19.130 First Aorist Active Participles

In the previous lesson, you learned about the present active participle and the present middle/passive participles. In this lesson, you will learn about the aorist active and the aorist middle participles, and you will learn about the aorist passive participles in the next lesson.

The most important thing to understand about Greek present and Greek aorist participles is that the difference between them is a difference in aspect. Because English does not have a strong sense of aspect, it is impossible to reflect the difference in these participles in English translation. The present active participle and the aorist active participle have the same translation into English:

πιστεύων (present active participle) - "believing"
πιστεύσας (aorist active participle) - "believing"

Now, in Greek the meaning of these participles is obviously not the same, or else there would not be a choice between present and aorist. The problem for us, as English speakers, is that the difference between these two participles is a difference of aspect that is often very difficult for us to grasp. The best thing you can do is to read lots of Greek (lots and lots and lots of Greek), and pay very close attention to how the authors choose whether to use the present aspect (unfolding action) or the aorist aspect (the action itself, with no emphasis on the action unfolding). Before you go on, you might want to review these notes about aspect in the Greek verb.

Next, read Croy section 130 where he discusses the aorist active participle for verbs that take a first aorist form (the sigmatic aorist). As you recall, the first aorist, or sigmatic aorist, is easy to recognize because of the presence of a sigma or the presence of a compound letter such as chi (k-s) or psi (p-s).

As you already know, participles do not have tense. This means that aorist participles do not have augment. You have run into this already, because the aorist infinitive also does not have tense, so when you formed the aorist infinitive you had to learn to remove the augment from the aorist past tense verb form in order to create the infinitive. The same thing happens with aorist participles. The aorist active participle is formed from the aorist past active verb (third principal part), but you must remove the augment in order to form the participle. Below you will find a chart that will help you recognize the basic form of the aorist active participle.

As you can see in Croy, the first aorist active participles are either first declension (feminine) or third declension (masculine and neuter). Since Croy has provided you with the paradigm of λύσας, I have provided you with the paradigm of διδάξας, "teaching," so that you can see how the paradigm looks with a xi instead of a sigma.

Notice that in the feminine singular plural, the participle is more like a noun than an adjective, because it takes the special accented omega ending that you expect in feminine nouns but not in feminine adjectives:

Chart of First Aorist Active Participle Forms