The Greek Augment: What this Amazingly Enduring Element Says about Continuity in Greek

The augment of Classical Greek is well entrenched in the verbal system as an obligatory marker of past tense and has proven to be perhaps the most formally enduring grammatical inflection in the verbal system of Greek over time. The vicissitudes and ultimate generalization of the augment across so much of the diachrony of Greek teach several important general lessons about language change: i) the forces of diachronic change can affect even the most stable of elements, ii) even in variability there can be stability and continuity of form across centuries, and suggest some lessons as well about the augment specifically: iii) its loss from other branches of Indo-European very likely reflects a resolution of competition similar to ἐκάθιζον ~ κάθιζον in favor of the unaugmented form but with a different generalized form and a broader scope than in Greek.