Ancient Greek morphology, aspect and constructions
Identify the form in its construction
Ancient Greek morphology encodes case, number, gender and verbal categories, but a written ending is not always unambiguous. Learn a noun with its article and genitive, then identify its declension and stem. The noun λόγος has genitive λόγου; neuter forms such as δῶρον require attention to the overlap of nominative and accusative. Greek uses nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative, rather than a separate Latin-style ablative case. Some texts also use dual forms alongside singular and plural.
Articles and adjectives agree with their nouns in relevant grammatical categories. A relative pronoun normally takes gender and number from its antecedent and case from its function in the relative clause, although case attraction and other constructions require context-sensitive analysis. Do not assume that matching visible endings alone identify the correct syntactic relation.
Verbs, time and aspect
Identify person, number, mood, voice and tense-system formation. An augment is associated with past indicative forms; reduplication is an important clue in many perfect-system forms. Neither a single prefix nor a familiar ending makes the rest of the analysis unnecessary. Learn principal parts because a verb's aorist may use a stem different from its present.
The aorist presents an occurrence with perfective aspect; it is not simply a command to translate every form as a completed English past. Aorist indicative normally has past reference, while an aorist infinitive, subjunctive or imperative must be interpreted within its own construction. Present and imperfect systems often present ongoing or repeated activity, while perfect-system forms commonly concern a resulting state. Actual interpretation still depends on context and dialect.
Middle forms do not automatically mean either an ordinary passive or a literal reflexive action. Check the verb and its construction. The subjunctive and optative likewise have several functions; a form in a past reporting context may be an oblique optative rather than an independent wish.
Nonfinite structures
A genitive absolute supplies circumstances through a genitive expression and participle. An accusative can serve as the subject of an infinitive in indirect statement, but subject-control and other constructions prevent a universal rule that every Greek infinitive must have an expressed accusative subject. Participles agree with their associated nouns and can be attributive, circumstantial or supplementary. State the specific construction before choosing a natural translation.