Conjunction: καί ‘and, also’

GrammarConjunction – καί ‘and, also’

Like prepositions, conjunctions (abbreviated conj) will often have a lot of overlap between languages, but the nearest equivalent will not be a one-to-one match. Their meaning is often quite broad, especially a very common conjunction like καί.

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SyntaxConjunction – καί

The basic function of καί is to connect two words together having the same part of speech:

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SemanticsConjunction – καί (1 – Connecting; 2 – Additive)

Some dictionaries and grammars claim that καί has many possible interpretations. Another way to view this is that καί itself does not specify any particular relationship between the two things it connects. This is different from a word like but which contrasts the two things it connects. A conjunction like and or καί, on the other hand, only says that the two words are semantically related, but they could be connected by being opposites, being similar, or having some other relationship.

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PhonologyVerbs and Recessive Accenting

While the placement of a noun’s accent in nominative case must be memorized, verbs’ accents are recessive, which means the accent goes as close to the beginning of the word as possible. The reason we say “as possible” is that Greek only allows accents to go back to the antepenultima, the third to last syllable, as we learned in 2.3.3. According to the rules we learned in 3.1.3, it is only when the vowel on the ultima is short that the accent can go all the way back to the antepenultima. When the vowel is long on the ultima, the accent can only go as far back as the penultima.

In all the verb forms seen so far, the final vowel has been long, so the accent has always been on the penultima. For example, ἐσθίω has three syllables, but because the final vowels ω (in ἐσθίω) and ει (ịn ἐσθίει and ἐσθίεις) are both long, the verb must be accented on the ι. Accent placement for verbs, then, is dependent upon the length of the vowel in the final syllable; we cover this in more detail in Phonology A.

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