Person and agreement
Person distinguishes participants in the speech situation: first includes the speaker, second addresses someone, and third refers to others. Number, noun class and other features may combine with person in an agreement form. A verb may index its subject, object, both, or neither. A person marker is not always a pronoun, and its location on the verb does not by itself identify the semantic agent.
Analyze agreement by comparing forms in controlled sentence contexts. If a source labels a suffix “3 singular”, ask which argument it indexes, whether the value changes in subordinate clauses, and whether a pronoun can co-occur.
Tense and aspect
Tense locates an event relative to a reference point such as speech time. Aspect describes how an event is viewed internally, for example as bounded, ongoing, habitual or completed relative to another point. An English translation “I wrote” or “I have written” may collapse distinctions in the source language. Ancient Greek perfect forms are a reminder that historical tense-aspect systems do not map one-to-one to modern English labels.
A grammatical category can be expressed by affixes, stem changes, reduplication, auxiliaries or particles. WALS cites Greek gé-grapha “I have written” as a reduplicated perfect; the form documents a construction, not an all-purpose formula for every Greek perfect.
Mood, modality and voice
Mood is a grammatical distinction associated with clause type, speaker commitment or hypotheticality; common descriptive labels include indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative, but their distributions are language-specific. Modality is the broader semantic domain of possibility, necessity and related meanings. A traditional mood name should be learned through attested contexts and contrasts.
Voice concerns the mapping of participants to grammatical roles, such as an active/passive opposition. A passive need not have the same morphology or discourse function across languages; “middle” also covers different functions in different traditions. For a supposed voice form, identify the event’s participants, the verb’s morphology and the clause’s syntax before assigning an English translation.
Evidentiality and other values
Some systems mark the source of information, such as direct perception or report, or encode polarity, direction or participant hierarchy. These cannot be squeezed into a universal Latin-style conjugation chart. WALS documents the breadth of verbal inflectional categories, but a site for a particular ancient language should include only the categories established by its grammar and corpus.
Practice: take one cited verbal form and write five separate questions: who is indexed, when is the event located, how is it viewed, what clause mood is signaled, and how are participants mapped to syntax? Answer only those for which the form or context supplies evidence.
Modern-language examples on this page clarify a linguistic pattern. They do not establish unattested sounds or forms for an ancient language. Follow the cited sources below and keep editorial readings separate from the surviving trace.