Crossword clues for aorist
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Aorist \A"o*rist\ ([=a]"[-o]*r[i^]st), n. [Gr. 'ao`ristos indefinite; 'a priv. + "ori`zein to define, ? boundary, limit.] (Gram.) A tense in the Greek language, which expresses an action as completed in past time, but leaves it, in other respects, wholly indeterminate.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
a. (context grammar English) Of or pertaining to a verb in the aorist aspect. n. (context grammar English) A verb in the aorist past, that is, in the past tense and the aorist aspect (the event described by the verb viewed as a completed whole). Also called the perfective past. The nearest equivalent in English is the simple past. The term aorist is used particularly often for verbs in Albanian, Ancient and Modern Greek.
WordNet
n. a verb tense in some languages (classical Greek and Sanskrit) expressing action (especially past action) without indicating its completion or continuation
Wikipedia
Aorist (; abbreviated ) verb forms usually express perfective aspect and refer to past events, similar to a preterite. Ancient Greek grammar had the aorist form, and the grammars of other Indo-European languages and languages influenced by the Indo-European grammatical tradition, such as Sanskrit, Armenian, the South Slavic languages, and Georgian also have forms referred to as aorist.
The word comes from Ancient Greek aóristos "indefinite", as the aorist was the unmarked (default) form of the verb, and thus did not have the implications of the imperfective aspect, which referred to an ongoing or repeated situation, or the perfect, which referred to a situation with a continuing relevance; instead it described an action "pure and simple".
Because the aorist was the unmarked aspect in Ancient Greek, the term is sometimes applied to unmarked verb forms in other languages, such as the habitual aspect in Turkish.
In the grammar of Ancient Greek, including Koine, the aorist (pronounced or ) is a class of verb forms that generally portray a situation as simple or undefined, that is, as having perfective 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.
Usage examples of "aorist".
Presumably it would in no way have been wrong to use an aorist instead.
Quenya, one can use the present tense as well as the aorist to describe also a general state of things.
In the case of primary verbs, the aorist and the present tense differ not only regarding the ending.
There is not simply an inquiry as to the value of classic culture, a certain jealousy of the schools where it is obtained, a rough popular contempt for the graces of learning, a failure to see any connection between the first aorist and the rolling of steel rails, but there is arising an angry protest against the conditions of a life which make one free of the serene heights of thought and give him range of all intellectual countries, and keep another at the spade and the loom, year after year, that he may earn food for the day and lodging for the night.
The time-forms of the verb are three, the present, the aorist, and the future.
I keep my mind off aorist passive verbs while I was walking, and I had to agree.
If so, we might have expected to see it in the formation of A-stem aorists as well.
Yet there are a very few strange forms in our corpus that look like aorists by their ending, but still show a long stem-vowel, e.
For now, just take my word that the verbs in the examples I cite are aorists.
In the case of primary verbs, the aorist and the present tense differ not only regarding the ending.
Here the verb polin "I can" is a finite form, the aorist of the primary verb pol appearing with the pronominal ending -n "I" attached but the word quetë must be analyzed as an infinitive.
But in the exercises I made for this course, I have used aorists for the English simple present, whereas I use the Quenya present tense for the English "is.
If so, we might have expected to see it in the formation of A-stem aorists as well.
The quote, reproduced above, apparently only deals with the infinitive form of primary verbs the ones that have aorists in -ë or with endings -i-.
As Jerry Caveney wrote about Tolkien on the Elfling list (August 3, 2000): In what seems to me typical of his creativeness and 'fun' in creating languages, he took the idea of the aorist aspect, and said, in effect, 'What if a language used the aorist to contrast present general (unlimited) actions to present continuative actions instead of using it to contrast past general actions to present continuative [as in classical Greek]?