72 Colorado College Studies. 



T^ayyo <fiiha<; {P. 173); yjtrOr^'^jiTzf/.'zffa, lyikatra, etc, are SO trans- 

 lated. 



The Subjunctive and Optative aorists are modes of the 

 inceptive action, nothing else; they do not there contain a 

 single sign of temporal gradation, nor do they have either in 

 Sanskrit or Zend a temporal sense, and just as little in the 

 independent clauses of the Greek. In the develoj)ed sen- 

 tence of the Greek, however, their surroundings are such that 

 the sense of the past time enters, or seems to enter into them, 

 which is sj)ecially true in the following cases. In prior rela- 

 tive and conjunctive sentences the Subjunctive aorist seems 

 to have the sense of past time, e. g., ^'S idv y-^ t3d?.rj Tt>rjijio'Mx -i'/.ttav 



-dv-:a<; atipdjis'^n^ Tzs^Jxea^ ol/.o-^th CEpifiOio. 'F 855. All the sen- 

 tence means is "whoever shall hit the dove". The hearer 

 will understand the hitting precedes the prize. Pedantically 

 we might translate "whoever shall have hit", though the 

 future perfect does not inhere in the aorist, but is transferred 

 there by the hearer from the context of the aorist. In such 

 surroundings the aorist is nearly always chosen because the 

 inception of the action is emphatic, not its course. The Skr. 

 does not distinguish action so accurately as the Greek and uses 

 the present in similar cases, and this was very probably done 

 in Greek also in colloquial style. When the Optative is in 

 the dependent question, it does contain the sense of the past, 

 e. g., irecpwra, riva (hurspoy ;j.sr t/.sivo-^ hhn; meaning "whomever 

 he might have found." However this sense does not belong 

 to ^8(n as such, but only in so far as it is the representative of 

 an £l«5e9. From the sentence e^ rtva eloe? we have by means of 

 the transmutation of persons and modes e-' nva hJoi and in the 

 transmutation the temporal sense of the original jTo^s- is trans- 

 ferred to ':<^in. This transmutation finds moreover no analogy 

 in the Indie group, but is a special development of the Greek. 

 (Cf. Delbruck, Griech. Synt., p. 107 ff.) 



The results of our investigation so far are then that the 

 Conditional is the form of a conceptive thought which as- 

 sumes something contradictory (or antithetical ) in its very 

 nature. Its modal relation — the assumed reality of the predi- 

 cate, which is not real in itself for the speaker — is a special 



