Augment (linguistics)
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- See also Augment (Star Trek) for the fictional race
In linguistics, the augment is a syllable added to the beginning of the word in certain Indo-European languages, most notably Greek (the augment survives and has been generalised in Modern Greek), Armenian, and the Indo-Iranian languages such as Sanskrit, to form the perfect, preterite, or aorist tenses.
For example, in classical Greek, the verb λέγω légô, “I speak”, forms its imperfect tense ἔλεγον élegon, “I was speaking”. The initial ε e represents the augment.
Philologists are uncertain whether the augment is a feature that was added to these branches of Indo-European, or whether the augment was present in the parent language and lost by all other branches.de:Augment fr:Augment