Nouns Overview
Table of contents
Nouns
Ancient Greek, like English, has several parts of speech into which words can be classified. We just learned about verbs in Module 1. The next 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.
1. 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 units).
2. case: A Greek noun can exhibit one of five core cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, or vocative. 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 a modifying adjective or replacing pronoun must take (more on this later).
Here are some quick examples of the uses of each case:
- nominative: subject, predicate nominative
- genitive: possession, agent
- dative: indirect object
- accusative: direct object
- vocative: direct address [relatively rare]
We’ll learn about each of these cases and uses in the coming units.
3. 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 units.
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” (more on this later).
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, respectively:
- 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, which we’ll learn about in the next unit)
- the noun’s English definition
Every part of a noun’s dictionary entry must be memorized for a few reasons:
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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).
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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 long feminine, short feminine, and masculine 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!)