Augment (Indo-European)

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 Greek, the verb λέγω légo, “I say”, forms its aorist tense as ἔλεξα; élexa, “I said”. The initial epsilon is the augment.

Historical linguists 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 (see also Proto-Greek).

The term has also been extended to describe similar features in non-Indo-Europeans languages. For example, in Nahuatl, the perfect ō- prefix is called an augment.