18.123 Forms of the Present Active Participle

Make sure you study the material in Croy section 123 carefully.

The present active participle is formed from the first principal part of the verb.

For the masculine and neuter forms of the present active participle, the declension follows the rules of the third declension. Notice the shift in stress caused by the genitive plural ending, and the unusual effect produced by the dative plural ending, just as you would expect in the third declension.

For the feminine forms of the present active participle, the declension obeys the rules of first declension nouns, with alternating alpha and eta vowels in the singular. The feminine participle even has a circumflex accent on the genitive plural ending, just as you learned for the feminine first declension nouns (remember that this was not true for the feminine adjectives). Notice the shifting stress pattern, just like what you learned for the mixed alpha-eta noun θάλασσα.

In order to make the accentuation pattern more clear, the paradigm provided here is for the verb πιστεύω (note the special accent for the neuter singular: the accent does not recede as you would expect for a verb, but rather persists on the same syllable that is accented in the nominative form, just as you would expect for a noun or adjective). This present active participle would be translated into English as "believing".

(But be careful - English sometimes uses "ing" to form a noun, rather than a participle. You can see an English participle in the sentence, "Believing in the power of prayer, the people went to church every day." This is not the same as the noun in a sentence like "Seeing is believing.")