3.3 Nouns: The Masculine — Epoché
What you will be able to do Decline a masculine noun of the commonest type through four cases and two numbers: φίλος , φίλου , φίλο , φίλε . Tell the three masculine types apart by their nominative singular: φίλος , υπολογιστής , άντρας . Read the final sigma as a signal: on a masculine noun it marks the subject, and it drops when the noun becomes the object. Recognise the vocative, the case for calling out to someone, which English lost: Γεια σου, φίλε! . Build the object of a verb correctly: Περιμένω τον φίλο μου. rather than the nominative you first learned. Prerequisites : 3.2 — the verb to be . Read 3.2 Grammar first; every sentence below has a verb in it, and most of them have that one. Until now you have met nouns in one shape only, the shape a dictionary gives. That shape is the nominative, the form a noun takes when it is the subject of the sentence. Greek has three others, and a noun changes its ending according to the job it is doing. This is the feature that makes Greek look difficult on paper and that makes it easy to read once it is in place, because the ending tells you the job and the word order does not have to. English has almost lost this. It survives in the pronouns — he against him , who against whom — and in the apostrophe-s of the possessive, and nowhere else. So an English speaker already knows what a case system does; what is new is that Greek applies it to every noun, not to seven pronouns. The pattern Masculine nouns fall into three types, named after their nominative singular ending. The word list at the end of this lesson gives one of each. Here is the commonest type in full. Case and job One More than one Nominative, the subject ο φίλος οι φίλοι Genitive, the possessor του φίλου των φίλων Accusative, the object τον φίλο τους φίλους Vocative, calling out φίλε φίλοι Read down the second column and listen to what the last letter is doing. The subject ends in a sigma. The object has lost it. The possessor has a different vowel before it. And the vocative, which is the form you use when you speak to the person rather than about him, has neither the sigma nor the article — you do not put the word for the in front of someone you are calling. The other two types differ only in the singular endings, and they differ in a way you can hear. Compare the three nominatives and the three accusatives. Type Subject Object Subject, more than one The first type ο φίλος τον φίλο οι φίλοι The second type ο υπολογιστής τον υπολογιστή οι υπολογιστές The third type ο άντρας τον άντρα οι άντρες One rule covers the whole of the singular and it is worth memorising in this shape: the masculine accusative singular is the nominative with the final sigma removed. That is true of all three types without exception. It is the single most useful fact in Greek noun morphology, because the accusative is the case you will need most often after the nominative, and it costs you nothing to form. The plurals are less uniform. The first type takes an ending that sounds like the vowel of machine ; the second and third take one that sounds like the vowel of bed followed by a sigma. In the accusative plural the first type adds a sigma to its plural ending — φίλους — while the other two use the same form as the nominative plural. So υπολογιστές and άντρες each do two jobs, and the sentence decides which. The genitive plural is the one form you will meet rarely in speech: φίλων , υπολογιστών , αντρών . It is common in writing and in fixed phrases, and everyday Greek prefers to rephrase. Notice that in all three types it ends the same way and that the stress has moved to the last syllable. How English says it English marks the same distinctions, but with word order and with prepositions instead of endings. The dog bit the man and the man bit the dog use identical words and mean opposite things, because English puts the subject first. Greek can put either first, because the endings have already said which is which. That is why Greek word order is free in a way English word order is not, and it is also why a beginner who reads Greek left to right as though it were English will occasionally get a sentence exactly backwards. The genitive is the case an English speaker will recognise most easily, because English still has it. Πηγαίνω στο σπίτι του φίλου μου. contains the Greek for my friend's house , and the Greek noun carries an ending where the English noun carries an apostrophe and an s. The difference is that Greek also uses the genitive after certain prepositions and in expressions of time, so the English label possessive is too narrow. Read the ending as meaning of , and you will be right nearly always. The vocative has no English equivalent at all. English calls to people by using the ordinary form of the noun and relying on intonation: hello, friend . Greek changes the word. Γεια σου, φίλε! uses a form that cannot appear anywhere else in the sentence, and using the nominative instead would sound as though you were describing the person to a third party rather than speaking to him. For the first type the vocative is distinct; for the second and third types it is the same as the accusative, which is one thing fewer to learn. One habit will save you weeks. When you learn a masculine noun, say the nominative and the accusative together, as a pair. The accusative is the form that appears after most verbs and after every preposition in the language, so in running text it is at least as common as the nominative, and a learner who knows only the dictionary form will be building half the sentence out of the wrong shape. Real sentences Eighteen lines from the public corpus, arranged by case. Read the Greek aloud, name the case of the masculine noun in it, and then read across. Greek English The case, and why Ο Τομ είναι φίλος μου. [1] Tom is a friend of mine. nominative: the noun is what the sentence is about Ο φίλος σου είναι εδώ. [2] Your friend is here. nominative as subject, with the possessive after it Αυτός