Elementary New Testament Greek, 2014a

10: Imperfect Tense
contraction between vowels. But you can see in the MI Conjugation
the unaffected personal ending, which (in these circumstances) does not
contract with any preceding vowel.
2) You see in all four example verbs of the MI Conjugation the “pure”
personal endings uncomplicated by contractions. You can also see that the
verb stems are perfectly consistent and easily visible in every instance.
3) Even though you can see a fair amount of variation across these paradigms
(especially with the vowel patterns connecting personal endings to verb
stems), you can still discern enough of each ending to parse and translate it
accurately.
The Uses of the Imperfect
The Greek Imperfect has several of the same “senses” as does the English Imperfect.
One way to improve the depth of your reading (whether in English or in the GNT) is
to ask which “sense” of the Imperfect might be at work in a given passage.
Descriptive/
Dramatic:
Customary:
Oftentimes we will use the “was x’ing” expression in English
simply to tell a story more vividly, to help listeners get into the
feel of the event. Instead of “the mummy stood up,” we could
say, “The mummy was standing up…!”
Sometimes Greek writers employed an Imperfect to describe
behaviors that regularly or habitually took place. A good
translation of a Customary Imperfect might be: “John would
regularly pray far into the night,” or “John usually prayed far into
the night,” or “John used to pray far into the night.” [Note, there
would be no separate words for usually, would regularly, or used
to in the Greek. The Imperfect tense (along with the context)
could convey these notions.]
Iterative:
Sometimes Greek writers wanted to highlight the repetitive
nature of an action which was not necessarily a matter of custom
or habit. A good translation of such an Iterative Imperfect might
be: “Jane was repeatedly wiping the brow of the crash victim,”
or “Jane kept on wiping the brow of the crash victim.” [Again,
no separate words for repeatedly, or kept on would be required
Greek. The Imperfect tense (along with the context) could
convey these notions.]
The Formation of the 1st Principal Part
from Various Verb Roots
125
In our vocabulary lists up to this point, we have been placing the root of each verb
in brackets without explanation. Now we need to draw back the curtain to reveal
the connections between the verb root and the many various forms that Greek verbs
can take. The key to it all is to understand that a verb root must be transformed into
(one of) six different principal parts so that all the various forms of a verb can then
be constructed from those principal parts. When you can clearly see this movement
from (one) root, through (six) principal parts, to (dozens of) verb forms, you will
“get it”! In other words, you can think of the six principal parts as the middle men,
or as trafc hubs. You can’t travel from a verb root to any particular form of a Greek
verb without traveling through one of the six principal parts.
This means, of course, that we have already been “traveling through” the First
Principal Part without knowing it! That’s right! All forms of the Present and
Imperfect Tenses of the Indicative mood are built from the FIRST Principal Part.
But how is the First Principal Part itself built?
To understand how this works, imagine that a verb root must be sent into The First
Principal Part Factory, which will convert the root into a nished product (the First
Principal Part) through one of several manufacturing processes. The engineer who
accepts the verb root into the factory makes a (somewhat mysterious) choice as to
which assembly line (A–F) the root should travel. Since those assembly lines differ
from one another in their machinery, the appearance of the nished product (the First
Principal Part) will depend entirely upon the assembly line chosen by the engineer!