Part thirty-four 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).

It’s now time to sort out any inflectional class (IC) ambiguities in our imperfect middle endings. As usual, I’ve written code evaluating the forms in the SBLGNT and assigning each one a single IC. The rules used are as follows:

3SG:-ετο or 2PL:-εσθε is IM-1 if lemma ends in -ω or -ομαι
IM-7 if lemma ends in -ημι
1SG:-όμην or 1PL:-όμεθα or 3PL:-οντο is IM-1 if lemma ends in -ω or -ομαι
IM-8 if lemma ends in -ωμι
1SG:-ούμην or 2SG:-οῦ or 3PL:-οῦντο is IM-2 if lemma ends in -έω or -έομαι
IM-3 if lemma ends in -όω or -όομαι
1SG:-ώμην or 2SG:-ῶ or 1PL:-ώμεθα or 3PL:-ῶντο is IM-5 if lemma is χράομαι
IM-4 if lemma ends in -άω or -άομαι

You can download the results of the disambiguation here. We’ll use this to do our counts in the next post.

Let’s first ask our usual questions, though…

Are the disambiguated inflectional classes consistent for each lexeme?

Yes. In this case, they are so need no further comment.

Is the value of X in our paradigm patterns consistent across a lexeme?

There’s only one exception, to do with the augment:

  • δύναμαι: ἐδυν or ἠδυν