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Lesson 7.2 · Infinitives and participles

The participle

The verb used as an adjective: “loosing”, “the one who looses”.

The last piece of the language, and the one that unlocks the most text. A participle is a verb wearing a noun's clothes: "loosing", "the one who looses", "having believed".

Take the r from the last lesson, keep the tense vowel, add a joining t, and then finish it with the noun endings from Part 2:

luloose adoes it rverb-as-word ōongoing tjoining letter omasculine sdoing it

luarōtos — "loosing", or "the one who is loosing", as the subject of its sentence. Long, but every letter is one you already know, read left to right.

It agrees like a describing word

Because it ends with noun endings, it agrees with whatever it describes — and that agreement tells you who is doing the "loosing":

luarōtosloosing — masculine, doing it
luarōtasloosing — feminine, doing it
luarōtonloosing — masculine, done to
luarōtoisloosing — masculine, plural
luirōtosbeing loosed — the i makes it passive

In real verses

tos pisteuarōtos eis auton
the one believing in him (John 3:16)

legarōtois
saying (Matthew 8:25) — plural, so: "they, saying…"

With the article in front, a participle simply becomes a person: tos pisteuarōtos, "the believing one", "whoever believes".

Infinitive & participle

formexample
infinitive: stem + aspect + voice + rluarō (to loose), luara (aorist), luirō (to be loosed)
participle: + r … + t + noun endingsluarōtos (loosing, masc nom), luirōton (being-loosed, ≈ λυθέντα)
This is the payoff of one noun table. Greek's participles are famous for being hard. Here they are two systems you already know, joined by a t — nothing new to learn at all.
In the Greek — why these are the hurdle

A Greek participle is a full verb and a full adjective at once, so it carries tense, voice, gender, number and case in a single fused ending — λύων, λύοντος, λύουσα, λυθείς, λελυκώς — and there are dozens of shapes. Greek also leans on them constantly, where English would start a new clause: "and having gone, they woke him, saying…" is one Greek sentence with three participles in it.

The word order and the clause structure here are the Greek's, so you are reading the same sentence shape — only the endings are predictable.

Practice

  1. What is agaparōtos?
  2. What is agaparōtas?
  3. What makes luirōtos passive?
Show the answers
  1. "Loving", or "the one who loves" — masculine, the subject. (It is the participle in 1 John 4:8.)
  2. The same thing about a feminine subject.
  3. The i straight after the stem, exactly as in Lesson 5.2.
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