Noun: 1st Declension & 2nd declension

GrammarNoun – 1st Declension masculine & 2nd declension feminine

We have seen that 1st declension nouns are usually feminine, and 2nd declension nouns are normally masculine or neuter (6.4.3), but this has been an oversimplification. Declensions are not, strictly speaking, reflective of grammatical gender, even if there are strong tendencies.

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MorphologyNoun – 1st Declension masculine & 2nd declension feminine

• 2nd declension fem endings are identical to their masc counterparts, but they take the fem article.
• The same principle also applies to most forms of 1st declension masc nouns – the article is masc, but the endings are the normal 1st declension endings. The exceptions are the nom, gen, and voc sg:
• Instead of -η for the fem 1st declension nom sg, the ending is -ης for the masc forms (e.g. ἡ ἀδελφ-ή vs. ὁ δεσπότ-ης).
• Note: This -ης ending is identical to the gen sg form in fem 1st declension nouns, as in ἀδελφ-ῆς.

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PhonologyEnclitic rule 6 (Circumflex on the ultima)

Another of Carson’s (1985) enclitic rules is the following: if a word before an enclitic has a circumflex on the final syllable, the enclitic will lose its accent, even if the enclitic is two syllables. This rule is counterintuitive because we would expect that a two-syllable enclitic would retain its accent when the preceding word has a circumflex on the ultima. The final syllable on the enclitic would then make the circumflex three syllables back from the end of the combined word. However, what we expect is not what we find, as we see in Matt 5:3: αὐτῶν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν ‘Theirs is the kingdom of heaven’. The enclitic ἐστιν does not have an accent even though it has two syllables and is preceded by a circumflex on the ultima (see Phonology A for an overview of the enclitic rules).

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