Lesson 1 | Present Indicatives
[1] About Present Indicatives
I hope that you are as excited as I am to learn about indicative verbs! By far, indicative verbs are the most common verbs in the Greek NT:
Kind of Verb
Number in the Greek NT
Indicative
15,623
Participle
6,658
Infinitive
2,291
Subjunctive
1,869
Imperative
1,635
Optative
68
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Learning indicative verbs in this course will greatly expand your ability to read the Greek NT. Indeed, simply completing this lesson will do so. There are 5,531 present indicatives in the Greek NT!
λύω
Let’s start by looking at a familiar present active indicative verb. We parse this form as present, active, indicative, first person, singular from λύω “I am untying” or “I untie.”
- “Present” communicates the verb’s tense-form. Remember that, unlike English, Koine Greek verbs primarily communicate aspect and not time. Present verbs have imperfective aspect. However, since this verb is in the indicative mood, it communicates both aspect and time. So, we could say that this verb is a non-past imperfective. That’s why we normally translate λύω into English as “I am untying” instead of “I was untying” or “I had untied.”
- “Active” communicates the verb’s voice. With an active voice verb, the subject does the verb’s action. That’s why we translate λύω as “I am untying” instead of “I am being untied.”
- “Indicative” communicates the verb’s mood. When an author or speaker uses an indicative verb, he portrays the verb’s action as a reality. That’s why we translate λύω as “I am untying” instead of “I could be untying” or “I might be untying” or even “Go on untying!”¹
- “First Person” tells us how the speaker or author relates to the verb’s subject. Since this is a first person verb, the speaker is the verb’s subject. That’s why we translate this as “I am untying” instead of “You are untying” or “She is untying.”²
- “Singular” communicates the verb’s number. A verb’s number tells us how many are involved in the action: one person (singular) or more than one person (plural). Of course, that’s why we translate λύω as “I am untying” instead of “We are untying.”
- “λύω” in the parsing tells us the verb’s stem. The verb’s stem identifies the basic meaning of the word. As you learned in this lesson on participles in Greek II, the stem can change between tense-forms. Thus, paying attention to the verb’s stem often helps us parse the verb. Note: When you memorize a new verb, you are memorizing the verb in its present stem.
Within the Context of a Particular Verse
διὰ τί λύετε; Why are you untying? —Luke 19:31
Here we have another form of λύω; notice how the ending changed from λύω to λύετε. This shift changes this verb from a first person singular (λύω – I am untying) into a second person plural (λύετε – You [pl.] are untying).
By this point, you might be noticing that Greek verbs change their form to encode different information. Each of the six parts of a Greek verb (tense-form, voice, mood, person, number, and lexical meaning) encodes its information in the verb-form. Our job, like a detective, is to look at each part of the verb to decipher the meaning.
Before we turn to look at present active indicative forms in depth on the next step, make sure you have the Greek III cheat sheet printed out and at hand.
Cheat Sheet: Indicative VerbspdfA printable cheat sheet containing all the paradigms you need to memorize for indicative verbs.
Cheat Sheet with BlankspdfIn this document, the key information has been removed from the above cheat sheet so you can fill it in for memory practice.