aorist

The factual accuracy of part of this article is disputed. The dispute is about "the aorist's grammatical role as an aspect rather than as a tense". Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.

Aorist (from Greek αοριστός, indefinite or unlimited) is a term used in certain Indo-European languages to refer to a particular grammatical tense and/or aspect. It is used to denote action in the past, but is distinguished from the imperfect and perfect; it is similar to the preterite in languages such as Spanish.

There is some confusion over whether the aorist is a tense or an aspect. This reflects the double nature of the aorist in Ancient Greek, the most well-known language with an aorist. In the indicative, the Ancient Greek aorist represents a combination of tense and aspect: past tense, perfective aspect. In other moods (subjunctive, optative and imperative), however, as well as in the infinitive and (largely) the participle, the aorist is purely aspectual, with no reference to any particular tense. Modern Greek has inherited the same system.

In Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the aorist was originally just an aspect, but by late PIE it had probably already developed into a combination of tense and aspect just as in Ancient Greek, since the same system is represented in Sanskrit.

Morphology

In Greek, and Sanskrit, the aorist is marked by several morphological devices, but three stand out as most common. Latin, however, does not have an aorist. People commonly confuse it with the perfect.

The s-aorist

The first is the s-aorist or sigmatic aorist, so called because an 's' is inserted between the root and the personal ending. In Greek, ακούω akoúō means "I hear", while ήκουσα ēkousa means "I heard." (Grammatical note: the first letter of ήκουσα is an eta, and not an alpha, because of a Greek verbal augment that marks the past indicative tense.) In Greek, this is called the first aorist, or the weak aorist.

Ablaut

The aorist's second marker is a change in vowel grade, a process known as ablaut. Indo-European made great use of ablaut to express semantic changes morphologically, in fact, English uses ablaut abundantly, creating such verb forms as: swim, swam, swum; come, came, come; and take, took, taken. English further uses ablaut in extended forms, such as: sit, seat, sat, set (etymologically, to set is to cause to sit); lie, lay, lain, laid, layer; and sing, sang, sung, song. And Greek λείπω leípō "I leave", but έλιπον élipon "I left". In Greek, this is called the second aorist or the strong aorist.

Reduplication

The third marker of the aorist is reduplication. While a reduplication is more commonly associated with the morphology of the perfect, there are sporadic verbs which use it in the aorist. The reduplicated aorist is more common in Sanskrit than in other Indo-European languages, but an example in Greek is the verb άγω ágō "I lead", which has the aorist ήγαγον ēgagon "I led," (Grammatical note: the first letter of ήγαγον is an eta, and not an alpha, because of a Greek verbal augment that marks the past indicative tense.)

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

See also

• Ancient Greek grammar: Dependence of moods and tenses
• Grammatical aspect
• Grammatical tense
• imperfective aspect
• perfective aspect

External links

• Greek tenses

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