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Lesson 4.4 · Verbs

The imperfect

Past action seen as going on, not as finished.

Change the last letter to -e and the action moves into the past — and stays ongoing there. It is English's "was doing", "used to do", "kept doing":

NowWas going on
agapatō he lovesagapate he was loving
luamō I looseluame I was loosing
atō he isate he was

That last one is the single most useful word in this lesson, and it opens the most famous sentence in the New Testament:

En archa ate tos logos
In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1)

Read it piece by piece: en "in", archa "beginning" in its to/for/in form, ate "was", tos logos "the Word" doing the being. You have now read a clause of the Bible without help.

In the Greek — the augment

Greek marks this tense by adding a syllable to the front of the verb — the augment: λύει "he looses" becomes ἔλυε "he was loosing", and ἀγαπᾷ becomes ἠγάπα. It is one of the reasons a Greek word can be hard to look up: the front of the word, where you would start searching, is not the word.

Biblang never puts anything in front of the stem. The same fact is marked at the end instead, so the front of every word is always the word itself.

Practice

  1. What is agapale?
  2. What is ane?
  3. Which is now and which is past: pisteuamō, pisteuame?
Show the answers
  1. "They were loving" — l is "they", e is ongoing past.
  2. "We were." The verb "to be" with no stem at all; Lesson 4.9 explains why.
  3. pisteuamō is "I believe" (now); pisteuame is "I was believing".
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