The Very Eσσence of You (Singular)

As the wheels of progress in Modern Greek became bogged in the mud slough of the passive (something with which, no doubt, any students of Classical or Koine Greek can identify), it was amusing that Hellenophones, ever resistant to the collapse of conjugations, such as occurred in French and English, have restored, once again, the sigma to the second person singular forms of the passive.

The change of [s] to [h] and thence to oblivion is a common process in the history of languages, and but this change affects Indo-European languages (of which Greek is one) particularly severely because the [s] marks the difference between the second and third persons, i.e., between 'you' and 'he'. Languages which which lose the sound sense between these two forms (and possible examples of such appear as early as the Hittite Empire) must make presonal pronouns obligatory; the guardians of the Greek tongue strenuously resist this aspect of analytical languages. Classical Greek uses the sigma, in various positions, as the marker of second personal singular, the future, and the aorist. The second person singular of the present active form (λυεις, “you loose”) is already a restoration of the consonant from the second person singular of the imperfect form (ελυες, “you were loosing”), although the resurrected sigma, like a borrowed letter of the alphabet, was placed after the new long vowel (ει) rather than between the two former short vowels where it had existed before (*εσι). The sigma of the future was restored in the empty position (sigmata?) between the vowels of the verb on the analogy of the sigmas which followed consonants, but not for every verb.

The damage, however, that the disappearance of future sigma caused does not compare to the jarring contractions from the absence of sigma in the present and imperfect of the medio-passive verb. This disruption appears most clearly in the student recitation of verbal endings, in a singsong voice and with frequently wrong syllabic stress, when the pleasant symmetry of the trisyllabic first and third person forms fails to appear in the second person and contracts (ηι < *εσαι, ου < *εσο), thereby hiding the characteristic vowels of these particular conjugations. Classical Greek possesses many contracted forms of verbs (three classes, in fact), but usually all six forms are contracted, not just one. The historian Herodotus' Ionic dialect shuns most contractions (and some contractions are probably the result of Attic or Atticizing editors), but even there the asigmatic second person (εαι) causes the tongue to stumble.

The preservation of the (medio)passive form in Modern Greek is not startling, given the large number of mediopassive and deponent verbs in Classical Greek, but the restoration of the sigma in the second person form (in the linguistically historical form εσαι, no less, even if the pronunciation has slightly changed) provides a symmetry and sensibility of the passive forms, and fits well with the extensive analogical remodeling of the Greek verbal system.