Definite article – Nominative singular

ObjectivesLearning objectives

• Proclitics and the rough breathing mark
• The morphology, syntax, and semantics of the definite article
• > 1 This common semantic definition is known to be inadequate in the linguistics literature. For a thorough discussion of what makes a noun a noun, a verb a verb, and an adjective an adjective, see Baker (2003).

VocabularyVocabulary

The nouns learned in this lesson appear with their form of the definite article. Just as Greek nouns have different case endings depending on their gender, so also the definite article takes on different forms depending on the gender of the noun. From now on, nouns are presented with the definite article to indicate the gender of the noun you are learning. The word ‘the’ is normally included in the gloss, but it is not included where the proper name in English would normally disallow the.

There is no separate line for this lesson’s grammar topic, namely ὁ ‘the’. Grammatical items that serve as grammar topics are not included in the vocabulary tables.

PhonologyPhonology: Proclitics & rough breathing mark

The word the may be pronounced with or without stress in English: THE man spoke and the-man spoke are both options (when discussing English words, italics are used). In the latter case, the article does not have an accent but falls on the following word. This is called a proclitic, which is a word without its own accent that is pronounced with the following word. Two forms of the Greek definite article are also proclitics, namely ὁ and ἡ.

The rough breathing mark is written the same as the smooth breathing mark except that the apostrophe-like character is pointing the other way. This signals that an ‘h’ sound should be pronounced before the vowel (though not all pronunciation systems utilize this sound; see the introduction), e.g. ὁ ὀφθαλμός where ὁ is pronounced [ho], and ὀ is just [o] (brackets [] are used to refer to sounds).

MorphologyMorphology: Definite article – Nominative singular

• Article form changes depending on case and gender
• Form of article is similar to the case ending, e.g. ὁ ≈ -ος, ἡ = -η, τό ≈ -ον

SyntaxSyntax: Noun – Definite article

The article comes before the noun it modifies, just like in English, e.g. ὁ ἄνθρωπος and not *ἄνθρωπος ὁ (syntactically ungrammatical examples are marked with *).

SemanticsSemantics: Noun – Definite article (1 – Uniqueness)

Not all languages have a definite article like the, and there is a lot of debate about what the article means within English and across other languages. Indeed, the definite article is not used the same way in English and Greek (see Semantics B for an in-depth discussion). These caveats notwithstanding, definite articles are normally associated with the idea of uniqueness. It is the speaker’s way of telling the hearer that there is just one unique thing the noun is referring to in the context. For example, Jesus tells a man in John 4:50 to go because his son will live. The next line says that the man (ὁ ἄνθρωπος) believed the word that Jesus spoke to him. In this context, the article is used because there is a unique man in the context that John is referring to – the man Jesus was speaking with. The article signals that the ἄνθρωπος is the same one that was just being talked about.