3.1 Three Genders and the Article — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name the three genders of Greek nouns and give the article that goes with each: ο πατέρας , η μητέρα , το φως . Guess the gender of an unfamiliar noun from its ending, and say how often the guess will be right. Read the plural articles Οι γονείς μου είναι στην Αυστραλία. and Τα παιδιά δεν έχουν σχολείο σήμερα. off the front of a noun. Use the article where Greek uses it and English does not, as in Η ζωή είναι όμορφη. and Το φως είναι ζωή. . Stop translating the English a , which Greek writes with a different word and often not at all. Prerequisites : 2.6 — the false friends. Read 2.6 Cognates first if you have not; the grammar volume assumes you can read Greek off the page without spelling it out. This is the first lesson of the grammar volume, and it takes the word that stands at the front of most Greek sentences. You have been reading it since the script volume without being told what it was doing. It is the definite article, it has three forms in the singular and two in the plural, and choosing between them is the first thing a Greek sentence asks of you. English has one definite article and it never changes: the man, the woman, the light, the parents. Greek has a small paradigm instead, and the form it uses tells you which of three classes the noun belongs to. Those classes are called genders, and the word is a nuisance, because two of the three have nothing to do with sex and the third only partly does. A table is masculine, a door is feminine, a child is neuter. Nothing about tables, doors or children is being claimed. The gender is a grammatical label, and the reason to learn it is that everything attached to the noun — the article, the adjective, later the pronoun — has to carry the same label. The pattern Here is the whole of what you need today. Three singular articles, two plural ones, and a rule of thumb about endings. Gender The article, one thing The article, more than one A noun to hang it on Masculine ο πατέρας is the father Οι γονείς μου είναι στην Αυστραλία. in the plural ο σκύλος — the dog Feminine η μητέρα is the mother Οι γονείς μου είναι στην Αυστραλία. in the plural η γάτα — the cat Neuter το φως is the light Τα παιδιά δεν έχουν σχολείο σήμερα. in the plural το σπίτι — the house The two plural articles are worth a second look, because the masculine and the feminine share one form and the neuter keeps its own. That is the first sign of something that will run through the whole of Greek grammar: the neuter behaves differently from the other two, often enough that it is worth treating as a separate case rather than as a third of three. Now the endings. A Greek noun usually announces its gender in its last two letters, and the correspondence is good enough to be worth learning as a rule with exceptions rather than as a tendency. Ending Gender it usually signals Examples from this lesson -ος , -ας , -ης masculine ο σκύλος , ο πατέρας , ο άντρας -α , -η feminine η γάτα , η πόλη , η πόρτα -ο , -ι , -μα neuter το σπίτι , το παιδί , το βιβλίο Three warnings about that table, all of them worth taking now rather than later. First, the rule is about endings, not about meaning: η πόλη ends in the feminine way and is feminine, and no argument about cities is involved. Second, there are genuine exceptions, and two of them are in the sentences below. The word for light, το φως , ends in a way that looks masculine and is neuter; the word for a doctor, ο γιατρός , ends in the masculine way but takes whichever article fits the person, so a woman doctor is η γιατρός , with the feminine article in front of the identical noun. Third, a noun that ends in a way the table does not cover is not rare enough to ignore, and the honest habit is to learn every noun with its article attached, exactly as the word list below prints them. That last habit is the practical content of this lesson. Do not learn the word for a dog and then wonder afterwards what its gender is. Learn the two words together, as one thing, in the shape ο σκύλος . The article costs you one syllable and saves you the whole of the agreement system later on, because once the article is right, the adjective and the pronoun follow from it. How English says it English has no gender on its nouns at all, and this is the point at which an English speaker has to do something genuinely new. It is not difficult in the way that a new sound is difficult; it is difficult in the way that an extra column in a form is difficult. Every noun now carries one more piece of information, and that information is not predictable from the world. There is no way to reason from a door to the feminine. You look at the ending, and if the ending does not decide it, you learn it. The reverse problem is smaller but catches everyone. English requires an article far less often than Greek does. Where English says life is beautiful with no article at all, Greek says Η ζωή είναι όμορφη. , with the feminine article standing in front of the abstract noun. Where English says light is life , Greek says Το φως είναι ζωή. , and puts the neuter article on the first noun. Abstractions, whole classes of things, most countries and most personal names take the article in Greek and do not take it in English. When you are in doubt, the Greek habit is to put the article in. There is one more mismatch, and it goes the other way. English also has an indefinite article, a , which it requires in front of a singular countable noun: a doctor , never doctor . Greek has a word that does that job, and you will meet it properly in the lesson on numbers, because it is the same word as the number one and it changes for gender like an adjective. But Greek uses it far less than English does. Ο Τομ είναι γιατρός. has no word for a in it at all; the English translation has to supply one. Counting the words in the two columns of the table below is the quickest way to see how often this happens. Real sentences Every line below was written by a speaker and taken from