Verbal Roots

[Stephen Jones]

Dear Greek students,

 

After more than a year and a half, we are nearing the end of our Street Greek Class. Next Tuesday will be our last class. (Sniff, Sniff. Excuse me while a get a tissue). But seriously, I am a little bummed. I have thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to teach Greek in a church environment, and have learned much during our time together.

 

This past Tuesday, we reviewed ch. 19 on Future Act/Mid Indicative verbs, then read and discussed ch. 20 on verbal roots. We quickly realized this was one of the more technical chapters with a lot of new concepts. Nevertheless, Mounce’s approach to morphology in the long run spares us a lot of rote memorization, because we are learning the actual behavior of Greek rather than endless paradigms and word lists.

 

The main point of our lesson was that there is a difference between the verbal root (its most basic form) and the verbal stem (which may be different in each tense).

 

Here’s an example:

 

Root: *bal, meaning “to throw” (this is a theoretical form; it never actually appears without a personal ending attached)

Present tense stem: *ball

Future tense stem: *bal

You’ll notice that the future tense stem is identical to the original verbal root, while the present tense stem has added an extra lamba.

 

Since the lexical form of a verb is in the present tense (ballw), it would be natural to assume that the present tense verb is its most “regular” form, and that other tense stems are adding or taking away letters from the present tense. But the exact opposite is true! The present tense stem is the one that’s irregular. It is the most irregular of all the verbal stems. This puts us at somewhat of a disadvantage, but once we learn how present tense stems are formed, we can easily trace most of them back to their original verbal root (which often shows up in the future and aorist tenses, as in the bal example above).

 

Mounce taught us three patterns of variation that help explain why present tense stems often change from the original verbal root. I mapped them out this way:

 

 

You can find the full explanation on pp. 168-171. If you can grasp these concepts, you will be well on your way to mastering Greek verbs.

 

Homework for next week:

Exercise 20.

Parsing 1-4

Warm-up a-d

Translation 1-3

 

Thanks,

Pastor Stephen