Fun nerdy moment . . .

[Usenko]

Hey all.

I was working on the Optative mood for a lecture for my Greek students.

This will be no problem for Germans reading this (I believe the same thing is in their language) but English speakers find moods a little tricky. Basically, if a verb is in the optative mood, it means that the speaker wishes it to be so.

I was trying to come up with a good phrase to show this concept to my students. I came up with this one:

εἴθε
Would that

ἡ Δύναμις
the power/force

μετὰ σοῦ
with unto you

εἴη…
I wish it to be.

(I mean, it made me giggle. )

PS - in English, repetition is inefficient. In New Testament Greek, it is how you express emphasis. So putting two versions of the same verb in the optative, at the beginning and the end of the sentence, emphasises the wish.

[Alan Phipps]

Nice. Now you just need to wear green facepaint when delivering this.

[Usenko]

Ιοδα! Ιοδα ζητεις σου!
(Ioda! Ioda seeking are you!)

[Alan Phipps]

In a similar vein but the nerd in question is not myself.

I have a cat (my employer we both think) who will claim that he NEVER gets fed. I keep his dry food in a cereal container on a shelf of the Welsh dresser in the kitchen. One day he learned how to jump up and lift the lid on the container with his paw and then stick his head in and munch. The remedy, I thought, was to put an elastic band around the container keeping the lid shut.

A few days later I heard a crash in the kitchen and he had pushed the container off the shelf and after a 4 foot drop the lid was off despite the band and now dry food was scattered all over the kitchen floor. My cat was sat in the middle of it munching. The remedy, I thought, was to tie the elastic band keeping the container shut to the dresser so that he could not knock the container over nor off the shelf.

A few days later I heard this strangely musical sound from the kitchen. The cat was up on the dresser shelf repeatedly twanging the stretching elastic band with his paw and slowly working it off the lid of the container. His reaction to being caught in the act was a to give me a steady knowing look that promised more later. I now keep his dry food inside a shut cupboard.

I have no doubt that his campaign is 'to be continued'.

[Usenko]

For us, the issue with the cat is not food (she seems quite unmotivated by food - rare for a cat, I believe!) but a tendency to sneak through doors she's not supposed to!

Our house is set up with a door from the kitchen to the laundry, and then from the laundry to the garage. Obviously she's not permitted outside without a cattery, so we keep the sliding door to the laundry carefully closed.

The number of times I've heard scratching at the laundry door, walked in and seen a little guilty face looking at me with a vibe of "It's not what it looks like!"

[Alan Phipps]

It's OK for me. The cat owns the whole house but I am discretionally allowed to use any part of it. There is a splendid cat flap to the outside in the back door and even a tailor-made cat-sized hole in the bottom of the fence from back garden to front. However, he instead often marches to the front door, sits down and shouts until I open the front door and let him out, as a good personal assistant to him should indeed do.

[berth]

Never heard of the optative mood. Is it the same as the subjunctive?

(I wish it were so. Long live the King. If I were you etc)

[Usenko]

In Greek, there's the subjunctive mood - "If it happens that" - which represents possibilities and unknowns.

The optative mood - "I wish that" - represents what the speaker wants.

When English had a subjunctive, it used to do both jobs. I don't think we ever really had an optative. "God save the King" and "Would that it were so" are both examples of the rare remaining subjunctives in English, but both are phrases which would have used an optative in Classical Greek.

[berth]

I just typed a long (for me) reply but I got the "Entering Terran Space" thing and it's gone. Bah. So tl:dr.

Very interesting Usenko, thanks.

English still has the subjunctive but we mostly don't realise when we're using it. It gets mixed up with the conditional and is fading, for sure.

The Romance languages have it, in spades. In Italian (to my limited knowledge), any statement involving wishes, supposition, or even thoughts demand il conjunctivo, in all tenses. Spanish is very similar in this regard. French, maybe a little less so - my French is well rusty so not 100% on that one.

That's the main thrust of it. May you enjoy my input