Noun: Nominative case

GrammarNoun – Nominative case

Nouns are generally a person, place, thing, or idea. The Greek nouns in this lesson are all in nominative case, and they have masculine, feminine, and neuter genders (abbreviated masc, fem, and neut respectively). There are two concepts to explain here: case and gender.

Grammatical case can be defined as a marking on a noun that determines its function. For example, the -ος ending of the noun ἄνθρωπος marks it as the subject of the sentence. The subject is usually the one that does the action described by the verb, e.g. in ἄνθρωπος κράζει ‘a person is shouting,’ ἄνθρωπος refers to the person who is doing the shouting (translations are given in single quotes throughout). Marking the subject is the most basic function of the nominative case (abbreviated nom).

Although grammatical gender is sometimes associated with some kinds of meaning, it is best to think of grammatical gender as a fairly arbitrary category, except when it comes to words that refer to people. As an example, the word ἄρτος ‘loaf’ is a masculine word, but there is no reason why it should be masculine rather than neuter. While there are some patterns when it comes to gender, for the most part you will need to memorize the gender of a noun when you learn it.

fromLesson 1.1

MorphologyNoun – Nominative singular

• Endings change when the gender changes

fromLesson 1.1

MorphologyNoun – Nominative plural

• The masc nom pl ending has an o-class vowel (like the singular; see 1.1.4.1).
• The fem ending has an α (η and α endings are common for fem).
• A final ι in the masc and fem endings mark the nom pl.
• The endings for the masc and fem are identical to the corresponding articles, except that the articles have a rough breathing mark.

fromLesson 4.2

SyntaxSubject-verb agreement with neut pl subjects

The normal expectation is for plural subjects to exhibit agreement with their verb in number, that is, plural subjects would have plural verbs. This expectation is not always met:

fromLesson 4.2

PhonologyAccents & smooth breathing mark

Most Greek words have accents. You might be used to this if you speak a language like Spanish, or it might seem a bit foreign if you speak a language like English. Even English, though, has accents, though they are not graphically represented. There are three types of accent markings you will learn in this lesson, two of them being accents: acute and grave accents and the smooth breathing mark.

The acute accent points up and to the right and is the most common accent, e.g. ἀδελφή. The other accent in this lesson is the grave accent, and it points down to the right. The basic rule for a grave accent is that an acute accent found at the end of a word will become a grave when another word follows it. Thus, when ἀδελφή is found in isolation, it will have an acute accent, but when it precedes another word like ἀδελφὴ κράζει, the acute accent becomes grave.

The second marking in this lesson is the smooth breathing mark. This is an apostrophe-like symbol that is placed above the first vowel in a word that begins with a vowel, e.g. ἀ δελφή, or next to an acute accent in ἄνθρωπος.

fromLesson 1.1

PhonologyLong and short vowels

As we saw with the genitive and dative, long vowels can change the accents (3.1.3), e.g. ὁ ἄνθρωπ-ος, τοῦ ἀνθρώπ-ου. Vowel length is also important for the circumflex accent – it is never found on an (exclusively) short vowel (i.e. ε or ο), and a long, accented penultima must take a circumflex if the ultima is short (e.g. δοῦλος). Because of these rules, it is important to know which vowels are long and which are short; the following table distinguishes all of Greek’s vowel sounds based on length:

Diphthongs were introduced in the introduction as a complex vowel sound made up of two individual sounds. They are almost always considered to be long, except for when αι or οι end a word by themselves (e.g., οι is short in ἄνθρωποι but long in ἀνθρώποις). In such cases, they are ordinarily short.

fromLesson 4.2