-θω

Ancient Greek Etymology From grc grk-pro *-tʰō, from grc ine-pro *-dʰeti. Pronunciation Suffix Rothstein-Dowden, Zachary Dental-aspirate presents in Greek and Indo-European 2023 https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/4f13d3b9-66f6-49ea-aeae-46417ba82e80/content The fact clearly emerges from this survey that a thematic present formant *-tʰe⁄o- was once productive in Greek as a tool for forming deradical and deverbal presents. grc no longer productive used to form verbs Usage notes According to the linguist Jeremy Rau, this suffix was no longer productive by the attested period of the Ancient Greek language. However, there are a large number of forms marked by this morpheme that lack any parallels in other Indo-European languages, which many indicate that it was productive at an earlier stage.14-15 Sandell, Ryan Paul Productivity in Historical Linguistics: Computational Perspectives on Word-Formation in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit 2015 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2z1476f8 The exact function of this suffix is disputed. The linguist Elizabeth Magni suggests that it originally described verbs related to "spontaneous and uncontrolled events," citing forms such as grc πρήθω to blow and grc πῡ́θομαι to rot. Moreover, Magni suggests that it was used to form anticausative verbs, noting forms such as grc πλήθω to become full (counterpart to grc πίμπλημι to fill).Magni, Elisabetta From action nominals to gerund and gerundive: some reflections on the -nd- forms Acta XIV Colloquii Internationalis Linguisticae Latinae, 2014, ISBN 978-84-7882-782-4, págs. 145-162 158 2014 Ediciones Clásicas https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=9415828 978-84-7882-782-4 https://web.archive.org/web/20260726135700/https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=9415828 26 July 2026 Alternatively, linguists such as Eduard Wentzel and Émile Benveniste argued for an originally durative meaning, noting that the class is often associated with intransitive verbs. Conjugation pres -θ imperf -θ References