The Competing Use of Perfect and Aorist Tenses in Old Church Slavonic
Author(s): Catherine Mary MacRobert / Language(s): English
/ Issue: 4/2013
Keywords: Old Church Slavonic translation technique; aorist tense; perfect tense; imperative; Euchologium Sinaiticum; Psalterium Sinaiticum
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 cooccur
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.
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