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Lesson 4.5 · Verbs

The aorist

The plain past: it happened, taken as a single whole event.

A verb ending in -a is the plain past: it happened. Not "was happening" over a stretch of time — just happened, taken as one whole event. It is the tense that carries most of the storytelling in the Gospels:

dakruata tos Iēsus.
Jesus wept. (John 11:35)

The shortest verse in the Bible, and you can now read all of it: dakru·a·t·a — weep, he, past — and tos Iēsus, Jesus, doing it.

agapatahe loved
legatahe said
egeiralathey woke (him)
luamaI loosed

Houtōs gar agapata tos theos ton kosmon
For God so loved the world. (John 3:16)

“Aorist” is a Greek word meaning “unbounded” — it says nothing about how long the action took. English usually renders it with a simple past: loved, said, went.
In the Greek — the tense that changes the stem most

The aorist is where Greek verbs are least predictable. Regular verbs add -σα (ἔλυσα), but a large group forms it from a different stem entirely (λέγω → εἶπον, ὁράω → εἶδον, φέρω → ἤνεγκα), and these have to be memorised one at a time. It is the main reason Greek students learn principal parts.

All of that irregularity lives in the choice of stem here, which is made once per word — so legata is visibly the same word as legatō, where εἶπεν and λέγει are not.

Practice

  1. What is pisteuala?
  2. What is the difference between agapate and agapata?
  3. Read: legata tos Iēsus.
Show the answers
  1. "They believed." l they, a past.
  2. Both are past. -e presents it as going on ("he was loving"); -a presents it as a single event ("he loved"). Next lesson is about exactly this.
  3. "Jesus said."
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