A look at some (alleged) morpho-syntactic isoglosses between Greek and Anatolian: the modal particle in epic Greek

In their recent discussion of the (alleged) Graeco-Anatolian Sprachbund Domenica Romagno listed three and Michele Bianconi four possible morpho-syntactic isoglosses between Anatolian and Greek (Romagno 2015: 436-440, Bianconi 2015: 149-160).

In this extensive article I address one of them:

the use of a modal particle (MP henceforth) to indicate potential, futurative and counterfactual meaning (in the terminology of Classical Philology the term "irrealis" is used), in Greek this is ἄν and in Hittite man.

By focusing on the Homeric evidence I will show that the assumption of a Sprachbund is not supported by the evidence. For my analysis I focus on epic Greek, and use Iliad 16 as basis, and when that book does not have sufficient instances, a corpus of 5267 verses from the Iliad (books 1, 5, 9, 11, 16, 22, 24). After pointing out some general problems in equalling the Hittite and Greek "modal particles" (§2), I will show that the MP had deictic and emphatic value in epic Greek and was used predominantly in speeches, and did not convey modal meaning (§3), that a sharp distinction between possibility, remote possibility and unreality cannot be made in epic Greek, that the optative was the original mood in the counterfactual and potential constructions, that it was the mood that communicated the notion of (remote) possibility and contrafactitivity and that the use of the indicative mood was an inner-Greek innovation that had not yet been completed at the time of epic Greek (§4)