🗣️ The verb: the system

The Greek verb is the richest part of the language. A finite form shows:

• person and number (with a dual);
• voice (active, middle, passive);
• mood (indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative);
• tense, which in Greek is two things at once: the time of the action, in the indicative only, and its aspect, in every mood.

Beside the finite forms stand the infinitives and participles of each tense and voice (chapter 10). This chapter gives the system as a whole:

• the categories;
• the tense stems and how they are built (augment, reduplication, the suffixes);
• the endings;
• the thematic verb λύω as the model;
• the principal parts by which a verb is learnt.

The contract verbs are in chapter 8, the athematic (-μι) verbs and the irregular ones in chapter 9.

Contents

1. The categories
2. Aspect and time
3. The tense systems and their stems
4. The augment
5. Reduplication
6. The endings
7. The model: λύω
8. Voice: active, middle, passive
9. The principal parts
10. How the treebanks annotate the verb
11. How Mova handles it
12. Sources

1. The categories

The finite verb has its subject in its ending, and a pronoun subject is left out unless stressed (chapter 6, §1) (smyth-1920 §§355–357).

2. Aspect and time

Every Greek verb form shows the stage of the action, its aspect (smyth-1920 §§1850–1852):

• imperfective (the present stem): the action as going on, repeated or attempted: λύω "I am loosing", ἔλυον "I was loosing, I kept loosing";
• perfective (the aorist stem): the action as a whole, a simple event, without regard to its duration: ἔλυσα "I loosed";
• stative (the perfect stem): the state that results from a completed action: λέλυκα "I have loosed (and it stays loosed)"; οἶδα "I know" (originally "I have seen").

Time is shown only in the indicative: the augment marks the past (§4), the future has its own stem. In the other moods and the infinitive, present and aorist differ in aspect only: λῦσαι "to loose (once)" against λύειν "to be loosing, to loose (as a process)". The difference is lost in English, which has a past tense but no perfective infinitive.

The aorist indicative is the narrative tense ("he did"), the imperfect the tense of background and repeated action ("he was doing, used to do"), and the perfect the tense of present result. In the narrative of the Septuagint (PTNK training set, Genesis and Ruth, UD 2.18, counted 2026-10-22), the aorist is 1,264 of the 1,942 indicatives with a tense, the imperfect 150 and the perfect 61.

3. The tense systems and their stems

The forms of a verb are built on up to six stems, the tense systems (smyth-1920 §§383–462):

The second aorist is built on a bare stem with the thematic vowel, often a different grade of the root from the present: λείπω "leave", aorist ἔλιπον; βάλλω "throw", ἔβαλον; λαμβάνω "take", ἔλαβον. The present stem often adds a suffix to the root (λαμβ-άν-ω, βάλλω < *βαλ-ι̯ω, γι-γνώ-σκω), and the aorist shows the root without it (chapter 1).

4. The augment

The augment marks the past in the indicative of the imperfect, the aorist and the pluperfect (smyth-1920 §§428–461):

• syllabic: ε- before a consonant: λύω → ἔλυον, ἔλυσα;
• temporal: before a vowel, the vowel is lengthened: ἄγω → ἦγον, ἐλπίζω → ἤλπιζον, οἰκέω → ᾤκουν;
• in compound verbs it stands between the prefix and the verb: ἀπο-βάλλω → ἀπ-έ-βαλον, προσ-βάλλω → προσ-έ-βαλλον; a prefix ending in a vowel loses it (ἀπο- → ἀπ-), and ἐκ becomes ἐξ before it (ἐξ-έ-βαλον).

Homer and the poets may leave the augment out. The augment is the only sign that tells an aorist indicative from an aorist subjunctive or infinitive with the same stem: ἔλυσα against λῦσαι.

5. Reduplication

The perfect system repeats the first consonant of the stem with ε (smyth-1920 §§439–448):

• λύω → λέλυκα, παιδεύω → πεπαίδευκα, γράφω → γέγραφα;
• an aspirate is repeated as its plain stop: φιλέω → πεφίληκα, θύω → τέθυκα;
• before two consonants, a double consonant or ῥ, the reduplication is only ε-: στέλλω → ἔσταλκα, ζητέω → ἐζήτηκα, ῥίπτω → ἔρριφα;
• before a vowel it is the temporal augment: ἄγω → ἦχα (and the Attic reduplication ἀκήκοα, ἐλήλυθα).

Reduplication is kept in every mood of the perfect, so a reduplicated form is a perfect wherever it stands. The present stems of some -μι verbs have a reduplication with ι (δί-δωμι, τί-θημι, ἵ-στημι) (chapter 9).

6. The endings

Primary endings stand in the present, the future and the perfect (the non-past tenses) and in the subjunctive. Secondary endings stand in the augmented tenses and in the optative (smyth-1920 §§462–467).

The subjunctive lengthens the thematic vowel (λύωμεν, λύητε); the optative has the mood sign ι or ιη (λύοιμι, λύοιμεν; λυθείην).

7. The model: λύω

The thematic verb λύω "loose, release" (smyth-1920 §383), in its indicative:

The other moods of the present and the aorist:

The middle: λύομαι, ἐλυόμην, λύσομαι, ἐλυσάμην, λέλυμαι. The aorist passive: ἐλύθην, future passive λυθήσομαι.

Note the final ν "movable" (ἔλυσε / ἔλυσεν), added before a vowel and at the end of a sentence, and in the Koine almost everywhere. A tokenizer and a lexicon must take both forms as one.

8. Voice: active, middle, passive

The middle shows that the subject acts on itself or for itself, or takes part in the action with special interest (smyth-1920 §§1713–1734):

• direct reflexive: λούομαι "I wash (myself)";
• indirect, for oneself: λύομαι τὸν υἱόν "I ransom my son" (loose him for myself), against λύω "I release";
• with a change of meaning: ἄρχω "I rule", ἄρχομαι "I begin"; πείθω "I persuade", πείθομαι "I obey"; παύω "I stop (someone)", παύομαι "I stop (myself), cease".

The passive has its own forms only in the aorist (ἐλύθην) and the future (λυθήσομαι) (smyth-1920 §§1735–1758). In the present, imperfect and perfect the middle forms serve as passive too: λύομαι is "I loose for myself" or "I am being loosed". The agent of a passive is ὑπό + genitive: ὑπὸ τῶν πολεμίων "by the enemy" (smyth-1920 §1698).

Deponent verbs have no active forms but an active meaning: βούλομαι "I want", ἔρχομαι "I come", γίγνομαι "I become". They are middle deponents (aorist middle: ἐγενόμην) or passive deponents (aorist passive: ἐβουλήθην).

Several verbs form the future in the middle even when active in meaning: ἀκούω, future ἀκούσομαι; λαμβάνω, λήψομαι; εἰμί, ἔσομαι.

9. The principal parts

A Greek verb is learnt by its six principal parts, one for each tense system: the first person singular of the present, future, aorist active, perfect active, perfect middle, aorist passive (smyth-1920 §§368–369):

Some of the commonest verbs join several roots (suppletion): ὁράω, ὄψομαι, εἶδον "see" from three roots; φέρω, οἴσω, ἤνεγκα "carry"; λέγω, ἐρῶ, εἶπον "say". A lemmatizer that does not know them reads εἶδον and ὁράω as two verbs.

10. How the treebanks annotate the verb

The UD Ancient Greek treebanks mark tense and aspect in two features, and their combinations stand for the Greek tenses. In PTNK (UD 2.18, counted 2026-10-22):

The aorist is Aspect=Perf (perfective), and the Greek perfect is Aspect=Perf with Tense=Pres: the UD name "perfective" and the Greek tense name "perfect" are not the same thing. The voice is Act, Mid, Pass or the set Mid,Pass (106 finite forms) where the form cannot tell. The mood sets Ind,Sub (27) keep the ambiguity of forms like λύω (present indicative or subjunctive).

11. How Mova handles it

Greek goes through Mova's English parser after en xpos-fill (PTNK dev LAS 74.41 with its own tags, 78.29 with gold tags; 2026-10-22). The tag set it maps to has the English verb tags (base, past, present third person, participles), so the Greek tense, aspect, mood and voice are not in the tags the parser sees, only in the FEATS. What a Greek frames reader needs from this chapter, in order:

1. Tense from the two features (§10): the aorist as a past event, the imperfect as a past background or repeated event, the perfect as a present state. The English frames reader already marks tense and aspect (tam); the Greek values map onto it.
2. Voice: the agent of a passive in ὑπό + genitive, and the middle read as reflexive or as the subject's own interest. A Mid,Pass form needs the context (an ὑπό phrase makes it passive).
3. The augment and reduplication for unknown words: a lemmatizer that strips ε- in the indicative and the reduplication in the perfect finds the stem of a verb it has never seen.
4. The suppletive verbs of §9 joined under one lemma, so that εἶδον and ὁράω are one event "see".
5. Mood: the subjunctive and optative read as not asserted (chapter 14).

12. Sources

• Smyth, H. W. 1920 (smyth-1920): §§355–467 (the forms), §§1698–1734 (the voices), §§1850–1965 (the tenses), paraphrased from the Perseus text (CC BY-SA).
• Goodwin, W. W. 1892 (goodwin-1892): the verb, public domain; Goodwin, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (1890; goodwin-1890), public domain.
• UD Ancient Greek PTNK (CC BY-SA 4.0): counts and examples.

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