Augment (linguistics)

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In linguistics, the augment is a syllable added to the beginning of the word in certain Indo-European languages, most notably Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iranian languages such as Sanskrit, to form the past tenses.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analysing language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. It is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is composed of two syllables: ig and nite.

Indo-European languages family of several hundred related languages and dialects

The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects.

Contents

Indo-European languages

Historical linguists are uncertain whether the augment is a feature that was added to some branches of Indo-European or whether the augment was present in the parent language and lost by all other branches (see also Proto-Greek).

Historical linguistics, also called diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:

  1. to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
  2. to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families
  3. to develop general theories about how and why language changes
  4. to describe the history of speech communities
  5. to study the history of words, i.e. etymology
Proto-Greek language proto-language

The Proto-Greek language, an Indo-European language, is the assumed last common ancestor of all known varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean Greek, the subsequent ancient Greek dialects and, ultimately, Koine, Byzantine and Modern Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants, who spoke the predecessor of the Mycenaean language, entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic or the Bronze Age.

Greek

Ancient Greek

In Ancient Greek, the verb λέγω légo “I say” has the aorist ἔλεξα élexa “I said”. The initial ε e 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: [1]

Ancient Greek Version of the Greek language used from roughly the 9th century BCE to the 6th century CE

The Ancient Greek language includes the forms of Greek used in Ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BCE to the 6th century CE. It is often roughly divided into the Archaic period, Classical period, and Hellenistic period. It is antedated in the second millennium BCE by Mycenaean Greek and succeeded by medieval Greek.

Digamma, waw, or wau is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has principally remained in use as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called waw or wau, its most common appellation in classical Greek is digamma; as a numeral, it was called episēmon during the Byzantine era and is now known as stigma after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ.

  • *έ-ϝιδον *é-widon → (loss of digamma) *ἔιδον *éidon → (synaeresis) εἶδον eîdon

In linguistics, synaeresis is a phonological process of sound change in which two adjacent vowels within a word are combined into a single syllable.

When the augment is added before a vowel, the augment and the vowel are contracted and the vowel becomes long: akoúō "I hear", ḗkousa "I heard". It is sometimes called the "temporal augment" because it increases the time needed to pronounce the vowel. [2]

Crasis is a type of contraction in which two vowels or diphthongs merge into one new vowel or diphthong, making one word out of two. Crasis occurs in Portuguese and Arabic as well as in Ancient Greek, for which it was first described.

In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may have arisen from one etymologically, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most other dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic, Finnish, Fijian, Kannada, Japanese, Old English, Scottish Gaelic and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of dialects of British English and is said to be phonemic in a few other dialects, such as Australian English, South African English and New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike other varieties of Chinese.

Homeric Greek

In Homer, past-tense (aorist or imperfect) verbs appeared both with and without an augment.

Homer name ascribed by the ancient Greeks to the legendary author of the Iliad and the Odyssey

Homer is the legendary author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are the central works of ancient Greek literature. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek kingdoms. It focuses on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles lasting a few weeks during the last year of the war. The Odyssey focuses on the ten-year journey home of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, after the fall of Troy. Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity, the most widespread being that he was a blind bard from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary.

The past tense is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to place an action or situation in past time. In languages which have a past tense, it thus provides a grammatical means of indicating that the event being referred to took place in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs sang, went and was.

In the grammar of Ancient Greek, including Koine, the aorist is a class of verb forms that generally portray a situation as simple or undefined, that is, as having aorist aspect. In the grammatical terminology of classical Greek, it is a tense, one of the seven divisions of the conjugation of a verb, found in all moods and voices.

  • ὣς φάτο — ὣς ἔφατο
    hṑs pháto — hṑs éphato
    "so he/she said"
  • ἦμος δ᾿ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς,
    êmos d' ērigéneia phánē rhododáktulos Ēṓs,
    "And when rose-fingered Dawn appeared, early-born,"

Modern Greek

Unaccented syllabic augment disappeared during the Byzantine period as a result of the loss of unstressed initial syllables. However, accented syllabic augments remained in place. [3] So Ancient ἔλυσα, ἐλύσαμεν "I loosened, we loosened" corresponds to Modern έλυσα, λύσαμε (élisa, lísame). [4] Temporal augment has not survived in the vernacular, which leaves the initial vowel unaltered: Ancient ἀγαπῶ, ἠγάπησα "I love, I loved"; Modern αγαπώ, αγάπησα (agapó, agápisa).

Sanskrit

Sanskrit had the augment अ- / a-, prefixed to past-tense verbs (aorist and imperfect). [5]

stempresentaoristimperfectEnglish
ध / dhãदधति / dadhãtiअधत् / adhãtअदधत् / adadhãtput
गम् / gamगच्छति / gacchatiअगमत् / agamatअगच्छत् / agacchatgo

Other

Non-Indo-European languages

The term has also been extended to describe similar features in non-Indo-European languages.

In Nahuatl, the perfect ō- prefix is called an augment.

In certain Bantu languages such as Zulu, the term "augment" refers to the initial vowel of a noun class prefix such as (in Zulu) umu-, ama-. That vowel may be present or absent, according to grammatical rules.

Constructed languages

In J. R. R. Tolkien's High Elvish, the repetition of the first vowel before the perfect (for instance utúlië, perfect tense of túlë, "come") is also called an augment.

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In Ancient Greek grammar, the genitive absolute is a grammatical construction consisting of a participle and often a noun both in the genitive case, which is very similar to the ablative absolute in Latin. A genitive absolute construction serves as a dependent clause, usually at the beginning of a sentence, in which the genitive noun is the subject of the dependent clause and the participle takes on the role of predicate.

The injunctive mood was a mood in Sanskrit characterized by secondary endings but no augment, and usually looked like an augmentless aorist or imperfect. It typically stood in a main clause and had a subjunctive or imperative meaning; for example, it could indicate intention, e.g. índrasya nú vīryā̀ṇi prá vocam "Indra's heroic deeds will/shall I now declaim". It was obligatory for use in prohibitions, where it follows mā́. In later Classical Sanskrit, only the use after mā remained.

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Proto-Slavic proto-language

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References

  1. ↑ Herbert Weir Smyth. Greek Grammar. par. 429: syllabic augment.
  2. ↑ Smyth. par. 435: temporal augment.
  3. ↑ Browning, Robert (1983). Medieval and Modern Greek (p58).
  4. ↑ Sophroniou, S.A. Modern Greek. Teach Yourself Books, 1962, Sevenoaks, p79.
  5. ↑ Coulson, Michael. Teach yourself Sanskrit. p. 244. Hodder and Stoughton, 1976, Sevenoaks.
  6. ↑ Clackson, James. 1994. The Linguistic Relationship Between Armenian and Greek. London: Publications of the Philological Society, No 30. (and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing)
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