Lesson 5.1 · Voice
The active voice
The subject does the action.
Every verb you have read so far has had an a sitting
just after the stem. Now it is time to say what it means.
That a says the subject is the one doing the
action: luatō, "he looses". This is called the
active, and it is the ordinary, everyday choice —
most verbs in the Bible have it.
The point of this box is that there are two other possibilities, and swapping the letter swaps who is affected:
| Letter | Means | Example |
|---|---|---|
a | the subject does it | luatō — he looses |
i | it is done to the subject | luitō — he is loosed |
e | the subject does it to itself | luetō |
The next two lessons take the other two. The grammar-book name for this box is voice.
luatō, luitō,
luetō — same stem, same person, same tense, three
different meanings.In the Greek — three voices, many endings
Greek has the same three voices, but marks them by swapping the entire ending set: λύει (active), λύεται (middle and passive together in the present), ἐλύθη (aorist passive, with its own -θη- marker). In several tenses the middle and passive are spelled identically and only context tells them apart — a real ambiguity that Lesson 9.4 comes back to.