In part 17, we went through counts for our present active (infinitive and indicative) classes. Now we’ll wrap things up by doing the same for the middle.

Recall this is based on the analysis of 820 tokens available here which was described in the last two parts.

Let us first of all look at the number of distinct lemmas in each of our 14 classes.

Again, even the small counts are elevated due to compound verbs. Folding compounds of the same base verb, only PM-1, PM-2, PM-3, PM-4, and PM-6a have more than one or two members (and PM-6a only has three).

This is just looking at the number of unique lemmas in each class but there are two other sets of numbers that are worth looking at: (1) the total number of tokens in the SBLGNT; (2) the distribution of classes amongst the hapax legomena.

Recall the hapax legomena matter because they give an indication of what classes were still productive.

If we fold compounds under their base verb, only PM-1, PM-2, PM-3, and PM-4 have more than one hapax legomenon.

Let’s now look at counts for each paradigm cell for each class:

As in the active, the 3SG and INF dominate with only a few interesting exceptions. The third person (especially 3SG but also 3PL) is unusually low in PM-2. In PM-9, the 2PL is usually high. This is almost certainly just because of particular lexical items that happen to be in those classes rather than an inherent characteristic of the class itself, although because the origins of some classes are derivational, there may occasionally be tendencies on semantic grounds.

If the goal is just to identify the person/number, not the class, (which is true in reception but not learning) then most of these numbers collapse because of shared endings. Here are the counts just focused on the common endings (without accents):

And that’s it for the present middles. I’ll do a brief summary post next and then we’ll start exploring beyond the presents.