Noun – 3rd Declension neuter plural

ObjectivesLearning objectives

• Word stems and inflectional morphology
• The morphology of 3rd Declension neut pl nouns

VocabularyVocabulary

MorphologyGeneral Greek: Inflectional Morphology

Even though we interpret words as whole units, some words are made up of smaller pieces. As an example, the two sibling terms, ἀδελφός and ἀδελφή, ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’ share the part ἀδελφ-. These words only differ in the ending which gives the case, gender, and number. The part that does not give information about the case, gender, or number is called the stem of a word. So, these two words share the same stem, namely ἀδελφ, and they differ in how they are inflected for case, gender, or number. Linguists call these kinds of endings inflectional morphology, which is the morphology that indicates grammatical information about the word. When you take away this inflectional part, you are left with the stem of a word (for more on word composition, see Morphology A).

MorphologyMorphology: Noun – 3rd Declension neuter plural

• Since the nom/acc pl ends in -α, we see the τ of the stem.
• The gen pl has the normal -ων ending (which often shifts the accent; see 3.1.3).
• For the dat pl, the ending is σι with a movable ν, and the σ causes the τ of the stem to drop. Both the σ and ι are characteristic of the dat pl (e.g. τέκν-οις).