Voice

---

In most cases, it is the personal marker that marks a verb as active or middle/passive. Usually the context of a sentence makes clear whether a verb using middle/passive personal markers is middle or passive (it cannot be both).

Some verbs appear only in the middle (or passive) morphologically but have active meanings. They are called deponent. Sometimes all forms of the verb are deponent (e.g. βούλομαι). Other times, only some forms are deponent (e.g. ἐγενόμην, past aorist deponent, but γέγονα, present perfect active). It is incorrect to identify a deponent as middle (or passive). Unlike deponent verbs, verbs in the middle have a special meaning (e.g. “I wash myself”) and can also be active (e.g. “I wash the dog”). The only way to know that a verb is deponent is by learning principal parts.

Only the aorist and future have an explicit passive marker that distinguishes passive from middle. In the aorist, this is /η/, before which θ often appears. It is added directly to the base. The aorist passive indicative uses default past time athematic personal markers otherwise used for the active (/ν, /ς, /ø, /μεν, /τε, /σαν).

The aorist passive marker /η/ (or /θη/) marks both aspect (aorist) and voice (passive). This renders the sigmatic aorist and asigmatic aorist indistinct, as /η/ (or /θη/) replaces /σ/. However, occasionally σ appears before /θη/ when it seems like it should not. This is due to the Double Dental Rule (e.g. ἐπείσθην < ἐ/πιθ/θη/ν), a base that originally ended in -σ/ but whose base-final σ is not seen in other instances (e.g. τελέω but ἐτελέσθην < ἐ/τελεσ/θη/ν), or “spurious sigma” added by analogy (e.g. ἐγνώσθην < ἐ/γνο/θη/ν).  

The future also uses /η/, always with a preceding θ, and combines this marker with the /σ/ future marker to produce the future passive marker /θησ/. This marker is added directly to the base, replacing /σ/ or /ε/ used in the active and middle, and is followed by thematic middle personal markers.

Forms of the perfect may be built periphrastically. When they do so, they use the appropriate voice (and gender and number) of the perfect participle and the appropriate time and mood of the verb “be” (future indicative or optative for the future perfect, present progressive indicative, subjunctive, or optative for the present perfect, and past progressive indicative for the past perfect). This happens especially when, due to the various markers needed to build the form, the product is incomprehensible or looks misleading (as in the case, e.g., of the 3rd person plural ἐσκευάδαται < ἐ/σκευαδ/Ṇται, which looks deceptively singular).

---

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