Noun – Nominative singular

ObjectivesLearning objectives

• General information about the case and gender system in Greek
• The phonology of acute and grave accents and the smooth breathing mark
• The morphology of the nominative singular

VocabularyVocabulary

Each lesson includes a vocabulary table as shown above, which contains the words learned in the Biblingo app for this lesson. The gloss given is a translation of the Greek text; it is not an exhaustive definition of the Greek word(s), nor does it represent all the possible meanings or translations of those Greek words. The next column refers to the grammatical category (abbreviated Cat) of the Greek word. Abbreviations are used for the grammatical category and are introduced when needed (for this lesson, n = noun and v = verb). Finally, the letters in the last column refer to the full paradigm (abbreviated Par) in the appendix. A paradigm gives all the forms associated with a word, usually in a chart. To illustrate, both ἄνθρωπος and ἄρτος belong to the paradigm B.a.β.i, but ἀδελφή belongs to the paradigm B.a.α.i. While the former two words share the same ending -ος, the latter has a different ending, namely -η (both of which are learned in this lesson). I would encourage you not to try to memorize the paradigms in the back of the book, but you can use them as a reference as you complete the activities within Biblingo (where you will do exercises that will help you internalize the information found in the paradigms).

You will occasionally see glosses with parentheses. These are used to make explicit what is implicit in the Greek form. For example, the verb κράζει ‘shouts’ implies that someone is doing the shouting. This is glossed as ‘he’, though the one shouting could also be a female ‘she’. The masculine is used for the subject to make the gloss more concise, but it should not be taken as implying that ‘she’ is not a possible subject.

PhonologyPhonology: Accents & smooth breathing mark

Most Greek words have accents. You might be used to this if you speak a language like Spanish, or it might seem a bit foreign if you speak a language like English. Even English, though, has accents, though they are not graphically represented. There are three types of accent markings you will learn in this lesson, two of them being accents: acute and grave accents and the smooth breathing mark.

The acute accent points up and to the right and is the most common accent, e.g. ἀδελφή. The other accent in this lesson is the grave accent, and it points down to the right. The basic rule for a grave accent is that an acute accent found at the end of a word will become a grave when another word follows it. Thus, when ἀδελφή is found in isolation, it will have an acute accent, but when it precedes another word like ἀδελφὴ κράζει, the acute accent becomes grave.

The second marking in this lesson is the smooth breathing mark. This is an apostrophe-like symbol that is placed above the first vowel in a word that begins with a vowel, e.g. ἀ δελφή, or next to an acute accent in ἄνθρωπος.

GrammarGrammar topic: Noun – Nominative case

Nouns are generally a person, place, thing, or idea. The Greek nouns in this lesson are all in nominative case, and they have masculine, feminine, and neuter genders (abbreviated masc, fem, and neut respectively). There are two concepts to explain here: case and gender.

Grammatical case can be defined as a marking on a noun that determines its function. For example, the -ος ending of the noun ἄνθρωπος marks it as the subject of the sentence. The subject is usually the one that does the action described by the verb, e.g. in ἄνθρωπος κράζει ‘a person is shouting,’ ἄνθρωπος refers to the person who is doing the shouting (translations are given in single quotes throughout). Marking the subject is the most basic function of the nominative case (abbreviated nom).

Although grammatical gender is sometimes associated with some kinds of meaning, it is best to think of grammatical gender as a fairly arbitrary category, except when it comes to words that refer to people. As an example, the word ἄρτος ‘loaf’ is a masculine word, but there is no reason why it should be masculine rather than neuter. While there are some patterns when it comes to gender, for the most part you will need to memorize the gender of a noun when you learn it.

MorphologyMorphology: Noun – Nominative singular

• Endings change when the gender changes