Nouns - Nominative, Genitive, Article

Nouns
The Definite Article: ὁ, ἡ, τό
Case Uses: Nominative and Genitive

Nouns

Ancient Greek, like English, has several parts of speech into which words can be classified. The first part of speech under consideration is the noun, defined here as a word that denotes a person, place, thing, or idea. Here are some examples in English: spouse, home, money, freedom.

Noun Aspects

Every noun in Greek has three aspects that indicate qualities of that noun.

gender: A Greek noun can exhibit one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter. Note my qualification: a noun’s gender is grammatical but not necessarily biological. For example, ἀνήρ, “man”, is masculine in Greek, while γυνή, “woman”, is feminine. However, other noun genders are not intuitive (for example, ὁδός, “road”, is feminine; λόγος, “word”, is masculine; ποίημα, “poem”, is neuter). As a result, a noun’s gender must be memorized in its dictionary entry (on which see below). A noun’s gender cannot be changed, and it helps determine what adjective forms can modify the noun or what pronoun forms can replace the noun (as you’ll learn about in later modules).
case: A Greek noun can exhibit one of five core cases: nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, or accusative. A noun’s case indicates the noun’s function within its sentence. Because Greek is an inflected language, it does not rely on word order, like English does, to indicate how a word functions in a sentence. Rather, we inflect or decline a noun (that is, we change its endings to indicate its case) to reflect what it is doing in the sentence: whether it is a subject or direct object or the object of a preposition, etc. The noun’s case will also provide information about the form that the modifying adjective must take (more on this later).
number: A Greek noun can exhibit one of three numbers: singular (if there’s only one of the noun); plural (if there’s more than one of the noun); or dual (if there are exactly two of the noun; the dual becomes progressively rarer the further in time we progress, but it tends to be used with natural pairs like eyes or knees in early works like the Iliad and the Odyssey). A noun’s number can change depending on what is needed. Think, for example, about the difference between one “dog” and three “dogs” – same noun, but singular and plural number, respectively. A noun’s number is particularly important for subject-verb agreement, which you’ll learn about in later modules.

Every Greek noun has a gender, case, and number, and the possibilities are summarized as follows:

gender: masculine, feminine, neuter
case: nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative
number: singular, plural, dual

The act of identifying a noun’s gender, case, and number is called parsing. So, if I were asked to parse, for example, the noun ψυχή, my answer would be “feminine nominative singular.”

Dictionary Entry

As indicated above, essential information about a noun, like its gender, can be found in its dictionary entry. A typical dictionary entry will look like the following:

λόγος, λόγου, m. - word

Note the four parts of the entry:

the nominative singular form of the noun
the genitive singular form of the noun
the gender of the noun (denoted either by the letters M(asculine), F(eminine), or N(euter), OR the definite articles ὁ, ἡ, τό, on which see below)
the noun’s English definition

Every part of a noun’s dictionary entry must be memorized for a few reasons:

The nominative and genitive singular forms of the noun (and in particular the letters that end each) help us classify nouns into declensions, groups of nouns that share ending patterns to indicate different cases and numbers (on which see below).
The noun’s gender cannot necessarily be intuited from the nominative and genitive singular forms or the English definition. Note, for example, the following dictionary entry: ὁδός, ὁδοῦ, f. - road. The nominative and genitive singular endings of this noun (-ος and -ου respectively) look exactly the same as those of λόγος, λόγου above. However, ὁδός is feminine while λόγος is masculine. Only the dictionary entry can definitively indicate a noun’s gender.

Declensions

Greek is an inflected language and relies on word endings to reveal how a word functions within the sentence. The act of changing the ending on a noun is called declension; we decline a noun (i.e., change its endings) to reflect its different cases and numbers.

Declension can also refer to groups of nouns that share similar ending patterns to reflect those different cases and numbers. There are three major declensions, each with subsections:

The alpha/eta declension (also called first declension) exhibits a large number of alphas and/or etas in its endings and includes feminine and masculine nouns. Subsections of this declension include short alpha, long alpha, and eta variants.
The omicron declension (also called second declension) exhibits a large number of omicrons in its endings and includes nouns of all three genders.
The consonant declension (also called third declension) exhibits wide variety in its endings and includes nouns of all three genders.

You can determine the declension to which a noun belongs based on its genitive singular ending:

first declension nouns have a genitive singular in -ας or -ης
second declension nouns have a genitive singular in -ου
third declension nouns have a genitive singular in -ος, -εως, or -ους

There is one exception: some masculine nouns have a genitive singular in -ου but a nominative singular in -ας or -ης; these nouns belong to the first declension.

This information is as important to memorize with the dictionary entry as the noun’s gender, since the endings that can be attached to the noun in question depend wholly on the declension to which the noun belongs.

Identifying the declension is also important for understanding the noun’s stem. To determine the stem to which we need to add the noun endings, we look to the noun’s genitive singular form and take off its ending. (Note: this is a general rule that will have exceptions, notably in third declension nouns with genitive singulars in -εως or -ους. We’ll deal with those as the time comes!)

Practice Opportunity 1

For each of the following nominative singular nouns, look up their definitions in the master vocabulary list and indicate the noun’s gender and declension.

κλώψ
φυγή
οἶκος
πρᾶγμα
δῶρον

The Definite Article: ὁ, ἡ, τό

Case Uses: Nominative and Genitive

As indicated above, the case of a noun indicates its function within a sentence, and the case is indicated by the ending on the noun. The function of the specific case is called a use, so we can speak about, e.g., the “uses” of the nominative or the “uses” of the accusative.

The noun’s dictionary entry gives you two forms of the noun (nominative singular and genitive singular), so let’s explore what each case can do.

Nominative

The nominative is named after the Latin noun nomen, or “name.” Thus, the nominative is the “naming” case of a noun and gives us the first part of the dictionary entry, which we use to alphabetize our dictionaries.

There are only two uses of the nominative:

subject. The nominative case of the noun can make it function as the subject of a verb, either the actor of an active verb (e.g., “The army marches to the sea”) or the receiver of the action of a middle/passive verb (e.g., “The army is seen by the citizens”). (You’ll learn all about verbs and active versus middle/passive in a later module.)
predicate nominative. The simplest type of sentence using a linking verb (like the verb “to be”) to equate two things. For example, “The word is the gift.” In this sentence, the linking verb “is” connects “the gift” back to the subject “the word” and indicates that they refer to the same thing. While “the word” is the subject (and thus would be in the nominative case), “the gift” serves as a predicate nominative, a word or phrase in the predicate of the sentence (e.g., the part of the sentence that follows the verb in English) that gets linked back to the subject.
- The verb “to be” does exist in Greek, but we’ll learn about it at a later date. It is actually technically not necessary to form a full Greek sentence, since it can be left out but understood by context. So, the sentence “The word is the gift” can be rendered as follows: ὁ λόγος τὸ δῶρον. (More on “the” at the end of this module.)

There are quite a few uses of the genitive, but we’ll focus on only one for now:

possession. The genitive case is used to indicate who possesses or owns another noun. Often, the genitive in this instance can be translated with the preposition “of” (e.g., “the home of the man”) or with an apostrophe, as in English possession. Note the following Greek to English renderings:
- ἡ οἰκία τοῦ ἀνδρός, “The home of the man”
- οἱ λόγοι τῆς γυναικός, “The words of the woman”

When the genitive is used in this way,