augment

enlarge or increase

"The recent speech of the president augmented tensions in the Near East" grow or intensify

"The pressure augmented"

In linguistics, the augment is a syllable added to the beginning of the word in certain Indo-European languages, most notably Greek languageGreek (the augment survives and has been generalised in Modern Greek), Armenian languageArmenian, and the Indo-Iranian languages such as Sanskrit, to form the perfect, preterite, or aorist tenses.For example, in classical Greek, the verb λέγω ''légô'', “I speak”, forms its imperfect tense !ἔλεγο ;ν? ''élegon'', “I was speaking”. The initial ε ''e'' represents the augment. historical linguisticsHistorical 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).Category:Indo-Eur opean? linguisticsCategory:Linguistic !morphologyde:Augmentfr:Augment