Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is commonly considered a ''synthetic'' or ''inflectional'' language, that is, a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. Nevertheless, already at the earliest stages of the language one finds traces of multi-word ''periphrastic'' constructions similar to those in the modern European languages, as in ἦν γινόµεν α, ''it was happening'', or ἔχειἀτιµά*sας , ''he has dishonoured''.Ve...