Attic Greek Infinitives

Ancient greek verbs have four moods indicative imperative subjunctive and optative three voices active middle and passive as well as three persons first second and third and three numbers singular dual and plural.

Attic greek infinitives.

The aorist tense always conveys a single discreet action i e. As a result mastering greek participles is essential to reading almost any paragraph of ancient greek. Epic greek also has the infinitive forms ἐλθέμεν elthémen and ἐλθέμεναι elthémenai. Mastronarde s book introduction to attic greek.

It is unfortunate that so many students of the new testament have no acquaintance with classical greek but it would be still more unfortunate if such. The situation is undoubtedly to be regretted but its existence should not be ignored. This is the most common tense for referring to. Another complication of greek grammar is that different greek authors wrote in different dialects all of which have slightly different grammatical forms see ancient greek dialects.

Ancient greek grammar is morphologically complex and preserves several features of proto indo european morphology. This table gives attic inflectional endings. The ancient greek infinitive is a non finite verb form sometimes called a verb mood with no endings for person or number but it is unlike in modern english inflected for tense and voice for a general introduction in the grammatical formation and the morphology of the ancient greek infinitive see here and for further information see these tables. The uses of the infinitive.

For conjugation in dialects other than attic see appendix ancient greek dialectal conjugation. Present imperfect future aorist the equivalent of past simple perfect pluperfect and future perfect. Greek verbs and infinitives can express all three aspects but the most common are. An ancient grammarian once wrote that the greeks were φιλομέτοχοι participle loving.

This happens quite often in patristic writings and it is good to keep this quote handy from donald j. The infinitive takes on a different use if an article is found in front of it. An experiment with perseus new vocabulary tool. It is used mainly to express acts.

This is no exaggeration. A list of words that covers 90 of tokens in a collection of attic prose texts from the perseus corpus. List of principal parts by unit through unit 19 for mastronarde s introduction to attic greek first three only i e present future aorist. Many of the uses of the infinitive are identical in greek and english.

τὸ ἄρχειν πόνον φέρει. Use the greek testament are unable to approach the subject through a study of classical attic prose. Nouns adjectives pronouns articles numerals and especially verbs are all highly inflected. συνεβούλευον τοῖς στρατιώταις μὴ ταῦτα ποιῆσαι i advised.

κῦρος κελεύει τὸν στρατηγὸν ἡγεῖσθαι cyrus commands the general to lead. Nearly a third of greek verbal forms are participles. While both the imperfect and aorist tenses refer to past actions and so are past tenses they differ in aspect.