The augment is an Indo-European verbal prefix used in Indo-Iranian, Greek, Phrygian, Armenian, and Albanian, to indicate past time. The augment might be either a Proto-Indo-European archaic feature lost elsewhere or a common innovation in those languages.
The augment originally appears to have been a separate word, with the potential meaning of 'there, then', which in time got fused to the verb. The augment is in PIE ( in Greek, in Sanskrit) and always bears the accent.
Greek
The predominant scholarly view on the prehistory of the augment is that it was originally a separate grammatical particle, although dissenting opinions have occasionally been voiced.
Homeric Greek
In Homer, past-tense (aorist or imperfect) verbs appeared both with and without an augment.
Ancient Greek
In Ancient Greek, the verb "I say" has the aorist "I said." The initial is the augment. When it comes before a consonant, it is called the "syllabic augment" because it adds a syllable. Sometimes the syllabic augment appears before a vowel because the initial consonant of the verbal root (usually digamma) was lost:
- *έ-ϝιδον *é-widon → (loss of digamma) *ἔιδον *éidon → (synaeresis) εἶδον eîdon
When the augment is added before a vowel, the augment and the vowel are contracted and the vowel becomes long: "I hear", "I heard". It is sometimes called the "temporal augment" because it increases the time needed to pronounce the vowel.
Modern Greek
Unaccented syllabic augments disappeared in some dialects during the Byzantine period as a result of the loss of unstressed initial syllables, this feature being inherited by Standard Modern Greek.<!-- see the Medieval_Greek#Grammar article without have references.--> However, accented syllabic augments have remained in place. So Ancient () "I loosened, we loosened" corresponds to Modern (). When the stem begins in a vowel, the augment has not survived in the vernacular and the vowel is left unaltered instead: Ancient () "I love, I loved"; Modern ().
Sanskrit
The augment is used in Sanskrit to form the imperfect, aorist, pluperfect and conditional. When the verb has a prefix, the augment always sits between the prefix and the root. The following examples of verb forms in the third-person singular illustrate the phenomenon:
{| class="wikitable"
! !! √bhū- !! sam + √bhū-
|-
! Present
| bháv·a·ti || sam·bháv·a·ti
|-
! Imperfect
| á·bhav·a·t || sam·á·bhav·a·t
|-
! Aorist
| á·bhū·t || sam·á·bhū·t
|-
! Conditional
| á·bhav·iṣya·t || sam·á·bhav·iṣya·t
|}
When the root starts with any of the vowels i-, u- or ṛ, the vowel is subject not to guṇa but vṛddhi.
- icch·á·ti -> aí·cch·a·t
- urṇó·ti -> aú·rṇo·t
- ṛdh·nó·ti -> ā́r·dh·no·t
Other
- Phrygian seems to have had an augment. <!-- source is the Phrygian language article -->
- Classical Armenian had an augment,<!-- taken from Armenian language --> in the form of e-.
- Yaghnobi, an East Iranian language spoken in Tajikistan, has an augment. <!-- source is the Yaghnobi language#Verb article -->
Constructed languages
In J. R. R. Tolkien's Quenya, the repetition of the first vowel before the perfect (for instance , perfect tense of , "come") is reminiscent of the Indo-European augment in both form and function, and is referred to by the same name in Tolkien's grammar of the language.
See also
- Sanskrit verbs
- Ancient Greek verbs
- Proto-Indo-European verbs