[B-Greek] Aorist M/P (or M and P) Finites and Participles

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Tue Mar 9 05:00:33 EST 2010


It may help to realize that Greek only has active and middle MESH in
the present
and perfect systems. So think of them as 'middle' not 'passives' or
even 'middle-
passives'. This is similar to Romance languages where a middle reflexive is
used for passives. Greeks, too, used the middle when they wanted to make
a passive sentence with a transitive verb.

As Carl pointed out with the aorist (and future), even where there are two
morphological sets [-SAMHN, -QHN], these are more frequently middle in
both sets.

and most verbs have a preferred "disposition" (DIAQESIS aka voice) in
a dialect,
which should be learned for each verb, so that EPOREYQHN is just the way
to say "I went".

However, on learning verbs, I would guess that more like 150-200 basic
and irregulars
are necessary for communicative Greek. Even 'regular' verbs -AN, -EIN, -OYN are
tricky and need separate learning because one must know the aorist
forms and whether
-HSAI, ASAI, ESAI, not to mention the DIAQESIS,

-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life



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