Augment

In linguistics, the augment was a syllable added to the beginning of the word in certain Indo-European languages, most notably Greek, Armenian, and the Indo-Iranian languages like Sanskrit, to form the perfect, preterite, or aorist[?] tenses.

The augment survives and has been generalised in Modern Greek. For example, the verb ληγω, "I end," forms its aorist tense εληξα, "I ended." The initial ε represents the augment.

Philologists 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 save these.