Aorist: Encyclopedia - Aorist

Aorist

Aorist (from Greek αοριστος, indefinite) is a term used in certain Indo-European languages to refer to a particular grammatical tense and/or aspect. It is often distinguished from the imperfect and perfect, and 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 schizophrenic 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.

Aorist - Morphology

In Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, the aorist is marked by several morphological devices, but three stand out as most common.

Aorist - The s-aorist

The first is the s-aorist, so called because an 's' is inserted between the root and the personal ending. In Latin, for example, dico means "I say", while dixi (from dic-s-i) means "I said"; in Greek, ακουω akouō means "I hear", while ηκουσα ēkousa means "I heard." (Grammatical note: the first letter of ηκουσα 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.

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. In Latin, ablaut was a common marker of the aorist, for example: capiō "I take"; but cēpī "I took"; and Greek λειπω leipō "I leave", but ελιπον elipon "I left". In Greek, this is called the second aorist.

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 αγω agō "I lead", which has the aorist ηγαγον ēgagon "I led". (Grammatical note: the first letter of ηγαγον is an eta, and not an alpha, because of a Greek verbal augment that marks the past indicative tense.)

See also

• Grammatical aspect
• Grammatical tense
• imperfective aspect
• perfective aspect

Categories: 1911 Britannica | Grammatical aspects | Grammatical tenses

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