Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/226

216 216 Oh certain Tenses are seldom overnice in balancing between contending claim- ants for their attention. They are quite content at find- ing, or at supposing that they have found, any word that will answer their purpose ; and the first that comes uppermost serves them. At all events it might very easily be stated in the grammar, and undoubtedly it should be so, that there is no diff*erence at all between the two aorists, and that, unless perhaps in one or two peculiar idioms, they are used without the slightest discrimination. Among the num- berless vagaries that have entered the heads of the learned this appears to have been one of the rarest. Hermann indeed, in the passage above referred to, mentions the mira opinio of a certain scholar named Steinbriichel, cui aoristi secundi ad primum eadem ratio visa est esse^ quae est plus- quamperfecti ad perfectum. Dr Murray too says in his History of the European Languages (Vol ii. p. 117) that " there is a difference between ELEXA and ELEGON, the aorist : the one is more active, and, by possession of SA, alludes more to operative performance, the other barely ex- presses the fact.*'*' But as there never was such an aorist as eXeyovj it will not be very easy to determine the exact shade of difference which separated it from eXe^a : nor would it be much easier to find out the distinction between e/c- Teiva and e/crai/oi/, or in what respect the latter was defi- cient in " operative performance.*''^ It is true that in certain verbs, both the aorists of which were retained in ordinary speech, a distinction was made between them* and that the first aorist was used in a transitive or causative sense, the second in an intransitive or neuter: such was the case for instance with earriaa and earrjv^ with eipvaa and ecpvv^ with €(j(ie<ia and ecxjirjVj, and others, a list of which is given by Buttmann, Vol. ii. pp. 48, foil. A similar distinction was supposed by Lowth to prevail in the use of the preterites from our own verb hang: which, " when active (he says), may perhaps be most properly used in the regular form; when neuter, in the irregular.'^' It might have been well if this practice, supposing it ever was the practice, had establisht itself. The Germans too, Buttmann remarks, draw the same line between verderbte and verdai^h^ between schwellte and schwolL This however is far from a general characteristic