Dear JP

I think your idea about verbs of production and temporality needs a little more tweaking and support. First, saying that verbs of production have no inherent temporal value in and of themselves seems to be quite an audacious claim. For Hebrew, Greek, English, and Latin, to name a few languages, possibly do not all function in the same way. This is not to mention the Slavic languages or other Semitic tongues.

English and Latin are tense based languages. Hebrew may or may not be tenseless and scholars fiercely debate aspect and Aktionsart as well as the role that temporality may or may not play in Greek grammar. So how you can make a blanket statement concerning verbs of production seems baffling.

I also ran a search of the Greek words for "create" and "creation" as they were used until the fourth century and only found one ambiguous example that does not suggest a "creation" came into existence at a certain time from non-being. That is in Origen. Maybe you've found examples in the ANE literature that buttress your argument.

In any event, what I'm therefore wondering is who you're relying on to support this claim that verbs of production have no inherent temporal value in and of themselves. Not saying you're totally wrong. I would just like more than your opinion on this subject since I don't think that this particular area is your academic specialty.

Peace
Dan

Yo G1,

I think your idea about verbs of production and temporality needs a little more tweaking and support. First, saying that verbs of production have no inherent temporal value in and of themselves seems to be quite an audacious claim.

Is it? Verbs are forms of action. Acts in themselves cannot in any sense connote temporality except by context and the actor (something outside the verb itself). I have a background in grammar, actually, and while I make little use of the rules because they bore me, I do know that anything with temporal sense is adjectival, not verbal.

As for tense, the verbs may have, as in English with suffixes, something added to them like an -ed, but then they become adjectival. "Create" tells us nothing temporally. "Created" tells us past, but how far past, and is it still ongoing? We need more than one word to know; we need context. This has been my reason behind asking others for a verb that by itself connotes an eternal product. I am not surprised that no one has come up with one. Given the unique nature of the Trinitarian relationship, it is hardly suprising that there is no unique verb connoting "eternal production" and that words have been borrowed from the linguistic stock like "created" which in other contexts have temporal meaning because of their objects.

Of course, Hebrew would have it very hard, as I understand it had only a vocabulary of a few thousands words.