Aspect

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Greek has three aspects: progressive, aorist, and perfect. The progressive emphasizes the progress or duration of an action. The aorist emphasizes the action itself without regard for its progress or completion. The perfect emphasizes the lasting impact of an action or a thing’s state or condition.

Some Greek verb bases are by default progressive. This means that the absence of an aspect marker is what marks the verb as progressive. Other verbs use at least one explicit progressive aspect marker. These markers are:

¹ Verbs that use this marker, if they also use ablaut to mark aspect and voice, are zero-grade in the progressive and basic e-grade in the aorist (e.g. γίγνομαι, present progressive indicative, but ἐγενόμην, past aorist indicative).

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In most cases, one cannot predict which progressive aspect marker(s) a verb base will use. Thus, one must memorize the base’s first principal part in order to know how it will appear in the progressive.

Verb bases are marked as aorist either by adding /σ/ to the end of the base, thus creating the sigmatic aorist, or by not adding sigma, thus creating the asigmatic aorist. Bases that do not add /σ/ are by default aorist and must be memorized as such. Fortunately, the list of these bases is relatively short. Sigmatic aorists regularly use alpha formation. Asigmatic aorists are with few exceptions thematic or, less frequently, athematic. One must learn the third principal part of verb bases to know how the base appears in the aorist.

Sometimes the sigmatic aorist is called “the first aorist” or “the weak aorist” (because it needs help to mark the aorist) and the asigmatic aorist “the second aorist” or “the strong aorist” (because it is “strong enough” to mark aorist aspect on its own). This book uses “sigmatic” and “asigmatic” because these terms are descriptive, and by isolating the specific marker of the aorist they avoid presumptions about formation sometimes associated with the traditional terms.

The perfect aspect may be marked in several ways. The clearest marker is the reduplication of a base-initial consonant with an intervening ε if the base begins with a single consonant or a stop + Merlin consonant cluster. However, if the base begins with any other consonant cluster (including ῥ-, which is /hr/, and ζ-, ξ- or ψ-, which are /zd/, /ks/, and /ps/, respectively), the perfect aspect marker ἐ/ is used as a prefix. If the base begins with a vowel, L/ is used to mark perfect aspect. (Note that, here, the markers ἐ/ and L/ mark perfect aspect and must not be mistaken for past time markers.)

Other perfect aspect markers are full o-grade (active) and basic e-grade (middle/passive), occasional aspiration of base-final consonant, use of a /κ/ suffix in the active singular especially after bases ending in vowels, and the reduplication of the first syllable of certain verbs like ἀκοϝ/ (ἀκήκοα), ἐλυθ/ (ἐλήλυθα), ἐνεκ/ (ἐνήνοχα), and ὀπ/ (ὄπωπα). Perhaps the most notable feature of the perfect middle/passive is its athematic formation (e.g. ἦγμαι < L/ἀγ/μαι, ἧμμαι < L/ἁφ/μαι, ἐσκεύασμαι < ἐ/σκευαδ/μαι, and so forth).

Because there is a fair amount of variation in the formation of the perfect active in particular, one must memorize the fourth principal part in order to know what perfect aspect markers a base normally uses.

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Vocabulary for this lesson (see here for the full lexicon)

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