A Thesis Master in Ancient Greek Linguistics
By
Abdel-Monem Ahmed Zaki
Teaching Assistant in The Department of Ancient European Civilization
Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University,
Cairo, Egypt.
2007
The Researcher divided this thesis to introduction, three chapters and the results. In the introduction; he discussed the modern Methods in Studying Language, and he criticized the ancient resources and modern references.
In the first chapter, The Researcher investigated the optative morphology and its relations to the Indo-European Language.
In the second chapter, he investigated the uses of the optative mood in the Greek Language in the Classical and Hellenistic Age, he divided it to Independent Clause and Dependent Clause.
In the third chapter, he investigated the Functions of the optative mood and its Syntactic Substitutes in the Classical and Hellenistic Age, and the reasons of the decreased use of the optative mood in the Hellenistic Age.
And the results were as follow:
� The uses of the optative mood in the Classical Age have expressed wishing, potentiality in independent clause, and in dependent clause to express purpose, reason, result, indirect speech, and conditional sentences.
� The Future Optative was not used in the indirect speech in the works of Homer, and its first appearance was noticed in the works of Pindar. So the optative mood was not used in the dependent clause, and it vanished in the Hellenistic Age.
� The perfect optative was rare in dependent clause in indirect speech, when it represents either the Perfect Indicative or the perfect subjunctive after the secondary tenses.
� According to the study the regular rule is to use the subjunctive after the primary tenses; the present, the future, and the perfect tenses, while the optative mood was using after the secondary tenses, that are the imperfect, the aorist, and the pluperfect tenses. From the study, I notice that the subjunctive mood was used after the secondary tenses, because the uses of optative mood in independent clause were decreasing in cases such as temporal, final, result clause, Cause, and the indirect speech in the Hellenistic Age.
� The use of the optative mood with a)/n disappeared in the dependent clause for expressing potentiality in the Hellenistic age.
� According to the study of papyri in the Ptolemaic Period the optative mood was using in the formal speech, while its use was decreased in daily speech.
� The optative mood did not clearly express the past, so the indicative mood represented it in expressing purpose in the past.
� The indicative mood and the subjunctive mood represented the optative mood in the indirect speech in the Hellenistic Age.
� The optative mood was not common in non-literary Papyri and only used to express wish and invocation and some expressions of potentiality,
� There were linguistic parallelisms between optative mood and the other moods since Homer, so, it was usual to use subjunctive, indicative and infinitive, side by side with the optative mood. According to the theory of the Language�s Changes, the language remains in the parallel case for a long period. The optative mood sometimes appears in the language and sometimes decreases to allow appearance for the other moods; such as subjunctive and indicative moods to be used and this uses appeared in the Hellenistic writers such as Polybius, Strabo, Plutarchus, and Lucianus.
