Notes On Koine Greek: Part 35

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1. Imperfect & Aorist Active Indicative: In the previous installation of these

notes, I reviewed the concept of aspect and briefly looked at the Neutral
Morpheme Rule. Here, I want to build on those ideas and discuss the Imperfect
and Aorist Active Indicative tenses. Though we’ve already noted that “kind” is
more important than “time” in Koine Greek, the fact remains that “time” is still
significant and must not be overlooked. To help us better understand the
Imperfect and Aorist Active Indicative, we will recall some of what we’ve already
done with the Present and Future Active Indicative paradigms.
2. Present, Future, Imperfect & Aorist Active Indicative: Drawing on the
work of David Alan Black, we shall use morphological comparison & contrast to
move forward. We will use luw as our source word. Note the differences and
shifts in the morphemes (*Note: Diacritical Marks are purposefully omitted here):

• Pres. Act. Ind. – lu|o|men

Lexical Neutral Person-Number

Morpheme Morpheme Suffix Morpheme

• Fut. Act. Ind. – lu|s|o|men

Lexical Future-Time Neutral Person-Number

Morpheme Morpheme Morpheme Suffix Morpheme

• Imperf. Act. Ind. – e|lu|o|men

*Note: that the “o” (neutral
morpheme) morphs to “sa”
Past-Time Lexical Neutral Person-Number (aoristic-aspect morpheme)
Morpheme Morpheme Morpheme Suffix Morpheme when going from the
Imperfect to the Aorist.
Thus, the Aor.-Aspect
• Aor. Act. Ind. – e|lu|sa|men Morpheme is just like the
Future-Time Morpheme with
Past-Time Lexical Aoristic-Aspect Person-Number an added “a”
Morpheme Morpheme Morpheme Suffix Morpheme

3. Tips: A) Prefixing epsilon (e) to a lexical morpheme makes the verb in the past
tense or past-time; B) It is helpful to refer to the morpheme by calling it what it
actually is, for example, the “past-time morpheme”, not just augment like some
grammars suggest; C) In terms of aspect, it is critical to remember that the
imperfective should generally be translated as showing progress (e.g. “I am
loosing” instead of “I loose”) so that when we move into different tenses where
the imperfective aspect is used, that process is more natural. E.g. the Imperfect
Active Indicative should be rendered “I was loosing”. This makes the translation
process a bit smoother and easier.