In other moods (subjunctive, optative, and imperative), the infinitive, and (largely) the participle, the aorist is purely aspectual and devoid of any temporal meaning.
In Proto-Indo-European, the aorist may have originated simply as an aspect of syntactic inflection, but later it probably developed into a combination of tense and aspect, a similar syntax being evident in Sanskrit.
In Greek, and Sanskrit, the aorist is marked by several morphological devices, but three stand out as most common. Latin, however, does not have an aorist. People commonly confuse it with the perfect.
Appearance
Morphological device
Position
Annotations
S-aorist
1st
The s-aorist or sigmatic aorist, so called because an 's' is inserted between the root and the personal ending. In Greek, ?????akoú? means "I hear", while ???????kousa means "I heard." (Grammatical note: the first letter of ?????? is an eta, and not an alpha, because of a Greek verbal augment that marks the past indicative tense.) In Greek, this is called the first aorist, or the weak aorist.
This process is a change in vowel grade. Indo-European made great use of ablaut to express semantic changes morphologically; in fact, English uses ablaut as well, creating such verb forms as: swim, swam, swum; come, came, come; and take, took, taken. English further uses ablaut in extended forms, such as: sit, seat, sat, set (etymologically, to set is to cause to sit); lie, lay, lain, laid, laid, layer; and sing, sang, sung, song. And Greek ?????leíp? "I leave", but ??????élipon "I left". In Greek, this is called the second aorist or the strong aorist.
While a reduplication is more commonly associated with the morphology of the perfect, there are sporadic verbs which use it in the aorist. The reduplicated aorist is more common in Sanskrit than in other Indo-European languages, but an example in Greek is the verb ???ág? "I lead", which has the aorist ???????gagon "I led," (Grammatical note: the first letter of ?????? is an eta, and not an alpha, because of a Greek verbal augment that marks the past indicative tense.)
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