Definite article

MorphologyDefinite 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

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SyntaxNoun – 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 *).

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SemanticsNoun – 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.

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PhonologyProclitics & 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).

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