I have no worked my way through chapter 8 of Mounce, which covers nominative and accusative nouns (subject and direct object forms), genitive and dative nouns (possessive and indirect object forms), and prepositions.
Greek word forms are a bit more complicated than in English. Most of the time in English, a word has the same form now matter how it is used. Our pronouns are one of the rare exceptions. For example,
- He drove the car.
- The car took him somewhere.
The word “he” changes to “him” when the pronoun changes from subject to object. The word “car” does not change when it makes the same switch. In Greek, the word would change. These changes in Greek are the nominative and accusative cases. Furthermore, Greek words are divided into three declensions, of which I’ve only learned two, first and second declension. The basic first declension words end in alpha (α) or eta (η) and are feminine in gender. The basic second declension words end in omicron (ο) and have either masculine or neuter gender. In Greek, gender doesn’t mean the words are manly or girlish or what-not, but it selects which kinds of articles and word endings are used. (This is something I’m already familiar with from learning German, where the word for girl, Mädchen, is actually a neuter gender word because of the suffix -chen, which means little.)
Greek, like English, also has special forms for possessive words, called the genitive case. For example, in English:
- That is my car.
- That is Gabe’s car.
Here “my” is the possessive form of “I” and and “Gabe’s” is the possessive form of “Gabe.”
Finally (or at least so far as I’m concerned thus far), Greek has a special case for indirect objects called the dative case. These words show up in situations like:
- I drive a car of awesomeness.
Here, “I” is the subject, “car” is the direct object, and “awesomeness” is the indirect object.
In addition to learning all of this, I have been learning about the definite article (the definite article in English is “the”). Greek does not have an indefinite article (in English the indefinite article is “a”). But the article in Greek is helpful in identifying which form a particular word is in because certain case forms in Greek are ambiguous.
In the picture at the top, you can see a table I drew on my whiteboard in my office showing all the first and second declension noun cases and articles for all three genders, nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative cases, and singular and plural forms. I’ve actually changed that table a bit since taking that photo to better identify where cases or articles are similar.
I’m now up to 113 flash cards (96 for vocabulary) in Anki and am steadily improving my speed at reading through 1 John in Greek.
Cheers.
