🗣️ The moods and the complex sentence

Greek has four moods and a particle, ἄν, that changes what they mean. The subjunctive looks to the future and to what is willed or expected. The optative is the mood of the remote: of wishes, of the merely possible, and, after a past verb, of reported speech. The optative is the first thing to go: it is common in Herodotus and Plato and almost gone in the New Testament. Reported statements are made with the accusative and infinitive, with a participle, or with ὅτι and a finite verb. The late language moves from the first to the last, as Latin moved from the accusative with the infinitive to quod. This chapter gives:

• the moods in main clauses;
• ἄν;
• purpose, result, cause, time and condition;
• indirect discourse;
• the change from classical to Koine, with counts.

Contents

1. The moods in main clauses
2. The particle ἄν
3. Purpose and object clauses: ἵνα, ὅπως, ὡς, μή
4. Result: ὥστε
5. Causal and temporal clauses
6. Conditional sentences
7. Relative clauses with a conditional sense
8. Indirect discourse
9. From classical to Koine: the optative and ὅτι
10. How Mova handles it
11. Sources

1. The moods in main clauses

(smyth-1920 §§1759–1849)

The negative is οὐ with the indicative and the potential optative, μή with the subjunctive, the wish optative and the imperative (chapter 12, §4).

2. The particle ἄν

ἄν has no translation of its own. It makes a statement contingent: on a condition, on circumstances, on an occasion (smyth-1920 §§1761–1798):

• with the past indicative, the unreal: ἔγραψεν ἄν "he would have written" (but did not);
• with the optative, the potential: γράφοι ἄν "he might write, he would write";
• with the subjunctive in subordinate clauses, the general or future condition: ἐὰν (= εἰ ἄν) γράφῃ "if he writes", ὅταν (= ὅτε ἄν) ἔλθῃ "whenever he comes", ὃς ἂν ἔλθῃ "whoever comes";
• with the infinitive and participle, the same values in indirect discourse.

ἄν is a postpositive word (chapter 13, §6) and often stands early in the clause, far from its verb, or is repeated.

3. Purpose and object clauses: ἵνα, ὅπως, ὡς, μή

Purpose is ἵνα, ὅπως, ὡς "in order that" (negative ἵνα μή, or μή alone) with the subjunctive, or after a past verb the optative (smyth-1920 §§2193–2206):

ἔρχομαι ἵνα ἴδω "I come to see"; ἦλθεν ἵνα ἴδοι "he came to see"

Greek also expresses purpose by the future participle (chapter 10, §5), by τοῦ + infinitive and by a relative clause with the future indicative.

Object clauses after verbs of effort (ἐπιμελοῦμαι, σκοπῶ, πράττω): ὅπως + future indicative: ἐπιμελεῖται ὅπως καλῶς ἕξει "he takes care that it shall be well" (smyth-1920 §§2207–2220).

Verbs of fearing: μή + subjunctive (optative after a past verb) for what is feared; μὴ οὐ for what is feared not to happen: φοβοῦμαι μὴ ἔλθῃ "I fear that he may come" (smyth-1920 §§2221–2233). This μή is the Latin nē of fear (la chapter 10, §4).

4. Result: ὥστε

ὥστε "so that, so as" (smyth-1920 §§2249–2278):

• with the infinitive, the natural or possible result: οὕτως ἀνόητος ἦν ὥστε τοῦτο πιστεύειν "he was foolish enough to believe it";
• with a finite verb, the actual result as a fact: οὕτως ἀνόητος ἦν ὥστε τοῦτο ἐπίστευσεν "he was so foolish that he believed it".

5. Causal and temporal clauses

Cause: ὅτι, διότι, ἐπεί, ἐπειδή, ὡς "because, since" with the indicative (the optative after a past verb for a reported reason) (smyth-1920 §§2240–2248).

Time (smyth-1920 §§2383–2461):

• ὅτε, ἡνίκα "when"; ἐπεί, ἐπειδή "after, when"; ἕως, μέχρι "while, until"; πρίν "before, until";
• with the indicative for a definite past or present time: ἐπεὶ ἦλθεν "when he came";
• with ἄν + subjunctive for an indefinite future or general present: ἐπειδὰν ἔλθῃ "when(ever) he comes";
• with the optative (no ἄν) for repeated action in the past: ἐπεὶ ἔλθοι "whenever he came";
• πρίν takes the infinitive after an affirmative main clause ("before"), a finite verb after a negative one ("until").

6. Conditional sentences

(smyth-1920 §§2280–2368)

The negative of the protasis is μή, of the apodosis οὐ. The Latin system (la chapter 10, §8) has the same three main types; Greek has the general conditions as well.

7. Relative clauses with a conditional sense

A relative clause with an indefinite antecedent follows the conditional system: ὃς ἂν ἔλθῃ "whoever comes" = ἐάν τις ἔλθῃ; ὅστις ἔλθοι "whoever came (each time)" (smyth-1920 §§2553–2573). The negative is μή. These are the general relative clauses of laws and rules: ὃς ἂν κλέψῃ … "whoever steals …".

8. Indirect discourse

A statement is reported in three ways (smyth-1920 §§2574–2635):

After a past verb, the verb of a ὅτι clause may keep its mood and tense or change to the optative of the same tense: εἶπεν ὅτι ὁ ἀνὴρ ἔλθοι "he said that the man had come". The infinitive and participle keep the tense of the direct statement: an aorist infinitive in indirect discourse means a past event, not perfective aspect alone (chapter 10, §2).

Indirect questions keep the interrogative or take the ὁ- forms of the correlatives (ὅστις, ὅπου, ὅπως: chapter 6, §8), with the same moods as ὅτι clauses.

9. From classical to Koine: the optative and ὅτι

Two changes mark the move from classical to Koine Greek: the loss of the optative, and the spread of ὅτι and ἵνα clauses at the expense of the infinitive. On our data (UD 2.18 training sets, counted 2026-10-22):

The pattern of the Latin of the same centuries:

• in Herodotus the accusative with the infinitive outnumbers ὅτι clauses eight to one, and the optative is as common as the subjunctive;
• in the New Testament ὅτι clauses outnumber the infinitive two to one, the optative has almost gone, and ἵνα with the subjunctive spreads to every kind of complement (θέλω ἵνα "I want that …"), the ancestor of the Modern Greek να;
• the Vulgate turned in the same way, from the accusative with the infinitive to quod and quia (la chapter 10, §11).

The Septuagint keeps some optatives (wishes and blessings: γένοιτο, δῴη) and uses ὅτι for the Hebrew kî "that, because".

10. How Mova handles it

In the UD trees.

• A subordinate clause is advcl, ccomp or acl:relcl, with its conjunction as mark.
• The mood is Mood=Sub, Mood=Opt in the FEATS.
• ἄν is ADV or PART attached as advmod to its verb, which the annotators find even when ἄν stands far away.
• The accusative subject of an infinitive is an nsubj with Case=Acc.

In Mova. A Greek frames reader needs, in order:

1. Mood and ἄν together (§2): ἄν with a past indicative is unreal, with an optative potential, with a subjunctive general or future. The English reader's irrealis and cond marks hold all three, and the table of §6 maps the types onto them exactly.
2. The reported content, whatever its form, as a reported proposition with its speaker: ὅτι + finite verb, the accusative and infinitive, the participle after verbs of perceiving. The English reader does the same with that clauses.
3. The tense of an infinitive in indirect discourse read as time, not aspect (§8).
4. The general relative and conditional clauses (§7) read as rules: "whoever does X, Y", the form of law and of maxims, and a frame the world of a text can hold as a rule rather than an event.

The counts of §9 make the same stylometric signal as the word order of chapter 13, §5: the optative and the infinitive against ὅτι tell classical from Koine without any model.

11. Sources

• Smyth, H. W. 1920 (smyth-1920): §§1759–1849 (the moods, ἄν), §§2162–2687 (the compound and complex sentence), paraphrased from the Perseus text (CC BY-SA).
• Goodwin, W. W. 1890, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (goodwin-1890), public domain.
• Burton, E. D. 1898, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses in New Testament Greek (burton-1898), public domain: the Koine side.
• UD Ancient Greek PTNK (CC BY-SA 4.0): counts; UD Ancient Greek PROIEL (CC BY-NC-SA): counts only.

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