Aorist passive personal endings

[Callaina]

This has bugged me for a while. Why on earth does the aorist passive use active secondary personal endings, when there are perfectly good middle/passive secondary personal endings that it could draw upon (without resembling anything else in the process and hence causing confusion)? Can anyone shed some light on this infuriatingly counterintuitive feature of ancient Greek?

Calling upon Imber Ranae and Aurifex for their insights

 

[Aurifex]

There's a fairly straightforward explanation.

There were no specifically passive endings in IE. There were however certain intransitive verbs with long -o-/-e- suffixes that in Greek came to form their aorists with the endings -ην, -ης, -η etc. These were the so-called root aorists we're still familiar with.

Though these were initially active in meaning, some inevitably lent themselves to being interpreted as passive, since passivity is only a small step from intransitivity in some cases. An example is πνίγω, whose aorist ἐπνίγην initially meant "I choked (on something)" but, presumably, readily shifted to "I was choked" where the need arose. Such aorists, active in form but effectively passive in meaning, then served as a model for the formation of the aorist passive of the majority of transitive verbs, which came to form their passive by the insertion of a -θ- suffix, whilst retaining the active endings of the originally active root aorists.

 

[Callaina]

Huh, ok. I guess that both makes sense and explains root aorists, which was another thing I was curious about.

Now, how did the passive personal endings that are used in other tenses arise?

 

[Callaina]

There were no specifically passive endings in IE. There were however certain intransitive verbs with long -o-/-e- suffixes that in Greek came to form their aorists with the endings -ην, -ης, -η etc.

Did all intransitive verbs originally fall into this category?

 

[Aurifex]

Did all intransitive verbs originally fall into this category?

No, I believe the category was actually one of stative verbs (not necessarily all of them) rather than intransitives, and not all stative verbs are intransitive, nor are all intransitive verbs stative.

Now, how did the passive personal endings that are used in other tenses arise?

I'm not sure I'm clear what your question is, but middle and passive were morphologically identical except in the aorist and future, the latter of which in its passive borrowed the aorist passive -θη- as its stem and added a sigma before inflecting with the present middle endings.
ETA: To answer these sorts of questions authoritatively, I think it would be useful if you tried to get hold of a copy of Sihler.

 

[Callaina]

Ah, I misunderstood your earlier post as "there were no specifically middle/passive endings in IE"...

Thanks -- I'll look for that book.

 

[Callaina]

Thanks -- I'll look for that book.

Our university library had a copy, so I went and grabbed it this afternoon! It looks quite useful (and thorough) indeed. Thanks.