Optative mood
The
optative mood is a
grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope. It is similar to the
cohortative mood.
Greek,
Georgian and
Sanskrit are examples of languages with an optative mood.
Gordon M. Messing attests: In dealing with the endings of the optative mood, Herbert Weir Smyth merely noted without comment that the first person singular ending except after -ιη- was -μι, despite his previous statement that the optative usually has the endings of the secondary
tenses of the
indicative. The anomaly of the usual ending -μι has now been resolved with the discovery of
Arcadian present optative first singular έξελαύνοια, which shows the original secondary active ending previously assumed but hitherto unattested.
