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. Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... This article discusses the unit of speech. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ... Modern Greek (Νεοελληνική, lit. ... Indo-Iranian can refer to: The Indo-Iranian languages The prehistoric Indo-Iranian people, see Aryan This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... The Sanskrit language ( संस्कृता वाक्) is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family and is not only a classical language, but also an official language of India. ... The term perfect has different meanings: Look up Perfect on Wiktionary, the free dictionary For the mathematical concept, see perfect number. ... This article is about the grammatical term. ... The aorist aspect was one of the three original aspects that defined the Indo_European verbal paradigm. ...

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.

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). Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ... The Proto-Greek language is the common ancestor of the Greek dialects, including the Mycenean language, the classical Greek dialects Attic-Ionic, Aeolic, Doric and North-Western Greek, and ultimately the Koine and Modern Greek. ...