Discrepancies between verb tables

[Brian Gould]

Thanks to @James Spinti who posted it on the “Learning paradigms” thread, I downloaded a table for λύω from Helma Dik’s website at the University of Chicago. For the indicative mood, she lists six tenses, in two groups of three:

Primary indicative: Present, Future, Perfect
Secondary indicative: Present, Aorist, Perfect

These tenses do not fully match the list given in Green’s *Brief Introduction to NT Greek,* pp. 45-47. Like Dik, Green also lists six tenses under the heading Indicative Mood. He names them as Present, Imperfect, Future, First aorist, Perfect, and Pluperfect.

Is there an easy explanation for the discrepancy?

Here are the links:

Helma Dik’s table for λύω:
https://classics.uchicago.edu/files/luw.pdf

Green’s *Brief Introduction,* kindly made available by Textkit:
https://www.textkit.com/learn/ID/140/author_id/61/

[Stephen Carlson]

Dik's columns are not tenses but tense-stems. They combine with the primary/secondary distinction (of the endings) to produce the traditional tenses of Greek. In particular the secondary present is the imperfect, and the secondary perfect is the pluperfect.

Also, ignore the "first" in Green's first aorist. That doesn't need to be there.

[Brian Gould]

For the pluperfect, Green lists the endings as -κειν, -κεις, -κει, -κειμεν, -κειτε, -κε(ι)σαν, while Dik’s Secondary Indicative Perfect reads ἐλελύκη, ἐλελύκης, ἐλελύκει, ἐλελύκεμεν, ἐλελύκετε, ἐλελύκεσαν. I can certainly see a close resemblance, particularly in the 3rd sing. and plur., but they are not identical in every case. Could this be explained by a vowel shift from “η” to “ει” or something of that nature?

[Stephen Carlson]

That's basically a dialectal difference between Attic and Koine.