Augments and Lost Consonants

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
1

In Pharr 835 & 836, he writes:

  1. Verbs beginning with a vowel formerly proceded by a lost consonant (usually F [vau], or σ), may take the syllabic instead of the temporal augment, as ἑάνδανον, imperfect of ἁνδάνω (σFανδανω) please.

  2. When initial σ has thus been lost, the augment always contracts with the first vowel of the stem, according to the rules (584-5); when the initial F has been lost, contraction may or may not take place…

These two rules seem to contradict. By 836, I would think the imperfect of ἁνδάνω (σFανδανω) please would be ἥνδανον, since the augment supposedly “always” contracts when initial σ was lost. Smyth gave me no guidance. Does the “may or may not” clause for F override the “always” clause for σ? Is this another thing I just have to memorize?

[edit]
Pharr also gives ἕαδον & εὔαδον as alternative 2nd aorist active priniciple parts. ἕαδον is self-explanatory; it follows the same pattern given in 835 above. εὔαδον raises another question; is this derived by ε+F → ε+υ → ευ by contraction?

2

σϜ- is not the same thing as σ-. (As an aside, the stem *σϜαδ- is cognate to English “sweet.”)

Pharr also gives ἕαδον & εὔαδον as alternative 2nd aorist active priniciple parts. ἕαδον is self-explanatory; it follows the same pattern given in 835 above. εὔαδον raises another question; is this derived by ε+F → ε+υ → ευ by contraction?

The digamma presents itself in curious ways from time to time, υ in a diphthong being one of them. This isn’t terribly common.