA: So that’s super interesting.
Right? for us, I think.
LENNY: So I think the key thing for understanding
how this three-part system works is to understand
the categories that were first applied to
language by the Prague School of Linguistics
in the 30s and 40s, and the big exponent,
that most of us have heard of the Prague School
of linguistics, is Roman Jakobson.
But he was, these people talked about, when
we think of oppositions, which are an important
feature we think of binary oppositions, like
one and zero, which are the pr--, built on,
that’s what computers are built on, where
something has a property and the other thing
doesn’t have it.
So our notion of most oppositions is that
they are mutually exclusive oppositions, like
black and white, or one and zero, but the
Prague School distinction is between what
are called “marked categories” and “unmarked
categories,” and they are not mutually exclusive.
On the contrary, the best examples of these
sorts of oppositional pairs, is like the opposition
between, well, uh, at least in its most unvarnished
and maybe to be emended form, the opposition
between pants and skirts.
CLAUDIA: Okay.
LENNY: So you could say that pants are “unmarked,”
in their opposition to skirts, because both
males and females wear pants.
CLAUDIA: Okay.
LENNY: Whereas skirts are “marked” because
females and some Celtic people wear them.
I mean, we are restricted to a certain group,
okay?
So from the point of … or, the other example
is the one that Greg uses, is the opposition
between “short” and “tall.”
Okay?
CLAUDIA: Um hum.
LENNY: They are not really mutually exclusive
because you can say of a short person, “How
tall are you?”
Okay?
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: In other words, there is a sense of
tall that doesn’t really, it means “How
high are you?”
not whether you are tall or short.
Okay?
CLAUDIA: Um hum.
LENNY: So it includes shortness and tallness,
okay, in it?
The other way of thinking about this is toll
both [inaudible] on the highways, or at least
there used to be.
Now everybody has electronic gadgets.
But maybe most of the people in this audience
know tollbooths where you have one lane for
passenger cars with exact change, …
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: … and another lane for everyone.
Okay?
Most people think that if they have exact
change, they should go in the exact change
lane.
But if you have exact change, you could go
in the lanes for everybody.
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: It is not an exclusive category.
It includes people with exact change, passengers
with exact change.
So that’s the basic idea.
CLAUDIA: So can I clarify?
The “unmarked” category can include the
“marked.”
Is that right?
LENNY: Exactly.
So what you have in Greek in aspects and here
are the names of them: is the imperfective
aspect, which describes action that is imperfect,
in the sense not that it is not perfect, but
in the sense that it is not complete …
CLAUDIA: Okay
LENNY: … in the sense of perfetto; and then
you have, and that includes the present and
the so-called imperfect tense, which is just
the past of the present.
These aren’t, aspect is not a category that’s,
it’s a category that is totally distinct
from tense, okay?
CLAUDIA: Right, right.
LENNY: Yep.
So, and I think the future belongs to the
category of the imperfect aspect.
And then you have the perfective aspect, so
there is imperfective aspect and perfective
aspect, and perspective aspect includes, in
terms of the indicative at least, perfect
tense and pluperfect tense, okay?
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: … which describe actions that are
complete.
So you know the notion is that if you use
the perfect of the verb “to die,”it is
a kind of grim example but I think that it
works okay, so the imperfective aspect of
“die” is to be in the process of dying,
okay?
CLAUDIA: Okay.
LENNY: … present, or if it is imperfect
it is in the past, “I was dying.”
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: But if you use it in a perfective sense,
you’re dead, okay?
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: It means “right now, I am dead.”
And the pluperfect means sometime in the past
I was dead, okay?
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: So there’s a proverb in Greek which
uses the ... well, let’s get to the proverb
afterwards.
CLAUDIA: Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
LENNY: So I think that these two categories
are relatively comprehensible and we can express
what they mean quite easily in English, …
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: … and they have to be enhanced a
little bit because, for example, in the case
of the Greek perfect, it means that a process
is complete, but it can also describe the
state that [inaudible] upon the completion
of a process.
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: Right.
Like being dead.
CLAUDIA: Dead.
Right.
“I have died.”
Dead.
Yeah.
So it’s a state, right?
LENNY: It’s a state or it’s just that
you have done it.
If you say, “I spoken” in Greek, in the
perfect, it means you are finished and you
are not going to do it anymore.
Okay?
CLAUDIA: Yeah.
LENNY: Alright.
So we have those two, but the tricky one is
the so-called aorist, which is the Greek name
for it, which is a-horistos, with an “h”
in there in Greek.
“A” is a negative prefix, as in “amoral”
and those things that survive in English,
and the horistos, the English word that is
cognate with it is “horizon,” which horizon
is the line that divides the sky from the
land or the sea, right?
CLAUDIA: Uh huh.
LENNY: So horizon in Greek means the divider.
Okay?
CLAUDIA: Okay.
LENNY: So what ahoristos means is “undivided”
or “undividing.”
Okay?
CLAUDIA: Okay.
LENNY: In other words, it does not make a
distinction.
Okay?
CLAUDIA: So in the terms that we were talking
about before, that would be “unmarked,”
is that what you are saying?
LENNY: Exactly.
But here’s the tricky part.
What you have got then is a three-part system,
what my examples of “unmarked” are totally
two-part examples.
You can see how this works if you think of
it as a triangle, okay?, At the top of the
triangle, for example, there is the word “lion,”
which means a specific kind of animal, when
I say a “lion” it doesn’t specify its
gender, it’s the lion as opposed to the
lamb, let’s say, or to a wolf, right?
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: It’s a category, okay? and it doesn’t
necessarily have gender.
But if you put that lion at the top of the
triangle and at the bottom ends of it you
put “lion” on one side and “lioness”
on the other, there is the sense of “lion”
that means male lion, okay?, and there is
another sense that means female, that then
it’s in opposition to “lioness.”
So in a certain sense that is the way that
the Greek aspects work.
On the top, you have the aorist, which is
just the category of an action.
Okay?
CLAUDIA: yeah, yeah, yeah.
LENNY: It doesn’t specify whether it is
ongoing or not.
And then you have the two categories that
are opposed to one another.
So what’s difficult is to appreciate what
an aorist does in Greek.
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: That’s hard and it does things.
For example, you can make proverbs in the
Greek in the aorist …
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: … because they have a kind of timelessness
to them, okay?
that’s one thing, but also they don’t
specify whether their action is on-going or
not.
They are markers that are left out there,
okay?
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: We don’t have this in English.
CLAUDIA: Right.
So it is totally different.
But that’s what is so fascinating to me,
right?
It is a different way of communicating the
ideas of what is happening in the world.
LENNY: Exactly, so the grammar books say “oh,
you translate the aorist indicative as a simple
past,” and even the standard grammar book
that we use, the Hansen and Quinn, says that
the aorist is simple aspect.
CLAUDIA: Right, right.
LENNY: Well, that is, okay.
But, anyway, since there is only a past tense
of it in the indicative, people learn that
aorist just means “I did it.”
But that in a sense means it’s perfect.
In English we don’t have this category.
So it’s a really difficult to get your head
into the notion that you have a form which
is really just focusing on the action without
specifying something about it, just as “lion”
isn’t male or female.
Do you know what I mean?
CLAUDIA: Yes, yes.
Exactly.
And I think that a triangle is a beautiful
way to describe that situation, that relationship,
right?, between the “marked” and the “unmarked.”
So then I mean, so then when we are starting
to think about, let’s say, we are reading
The Iliad, or we’re reading some ancient
Greek poetry, can you talk a little bit about
the way that that can be used in order to
make poetry and myth function, do the things
that it can do do, because this is really
functional, this is functional poetry.
It is trying to change the world, right?
LENNY: It is.
I think that you have a whole kind of esthetic
to the way you use … For example, the imperfect
has a past tense and the aorist as a past
tense in narrative and in Greek poetry, and
Homer, or other texts.
So that I think that it’s another way of
thinking about unmarked forms is that they
are the default, the default narrative tense
is aorist.
Okay?
CLAUDIA: Yeah.
LENNY: That means that the imperfect is in
opposition to it and is a marked form, and
a restricted one.
And so is the pluperfect, okay?, If you want
to think of it in those terms, and the perfect.
But I think, whatever …. you don’t use
perfect and pluperfect as narrative tenses
in Greek.
They are something else, okay?.
But the aorist and the imperfect are continually
in opposition to one another, and at a certain
point in Greek, you can also use the present
as a narrative tense, which is kind of mind-boggling
to us.
That is sub-standard in English to use a present
as a narrative tense.
Stuff like, “So I says to him …,” that’s
bad English, right?
That’s sub-standard English.
So anyhow, but so it becomes even more complex
after a certain point, but in heroic poetry,
the opposition is between imperfect and aorist,
and the aorist is kind of just narrative,
you are just describing what happens, and
then bingo! all of a sudden, you have the
imperfect which visualizes things, I think.
CLAUDIA: Okay, yeah.
LENNY: And which slows things down, if you
want.
And so a nice example of this, for example,
when a god or a goddess like Thetis, when
she appears to Achilles, okay?, she does things
like she comes in the aorist, but when she
is sitting there it is in the imperfect, okay?
CLAUDIA: Sitting next to him.
LENNY: Sitting next to him, okay?
So, and you use the particle [hara or ara]
with that …
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: … which we think is the visualization
particle, right?
So you can see that you have a coincidence
between the notion of slowing the film down
and asking you to visualize something, and
also the way you use these different forms
– verb aspects – to express the highlighting
of certain things, or the slowing down of
certain things.
CLAUDIA: So in a very fundamental way, I mean,
[the use of this aspect?] is really affecting
the way that the group that is around and
interacting with the performer is receiving
it and … integrating it.
LENNY: … visualizing it as you do.
I mean, if you, you know, I think it is a
really crucial thing to think of narrative
… We don’t have so much experience any
more of verbal narrative, right?
CLAUDIA: um-hum.
LENNY: … while a person doing gestures,
and stuff like that.
Verbal narrative.
I mean, we do in our interactions with our
family and friends.
But in an artistic media, we don’t have
that right?
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: But I think that the closest thing
in my experience was when I was a kid when
radio was a big narrative medium.
CLAUDIA: Right, right.
LENNY: And so you learned to imagine in your
head what people were saying, the story that
they were telling you.
And it’s a very vivid thing because it is
your imagination that gets activated by the
images.
Whereas our medium is film and the images
are all being fabricated for you, you don’t
have an opportunity to do the imagining for
yourself.
CLAUDIA: Right.
LENNY: And so these cues that point out things
about the way the action is being represented
I think are very powerful in a linguistic
and cultural system like that.
