Unit 16

Greek Learning Greek
1

I am working on Unit 16 and am having a lot of trouble with imperfects and contractions. I am supposed to write, “He was leading the way.”

  1. I interpreted “was leading” as a middle voice, so I started with the verb “ἀπάγω.”
  2. I remembered that I do not augment a prepositional prefix, so then I cam up with “ἀπήγω.”
  3. The word is in the third person, so then I switched the ending to “ἀπήγτο.”
  4. A rule on page 133, states that an accent cannot precede the augment, so I came up with ἀπῆγτο."

The answer book came up with, “ἀπῆγε(ν)” I do not understand how the answer book came up with that ending. Can somebody write a step-by-step process as to how the answer book came up with the ending?

2

First, why do you think “was leading” should be in the middle voice. There is no reason for this here. Perhaps if he were leading someone into his trap, implying that it was for his own interest, but that’s far fetched.

Secondly you need to revise the different endings for different tenses. You use the present ending for the imperfect first person, and for the 3rd person middle you forget the thematic vowel, which would have given you ἀπήγετο.

Your step by step process is fine, but you make the wrong decision in almost every step, since you don’t know the difference between the active and middle voice, and you don’t know the endings well enough. It is really important to work on that. If you had realized that you should use the active voice, and had known how to form the 3rd person singular imperfect of the verb, you would have arrived at the right answer.

3

I thought it was in the middle voice because there is no object and the phrase tended to emphasize the subject. I am having trouble distinguishing between the middle and active voice.

4

Also, I do have trouble understanding how to form the third person, since the chart just says it is --, a blank.
I do not know if a blank means that I only use the stem, use the usual 3rd person active ending, or what?