Appendix I. (29/30)
英語原文
The most natural view seems to be, that the primitive optative, before it came into the Greek language, was a weak form, like he may go and may he go, from which on one side came its potential and its future conditional use, and on the other side its use in exhortations and wishes. These uses would naturally all be established before there was any occation to express either an unreal condition or an unattained wish. The need of a form for present unreal conditions and present wishes would naturally come next, and the present optative was made to include these also, no practical diffculty being caused by having a single form for it would be as both present and future, none being felt in Homer and none being now felt in English. In this state the optative probably came into the Greek, before any appempt was made to extend its use to past unreal conditions. When a form was required for these, the optative may have been used at first, on the analogy of present unreal conditions ; but here the seriou difficulty of using ἀπόλοιτό κε for he would have perished when it was already familiar in the sense he would perish (hereafter) probably prevented the establishment of this usage. Before our evidence begins, the past tenses of the indicative were firmly established in past unreal conditions, while the optative was here a rare exception, even in apodosis, and was never used in protasis. But no attempt was yet made to dislodge the present optative from present unreal conditions or the corresponding wishes, although the use of ὤφελον or ὤφελλον in Homer shows that a past indicative in a present sense was not absolutely repugnant even to the early usage. But afterwards a new tendency prevailed, and the imperfect indicative took the place of the optative in present unreal conditions, still retaining its older use (with the aorist) in past conditions. The Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin appear to have developed their expressions of past unreal conditions independently. The Sanskrit, which seldom needed such a form, used its past future, as the Greek occasionally used ἔμελλον with the infinitive (see §248).
日本語解釈