Greek 1.1: First and Second Declension Nouns

Gender, Number, Case

Legendum: Boas et al., Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek, pp. 40-46; Dickey, An Introduction to the Composition and Analysis of Greek Prose, 35-43.

This is the inaugural post in a series on how to read Greek. I am assuming the following knowledge that can easily be gleaned from different places on the Internet: a.), the alphabet; b.), diphthongs, and c.) the meaning of accentuation marks, particularly rough and smooth breathing. It is not necessary to have mastered the rest of Greek accentuation from the get-go so long as one can read the letters and knows these breathing marks. (For the record, I’ve been studying Ancient Greek for a full decade and I still make regular mistakes in accentuation when I’m writing a word by hand, so, it’s okay if it doesn’t make perfect sense the first time.) I am also unbothered about which pronunciation system the student elects to use; just pick one and stick to it. I was raised on “Erasmian” pronunciation, which is probably somewhat closer to the more Archaic and Classical pronunciations of, say, Homer and much later of Plato; but if your primary interest is Koine, you’re going to end up pronouncing Greek more similarly to Modern/Demotic, as some of the shifts going on in Greek today were already underway in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. Again, the important thing to do is to pick one and stick to it for purposes of learning, and then play around with it later.

This knowledge in place, we jump in with nouns. A noun is a person, place, or thing. Greek, like most Indo-European and Semitic languages, has various helps for the reader to identify what nouns, and related parts of speech like articles, adjectives, pronouns, and participles, are doing in the sentence: specifically, grammatical gender, number, and case. Every Greek noun can be evaluated based on its gender, number, and case, and synopses of nouns inflected by these conditions constitute systems called declensions. Greek has three declensions (Latin has five). In this post, we will meet the first and second.