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Ancient Greek verbs can be divided into two groups, the thematic (in which a thematic vowel /e/ or /o/ is added before the ending, e.g. λύ-ο-μεν (lú-o-men) "we free"), and the athematic (in which the endings are attached directly to the stem, e.g. ἐσ-μέν (es-mén) "we are". [20] Thematic verbs are much more numerous.
Ancient Greek makes frequent use of participles, which are verbal adjectives. Participles are found in all three voices (Active, Middle, and Passive) and in five different tenses (present, aorist, perfect, future, and future perfect).
In Latin, most verbs have four principal parts.For example, the verb for "to carry" is given as portō – portāre – portāvī – portātum, where portō is the first-person singular present active indicative ("I carry"), portāre is the present active infinitive ("to carry"), portāvī is the first-person singular perfect active indicative ("I carried"), and portātum is the neuter supine.
A common idiom in Ancient Greek is for the protasis of a conditional clause to be replaced by a relative clause. (For example, "whoever saw it would be amazed" = "if anyone saw it, they would be amazed.") Such sentences are known as "conditional relative clauses", and they follow the same grammar as ordinary conditionals. [77]
The optative mood (/ ˈ ɒ p t ə t ɪ v / or / ɒ p ˈ t eɪ t ɪ v /; [1] Ancient Greek [ἔγκλισις] εὐκτική, [énklisis] euktikḗ, "[inflection] for wishing", [2] Latin optātīvus [modus] "[mode] for wishing") [3] is a grammatical mood of the Ancient Greek verb, named for its use as a way to express wishes.
The subjunctive mood (Greek ὑποτακτική (hupotaktikḗ) "for arranging underneath", from ὑποτάσσω (hupotássō) "I arrange beneath") along with the indicative, optative, and imperative, is one of the four moods of the Ancient Greek verb. It can be used both in the meaning "should" (the jussive subjunctive) and in the meaning ...
Ancient Greek verbs had a pluperfect form (called ὑπερσυντέλικος, "more than completed"). An example is ἐτεθύκει, "had sacrificed" – compare the perfect τέθυκε, "has sacrificed". Modern Greek uses auxiliaries to form the pluperfect; examples are given in the table at the end of this article.
In Ancient Greek, for example, the perfect carried the meaning of a state resulting from a past action, but the PIE stative referred to the state alone. Likewise, the aorist, though having a tense-like meaning in Ancient Greek, had none in PIE. Perfective and stative verbs were effectively tenseless, or indifferent to time.