Аорист: форма глагола прошедшего времени и её особенности

Verb form that usually expresses perfective aspect and refers to past events
the aorists of various languages
Aorist ('/eɪ//ə//r//ᵻ//s//t/ AYərist; abbreviated ) verb forms usually express perfective aspect and refer to past events, similar to a preterite. Ancient Greek grammar had the aorist form, and the grammars of other Indo European languages and languages influenced by the Indo European grammatical tradition, such as Middle Persian, Sanskrit, Armenian, the South Slavic languages, Georgian, and Pashto, also have forms referred to as aorist. The word comes from Ancient Greek ἀόριστος ( ), as the aorist was the unmarked (default) form of the verb, and thus did not have the implications of the imperfective aspect, which referred to an ongoing or repeated situation, or the perfect, which referred to a situation with a continuing relevance; instead it described an action "pure and simple". Because the aorist was the unmarked aspect in Ancient Greek, the term is sometimes applied to unmarked verb forms in other languages, such as the habitual aspect in Turkish.

In Proto Indo European, the aorist appears to have originated as a series of verb forms expressing manner of action. Proto Indo European had a three way aspectual opposition, traditionally called "present", "aorist", and "perfect", which are thought to have been, respectively, imperfective, perfective, and stative (resultant state) aspects. By the time of Classical Greek, this system was maintained largely in independent instances of the non indicative moods and in the nonfinite forms. But in the indicative, and in dependent clauses with the subjunctive and optative, the aspects took on temporal significance. In this manner, the aorist was often used as an unmarked past tense, and the perfect came to develop a resultative use, which is why the term perfect is used for this meaning in modern languages. Other Indo European languages lost the aorist entirely. In the development of Latin, for example, the aorist merged with the perfect. The preterites (past perfectives) of the Romance languages, which are sometimes called 'aorist', are an independent development.

In Ancient Greek, the indicative aorist is one of the two main forms used in telling a story; it is used for undivided events, such as the individual steps in a continuous process (narrative aorist); it is also used for events that took place before the story itself (past within past). The aorist indicative is also used to express things that happen in general, without asserting a time (the "gnomic aorist"). It can also be used of present and future events; the aorist also has several specialized senses meaning present action. Non indicative forms of the aorist (subjunctives, optatives, imperatives, infinitives) are usually purely aspectual, with certain exceptions including indirect speech constructions and the use of optative as part of the sequence of tenses in dependent clauses. There are aorist infinitives and imperatives that do not imply temporality at all. For example, the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:11 uses the aorist imperative in "Give (δός ) us this day our daily bread", in contrast to the analogous passage in Luke 11:3, which uses the imperfective aspect, implying repetition, with "Give (δίδου , present imperative) us day by day our daily bread." An example of how the aorist tense contrasts with the imperfect in describing the past occurs in Xenophon's Anabasis, when the Persian aristocrat Orontas is executed: "and those who had been previously in the habit of bowing (προσεκύνουν , imperfect) to him, bowed (προσεκύνησαν , aorist) to him even then." Here the imperfect refers to a past habitual or repeated act, and the aorist to a single one. There is disagreement as to which functions of the Greek aorist are inherent within it. Some of the disagreement applies to the history of the development of the various functions and forms. Most grammarians differentiate the aorist indicative from the non indicative aorists. Many authors hold that the aorist tends to be about the past because it is perfective, and perfectives tend to describe completed actions; others that the aorist indicative and to some extent the participle is essentially a mixture of past tense and perfective aspect.

Because the aorist was not maintained in either Latin or the Germanic languages, there have long been difficulties in translating the Greek New Testament into Western languages. The aorist has often been interpreted as making a strong statement about the aspect or even the time of an event, when, in fact, due to its being the unmarked (default) form of the Greek verb, such implications are often left to context. Thus, within New Testament hermeneutics, it is considered an exegetical fallacy to attach undue significance to uses of the aorist. In particular, the aorist does not imply a "once for all" action, as it has commonly been misinterpreted, although it frequently refers to a simple, non repeated action.

Although quite common in older Sanskrit, the aorist is comparatively infrequent in much of classical Sanskrit, occurring, for example, 66 times in the first book of the Rāmāyaṇa, 8 times in the Hitopadeśa, 6 times in the Bhagavad Gītā, and 6 times in the story of Śakuntalā in the Mahābhārata.

In Georgian and Svan, the aorist marks perfective aspect. In the indicative, it marks completed events. In other moods, it marks events that are yet to be completed. In Mingrelian and Laz, the aorist is basically a past tense and can be combined with both perfective and imperfective aspects as well as the imperative and the subjunctive moods.

In Khinalug, the aorist is a perfective aspect, and the two terms ("aorist" and "perfective") are often used interchangeably. In Udi, the aorist is an imperfective aspect that is usually a past tense but can also replace the present tense.

In Turkish, the aorist (geniş zaman, literally "broad time") is a habitual aspect For example, the statement Et yemem ("I do not eat meat") informs the listener that the speaker is a vegetarian and not merely that he happens not to be eating meat at that very moment. To convey the latter message, the present progressive Et yemiyorum ("I am not eating meat") would be appropriate. The Turkish aorist is commonly used in enquiries about someone's wishes, as in Bir şey yemek ister misiniz? ("Would you like to eat something?"). That makes a question like Domuz eti yer misiniz? ambiguous, as the listener may interpret it as an informational question ("Are you someone who eats pork"?) or as an offer ("Would you [like to] eat pork? ").