The Greek verb Conjugation, in relation to English and Spanish

A word can vary, especially in its endings, for a number of reasons.

In English, number is the most evident. For example, "horse" differs from "horses" because one is singular and the other plural. In grammatical terms we would say that number is an accident of English words, that is, a characteristic that might cause a word to change its form.

Another much less frequent accident in English is gender. In general, English words don't have gender markers, but there are a few examlpes: blond, blonde. We could say, then, that gender is not a common accident for English words.

This doesn't happen in other languages, for example the Latin languages, where nominal words (substantives, adjectives) frequently have accidence in gender and number: señor, señora, señores, señoras. Moreover, adjectives, normally invariable in English, also have such accidence in Latin languages: lindo/linda/lindos/lindas.

Verbs also have accidence. They tend to vary according to number (singular or plural), and according to the "person". The person is a concept that indicates the location of the verb in realtion to the speaker.

• The first person (I, we), is the person who speaks.
• The second person (you singular or plural), is the person to whom one speaks.
• The third person (he/she/it, they), is a referred person, of whom one speaks.
  

In modern English, verb accidents by gender and number are almost nonexistent, except for the additional "s" for regular forms of the present 3rd person singular.

Compare the accidence of English and Spanis for the present tense of the verb "to love"="amar"

I	love	yo	amo
you	love	tú	amas
he	loves	él	ama
we	love	nosotros	amamos
you	love	vosotros	amáis
they	love	ellos	aman

As it can be seen, verbs Spanish and other Latin languages vary in form according to their person and number. English verbs too, but in a much smaller degree, that's why in English the use of the pronoun accompanying the verbal form is mandatory.

Another accident of verbs is, of course, the tense. "Look" is different from "looks", and this is different from "looked". Tense is, then, anothen accident of verbs.

Classic Greek has all these accidents just mentioned: tense, person and number.

There are 2 more variations of a verb that will be mentioned in this article: one is the "voice". It denotes if the subject of a verb is performing the action (i.e., being "active"), or rather suffering, experiencing the action unto himself (i.e, being "passive"). In either English or Spanish, the voice is not a real accident of the verbs, because these languages have verbs only for the active voice, while the passive voice is built by means of a verbal phrase: I love/I am loved=amo/soy amado.

But in Classic Greek the is an accident of the verb. Variations in the verb word indicate not only person, number and tense, but also voice.

For example, lúw means "I dissolve", whereas "lúomai" means "I am dissolved". The w-omai ending denotes the voice. Moreover, Greek has an intermediate voice (adequately called "middle voice"), used for reflective or intransitive actions.

Finally, Classic Greek, as well as Spanish and English, have modes or "moods", which indicate the speakers' attitude. The conditional, for example, is a mood. "I like" and "I would like" are both present, only that one is in our "normal" mood we use to say things, called "Indicative Mood", and the other is in the mood we use for conditions or possibilities, called "Conditional mood". Other moods are Subjunctive and Imperative, the mood for giving orders, request, advice.

Classic Greek has all these moods (and one more, in fact), and, again, it doesn't resort to verbal phrases but indicates the mood all in one word. For example: "ágeis" means "drive" like in "you drive" in indicative mode, whereas "áge" means "drive!" as in imperative mode.

A good collection of free examples of Classic Greek verbs and their variations can be found here:

http://kalos-software.com/charts.php

along with other charts not relevant to this article.

All these accidents we mentioned for Greek verbs are called the "conjugation" of a verb.

To summarize, the conjugation of a verb (in both English, Spanish and Classic Greek) consists in how the verb word changes according to the following accidents:

• Person
• Number
• Tense
• Voice
• Mood

In Greek, all these accidents are usually indicated in a single, usually long word. In Spanish, some accidents are indicated using different word endings and some are constructed using verbal phrases. In English, there is very little variation in verbal words, and almost all the verb's accidents are indicated using either an accompanying personal pronoun and/or verbal phrases.