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1.2b: Present Indicative of a Greek verb. The Infinitive.
Present Indicative
In the sentences we have seen so far the verb is in the 3rd person (he, she, it). Note that a noun in the subject takes always the 3rd person of the verb: compare "The doctor heal-s."). Just as in English the ending -s marks the 3rd person of the verb, so in Greek the invariable portion of the verb is θεραπευ- and the ending -ει marks the 3rd person. The tense of both Greek and English forms is Present. The Mood is Indicative.
Let us conjugate this verb in the Present Indicative. Conjugating a verb means "running" it through the three persons of the singular and then the three persons of the plural. I include the personal pronoun corresponding to each form, indispensable for the English verb. (1) You will notice, however, that since each person has a unique ending, the Greek pronoun need not be explicit. It is marked by the ending of the verb.
|
I cure |
ἐγώ |
θεραπεύ-ω |
|
you (sg) cure |
σύ |
θεραπεύ-εις |
|
he, she, it cures |
ἐκεῖνος, ἐκείνη, ἐκεῖνο |
θεραπεύ-ει |
|
we cure |
ἡμεῖς |
θεραπεύ-ομεν |
|
you (pl) cure |
ὑμεῖς |
θεραπεύ-ετε |
|
they cure |
ἐκεῖνοι, ἐκεῖναι |
θεραπεύ-ουσι(ν) |
We call the invariable portion of the verb its stem. θεραπευ- is the present stem of this verb. The endings of the present indicative are marked in red.
Observations
1) In English "you" is used both for singular and plural. When translating, most of the time I will need to specify "sg" or "pl."
2) Greek has a personal pronoun for the third person, but if it is used as a subject it is emphatic, as in "He does it all himself," an unwanted effect in most of our examples. So I resort to the pronoun that means "that / those." We are saying here "that man, that woman, that (remedy, for example) cures.
The Infinitive
In English we mention a verb using its infinitive: "to heal." In Greek, as we will see later, verbs are cited with several forms, none of which is the infinitive! The first form cited is the 1st person singular of the Present Indicative. Because of the disparity in the conventions of both languages, we translate it, in a vocabulary or a dictionary, with our infinitive.
How to form the Greek infinitive? (This is actually the Present Infinitive, "= to heal," rather than "= to have healed." Add to the present stem the ending -ειν:
θεραπεύ-ειν "to heal"
διδάσκ-ειν "to teach"
(1)
You are not expected to learn the personal
pronouns at this time. I present them with the conjugation of the verb so
that students start becoming familiar with them. They are listed in the
nominative case, because each is, of course, the subject of the corresponding
person of the verb. Their other cases are different from the cases of nouns,
except for the pronoun of the third person. They will be learned in lesson
9.