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Ancient Greek verbs have four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative), three voices (active, middle and passive), as well as three persons (first, second and third) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). In the indicative mood there are seven tenses: present, imperfect, future, aorist (the equivalent of past simple ...
One of the most notable features that Ancient Greek has inherited from Proto-Indo-European is its use of verb "tense" to express both tense proper (present, past, or future) and the aspect of the time (as ongoing, simply taking place, or completed with a lasting result). The aspectual relation is expressed by the tenses in all the moods, while ...
Greek verb morphology is structured around a basic 2-by-2 contrast of two aspects, imperfective and perfective, and two tenses, past and non-past (or present). The aspects are expressed by distinct verb stems, while the tenses are marked mainly by different sets of endings.
By contrast, in theoretical linguistics, tense refers to a form that specifies a point in time (past, present, or future), so in that sense the aorist is a tense-aspect combination. The literary Greek of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Attic Greek , was the standard school-room form of Greek for centuries.
The tense of the verb can be aorist (if it is an event) or present (if it describes a situation). The following three examples use the aorist optative: καὶ ὁ Παρθένιος ἄβατος· ἐφʼ ὃν ἔλθοιτε ἄν , εἰ τὸν Ἅλυν διαβαίητε .
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).
Ancient Greek verbs often alter the stem in the present (progressive) system with a variety of markers. These markers are best understood as markers of the continuous and progressive aspects, rather than of the present tense. For verbs with progressive markers, the present progressive system is not the best guide to the true stem, which is ...
The optative mood (/ ˈɒptətɪv / or / ɒpˈteɪtɪv /; [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 optative mood in Greek is ...