In thinking about the present volume by author Ezra la Roi, I am reminded of a part of the Jewish Passover Haggadah—the text of the “telling” of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. In the Haggadah there is a song that recounts the escape from Egypt in a step-by-step fashion, wherein each step in the progression had God’s help. Each step ends with the refrain “Dayenu”, a Hebrew word meaning ‘it would have been enough’, indicating that that step alone would have sufficed to help the Jews immensely. Ultimately, the many steps are summed up by alluding to God’s having done all of those steps on behalf of the Jews.
I mention this because in this fascinating work, la Roi, without any divine intervention but with considerable inspiration, gives us a detailed overview of a pragmatically complex and nuanced set of constructions—counterfactuals—providing both a synchronic analysis and a discussion of the diachrony involved, not just for Ancient Greek but for Post-Classical Greek, and Medieval Greek as well as Modern Greek. I am thus led to think that had he just focused on a synchronic account, or just a diachronic account, for just Epic Greek (Homer, especially) or just Classical Greek, or just Medieval Greek and so on, it would have been sufficient. But he did all of that, and more, producing work that covers the whole span of the relevant1 recorded history of Greek from Homeric Greek up to Modern Greek of the present-day. And at the same time, he offers an insightful review of the relevant literature on counterfactuals and provides his own analytic framework for understanding them and understanding their diachrony.
La Roi starts with a careful periodization of Greek, going well beyond the usual division into Ancient, Post-Classical, Medieval, and Modern, and this finer granularity provides a basis for a detailed and comprehensive coverage of the whole of the attestation of counterfactuality in Greek. He develops a “life cycle” for counterfactuals and illustrates its applicability in each phase of the language that he examines. In this way, he gives the reader much to chew on and ponder in terms of both synchrony and diachrony.
As a work that is both theoretical, in that it provides an explicit analysis for counterfactuals, and highly empirical, in that it is richly illustrated with example sentences from each of the chronological periods identified, this study is tailor-made for the Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory series. It is a great pleasure for me to be able to add such fine and thought-provoking research to the roster of EALT volumes.
Brian D. Joseph
EALT Series Managing Editor
Columbus, Ohio USA
20 June 2025
I say “relevant” here to excuse the fact that la Roi does not discuss Mycenaean Greek, a move which is understandable inasmuch as there is simply no pertinent data from that earliest documentation of the language.