Noun – Accusative plural

ObjectivesLearning objectives

• The morphology of the name Ἰησοῦς and the semantics of names with articles
• The morphology of the acc pl (masc, fem, neut)

VocabularyVocabulary

NoteἸησοῦς ‘Jesus’

In Greek, Jesus’s name is Ἰησοῦς. As a name, it has no plural forms, and the genitive and dative forms are identical, which means there are only 3 forms to learn: Ἰησοῦς (nom), Ἰησοῦ (gen/dat), and Ἰησοῦν (acc).

Names in Greek are more often found without the article, but the article is far more common with Greek names than English names. Because of this, you should not equate ὁ Ἰησοῦς (which occurs about 40% of the time) with ‘the Jesus’. The article in Greek does not mean the same thing as English the, so you cannot assume the two are equivalent (see Semantics B for further discussion).

MorphologyMorphology: Noun – Accusative plural

• The masc and fem forms have ς at the end.
• The final vowel (the diphthong -ου) of the masc form is long, so the accent-shifting rules apply (see 3.1.3).
• The fem ending has the characteristic α of the fem pl.
• The neut form is the same in the nom and acc.
• All articles are identical to the endings except for the initial τ.