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The grammar of Modern Greek, as spoken in present-day Greece and Cyprus, is essentially that of Demotic Greek, but it has also assimilated certain elements of Katharevousa, the archaic, learned variety of Greek imitating Classical Greek forms, which used to be the official language of Greece through much of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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]
Another use of the article in Ancient Greek is with an infinitive, adjective, adverb, or a participle to make a noun, for example, τὸ ἀδικεῖν (tò adikeîn) "wrong-doing, doing wrong"; τὸ καλόν (tò kalón) "the beautiful, beauty"; τὰ γενόμενα (tà genómena) "the events, the things that happened"; οἱ ...
In Ancient Greek grammar, the genitive absolute is a grammatical construction consisting of a participle and often a noun both in the genitive case, which is very similar to the ablative absolute in Latin.
The endings with -θη- (-thē-) and -η- (-ē-) were originally intransitive actives rather than passives [18] and sometimes have an intransitive meaning even in Classical Greek. For example, ἐσώθην (esṓthēn) (from σῴζω sōízō "I save") often means "I got back safely" rather than "I was saved":
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 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 is still used today in Modern Greek, whereas the optative has died out. The subjunctive can usually be recognised easily from the fact that it almost always has the letters ω (ō) or η (ē) in the ending, for example εἴπωμεν (eípōmen), γένηται (génētai). It exists in three tenses only: the present, the ...