The Greek verbal system

This chapter has no endings to learn. It is the map, and we will be reading it for a long time yet — so a few minutes on it now saves a great deal of puzzlement later.

Here is the whole of it in one sentence: an English verb needs helpers to say what a Greek verb says in one word. We say we are loosing — three words. Greek says λύομεν. Everything below answers one question: what is packed into that one word?

Five things are, and these five names will come up constantly.

Naming all five is called parsing, and it is most of what reading Greek consists of. λύομεν is first person, plural, present, active, indicative — "we loose". Five facts in one word, and not a helping verb in sight.

What is aspect, and why does it come first?

This is the most important idea in the chapter, and the one most likely to have been taught to you wrongly.

We are used to tense meaning time. In Greek it mostly means something else: aspect, which is how the writer chose to present an action rather than when it happened. Most modern grammars count three.

An English speaker hears "he loosed" and thinks: past. A Greek reader meets ἔλυσεν and thinks: presented as one complete act. The two often line up. They are not the same claim, and where they come apart is where careful reading pays.

Two names for the same thing

One warning before you read anything else on Greek, because the labels move about. Black calls the three aspects imperfective, aoristic and perfective — so in his usage "perfective" means the perfect. Most modern grammars, and this course, use perfective for the aorist.

Neither is wrong. They are two conventions and you will meet both, so when you read Black, translate. Some grammarians also decline to give the perfect an aspect of its own; nothing here turns on it.

When does the tense tell us the time?

Only in the indicative. Everywhere else the tense is telling us about aspect and almost nothing about time.

Two forms show this most clearly, and both are worth meeting now. The infinitive is the to form — to loose. The participle is the -ing form used as a describing word — loosing, the one loosing. Neither carries a person, and between them they are about a third of the verb forms in the book.

Both have a tense, and in neither does that tense mean time. An aorist participle is not automatically past. τὸ ἀποθανεῖν in Philippians 1:21 is not "to have died", and chapter 22 comes back to it. The one exception is reported speech, where an infinitive's tense can carry time relative to the main verb.

What does mood tell us?

Mood is the manner in which a speaker presents the action — not what happened, but what kind of claim is being made about it.

The indicative states it as fact: he has mercy. Four out of five verbs that carry a person and a number are indicative, and the whole of chapters 3 to 16 stays inside it. The imperative commands: Lord, have mercy. The subjunctive presents the action as contingent, not yet settled: if he should have mercy. The optative, which wishes or wonders (may it never be!), is rare and fading by the Koine period — 68 occurrences in the whole New Testament.

Two things to carry away. Only the indicative fixes time. And the negative follows the mood rather than the meaning: οὐ with the indicative, μή with everything else. The next chapter takes that up, along with the exception worth knowing.

What does voice tell us?

The active presents the subject as doing the action: ἀκούω, I hear. The passive presents it as having the action done to it: I am heard. Where the doer is named, ὑπό usually marks who it was.

The middle has no English equivalent, and is worth meeting now rather than being ambushed by it in chapter 12. The subject acts with reference to itself — on itself, for itself, or in its own interest. It is not quite reflexive, and it is not passive.

Now the hard part, and it does not get easier: in most tenses the middle and the passive share their endings, so the form alone cannot tell us which is meant. Only the verb and the sentence can. Many verbs have middle forms and no active — traditionally called deponent, a label chapter 12 questions — like ἔρχομαι, I come.

How can we spot a past tense at a glance?

By two marks that travel together. Greek has two sets of personal endings. Primary endings go on the tenses whose indicative refers to present or future time: present, future, perfect. Secondary endings go on the past-time tenses: imperfect, aorist, pluperfect.

Those past tenses also take an augment — an ἐ fixed to the front of the verb.

This is worth more than it looks. Spotting an augment and a secondary ending tells us "past" before we have worked out the verb, the person, or even which word it is. Reading the shape before the word is what fluency in a language like this actually consists of.

What are principal parts?

A verb's stem is the part that carries its meaning, before any ending is added. Most verbs build every form they have out of one stem. Not all of them do, and the ones that do not are common.

So each verb has up to six principal parts — the building blocks every other form is made from: present, future, aorist active, perfect active, perfect middle/passive, aorist passive. For λύω they are λύω, λύσω, ἔλυσα, λέλυκα, λέλυμαι, ἐλύθην.

Take heart: the irregularity is concentrated rather than scattered. It lives in the principal parts of a few hundred verbs, and the commonest of those you will meet often enough to learn without trying. There is a drill here for exactly the forty-one that are worth the trouble.

The discipline

From here on, never say a form means something until you have parsed it. Not because parsing is the goal — reading is — but because the ending is where the meaning lives, and guessing from the stem is how confident mistranslations are made.

The endings are small. The payoff is the whole language.