Part thirty-two of a tour through Greek inflectional morphology to help get students thinking more systematically about the word forms they see (and maybe teach a bit of general linguistics along the way).
We’ll now use the disambiguation we did in the previous post to produce SBLGNT counts for the imperfect actives like we have for the presents before. I’ve included all the lemmas if the list is short enough (and marked the hapakes with an asterisk).
| class | # lemmas | # tokens | # hapakes | lemmas (* = hapax) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IA-1 | 150 | 540 | 87 | |
| IA-2 | 68 | 239 | 35 | |
| IA-3 | 7 | 8 | 6 | δολιόω* πληρόω* ἀξιόω* δηλόω* (and thematic forms of δίδωμι ἀποδίδωμι* παραδίδωμι* ) |
| IA-4 | 9 | 60 | 1 | |
| IA-5 | 1 | 2 | - | ζάω |
| IA-6a | - | - | - | |
| IA-7 | 3 | 4 | 2 | τίθημι προστίθημι* ἐπιτίθημι* |
| IA-8 | 4 | 16 | 1 | δίδωμι ἐπιδίδωμι* παραδίδωμι (and -σαν form of ἔχω) |
| IA-9 | 1 | 43 | - | φημί |
| IA-10 | 1 | 435 | - | εἰμί |
| IA-10-COMP | 2 | 3 | 1 | σύνειμι* πάρειμι |
| IA-11-COMP | 3 | 4 | 2 | ἄπειμι* ἔξειμι* εἴσειμι |
And the counts for each paradigm cell for each class:
| IA-1 | IA-2 | IA-3 | IA-4 | IA-5 | IA-6a | IA-7 | IA-8 | IA-9 | IA-10 | IA-10-COMP | IA-11-COMP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1SG | 18 | 7 | - | - | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| 2SG | 3 | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 8 | - | - |
| 3SG | 255 | 127 | 3 | 29 | - | - | 2 | 12 | 43 | 314 | - | 2 |
| 1PL | 12 | 4 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 8 | - | - |
| 2PL | 8 | 3 | - | 2 | 1 | - | - | - | - | 10 | - | - |
| 3PL | 244 | 97 | 4+1 | 29 | - | - | 2 | 4 | - | 95 | 3 | 2 |
| 540 | 239 | 8 | 60 | 2 | - | 4 | 16 | 43 | 435 | 3 | 4 |
One of the things that’s obvious about these numbers is the importance of the 3SG and 3PL forms. In every class other than IA-5 (ζάω) those two person-numbers dominate (and there are only two instances of ζάω anyway). Of the 11 inflection classes with forms in the SBLGNT, 7 of them ONLY have forms in either 3SG or 3PL or both. Notice that IA-9 appears only in the 3SG (i.e. ἔφη). Notice also that, despite some showing in the 2SG, 1PL, and 2PL the copula does not appear at all in the imperfect active 1SG in the SBLGNT.
Just as a little experiment, what if we showed the imperfect active indicative paradigms with only what is found in the SBLGNT text and showed complete forms (not just the distinguisher pattern) in any case where a form made up 25% or more of the instances of that cell? The result would be the following:
| IA-1 | IA-2 | IA-3 | IA-4 | IA-5 | IA-6a | IA-7 | IA-8 | IA-9 | IA-10 | IA-10-COMP | IA-11-COMP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1SG | Xον | Xουν | - | - | ἔζων | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| 2SG | εἶχες, ἐζώννυες, ἤθελες | περιεπάτεις | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ἦς, ἦσθα | - | - |
| 3SG | ἔλεγε(ν) + other Xε(ν) | Xει | ἐπλήρου, ἠξίου, ἐδήλου | ἐπηρώτα + other Xᾱ | - | - | προσετίθει, ἐτίθει | ἐδίδου + other Xου | ἔφη | ἦν | - | εἰσῄει |
| 1PL | Xομεν | ἐζητοῦμεν, ἐλαλοῦμεν, παρεκαλοῦμεν, εὐδοκοῦμεν | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ἦμεν | - | - |
| 2PL | εἴχετε, ἐπιστεύετε + other Xετε | ἐζητεῖτε, ἐποιεῖτε, ἐφρονεῖτε | - | ἠγαπᾶτε | ἐζῆτε | - | - | - | - | ἦτε | - | - |
| 3PL | ἔλεγον + other Xον | Xουν | ἐδίδουν, ἀπεδίδουν, παρεδίδουν + ἐδολιοῦσαν | ἐπηρώτων + other Xων | - | - | ἐτίθεσαν, ἐπετίθεσαν | εἴχοσαν, ἐδίδοσαν, παρεδίδοσαν | - | ἦσαν | παρῆσαν, συνῆσαν | ἀπῄεσαν, ἐξῄεσαν |
Here any form making up 25% or more of the tokens for that combination of inflectional class and person-number is show (if that’s all that’s shown in a cell, there are no other forms). Forms in bold also occur 10 times or more in the text,
That wraps up our exploration of the indicative imperfect active endings. In the next three posts, we’ll finish up the middles.