Verb: Aorist passive

GrammarVerb – Aorist passive singular

The Greek verbal system normally lumps middle and passive into one category (hence the Luo medio-passive), but the Aorist indicative is different in that it marks middle and passive differently.

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MorphologyVerb – Aorist passive singular

• The Aorist psv endings begin with -θη, Greek’s marker for psv voice
• Be careful: The 1s ends with a ν, while the 3s ends without its characteristic moveable ν

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MorphologyVerb – Aorist passive plural

• The pl Aorist psv is formed by combining θη (see 17.1.4.1) with the pl person endings from the act Elusa form (see 14.1.3.1)
• Aorist -βαίνω verbs (e.g. ἀναβαίνω) and γινώσκω have the same person endings as the Aorist psv without the θη and attached to the stems βη and γνω (these are also called athematic 2nd Aorist verbs; see 13.1.3)
• Aorist of γινώσκω = ἔγνων, ἔγνως, ἔγνω, etc.

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SyntaxVerb – Passive (1 – Subject affected)

While we have said that voice is a syntactic category and not a semantic one, the passive voice does still correlate with certain meanings. Objects in active sentences are often affected by the event of the verb in some way, so subjects in passive sentences (which are the original objects in the active sentence) are also normally affected by the event of the verb. This is why the passive voice is called “passive” – the subject is passive in the sentence. While the subject is not always truly passive, it is indeed almost always affected in some way.

The active verb λύω normally takes a subject that is actively untying something, and the object is the thing that is untied. In the passive, the thing untied (that is, the thing affected) becomes the grammatical subject, the ‘bond of his tongue’ in the below example:

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SemanticsVerb – Passive (2 – Change of state)

When we introduced the passive, we said that the subject is affected by the action of the verb in some way, but this is a very broad criterion. One specific way the subject could be affected is by entering a new state. The contrast between the two verbs of sleeping καθεύδω and ἐκοιμήθην exemplify this. While the former refers to the state of being asleep, the latter normally refers to falling asleep, and it is commonly used as a euphemism for dying:

fromLesson 18.1