Finite verb forms

Finite verb forms have five properties: tense, voice, mood, person and number. To properly identify a finite verb form, you must identify all five properties. Ancient Greek finite verb forms contain all of this information in the verb form itself. In English, we often need other words to convey some of this information, such as subject pronouns to convey the person and number, and auxiliary (or “helping”) verbs to express tense, mood, and voice.

Tense

The tense of a finite verb describes the time of the action and/or its aspect.

Over these two semesters of learning ancient Greek, we will consider six tenses, which are divided into “primary” and “secondary” tenses. The three “primary” tenses represent actions in the present or future; the three “secondary” tenses are all past tenses.

Primary tenses: Present, Future, Perfect
Secondary tenses: Imperfect, Aorist, Pluperfect

Multiple tenses for action in a particular “time” (such as the past) differ in aspect. Aspect emphasizes the type of action being represented, or how the action is being depicted. Aspects include simple, ongoing or continuous and completed. The tense of a finite verb can indicate both time and aspect, or, in some verb forms, aspect alone.

Voice

Voice expresses the relationship between the action of the verb and the subject. English has two voices: active, in which the subject is performing the action of the verb (“I love”), and passive, in which the subject is receiving the action of the verb (“I am loved”).

Ancient Greek has active and passive voices that operate the same way. In addition, it has a third voice, the middle. In the middle voice, the subject performs the action of the verb with a particular interest or reference between the subject and the action of the verb, such as reflexive (“I love myself”), reciprocal (“we love each other”), initiating the action to be performed by another (“I got my hair cut” or “I am having my house painted”) or with a particular self-interest (“I love for my own reasons, in my own interests”).

Take some time to think about how the middle voice imagines actions with nuances different from the active. How does English express those ideas, if it does? In some uses (and for some verbs in all uses), the middle forms will have a meaning that is best represented by an active verb form in English. But paying attention to the ideas that the middle form represents is important for understanding ancient Greek modes of expression.

For some verb tenses, the middle and the passive share the same form. If you are identifying the form alone, you should identify it as “middle or passive.” In a sentence, however, you will consider other syntactic structures within the clause or sentence to determine whether that particular use is middle or is passive, in order to understand the clause or sentence correctly.

Mood

The mood of a verb indicates the function of the expression and the nature of the action in the speaker’s conception. “Mood” and “mode” come from the same root in English: the “mood” of a verb is the “mode” in which the verb is operating.

Ancient Greek has four moods:

the indicative, used to express a statement or question of a factual nature (in the eyes of the speaker) in the past, present, or future.
the imperative, used to give a command
the subjunctive
the optative

The subjunctive and optative moods have many uses in subordinate clauses, and are also used to express potential or possible action.

Person

A verb’s person expresses the subject of the verb in relation to the “speaker” of the sentence.

The first person (I or we in English) subject includes the speaker.
The second person (you in English) subject is the addressee(s) of the speaker.
The third person (he, she, it, they in English) subject is a person or thing separate from the speaker and addressee.

Number

Number combines with person in describing the subject of verb. It indicates when the subject is singular or plural. In English, for example, first person singular is I while first person plural is we.

Ancient Greek also has an additional, less common number known as the dual, when the subject is two persons, animals, body parts (e.g., eyes, hands), or things acting together. We will not see finite verbs in the dual in our readings this year.