Ancient Greek/Glossary of Grammatical Terms

This page is under severe development. 25% Glossary of Grammatical Terms As some of you may not have a solid grounding in English grammar, it is important to have a solid set of definitions to reference while learning Ancient Greek. Grammatical terms are linked to the glossary for your convenience. Alternatively, you can read this section first to make sure you are familiar with the basic structure. Noun Definition: a noun is a person, place, or thing (e.g. man, room, and table). Common Noun: general name for nouns. The word person could refer to any person. The word city could refer to any city. Common nouns aren’t capitalized unless they’re the first word in a sentence. Proper Noun: a proper noun refers to a specific person, place, or organization and is indicated by the capitalization of its initial letter; e.g. Socrates, Athens, or the Lyceum. Concrete Noun: any person, place, thing, or animal that you can experience with your five senses (e.g., aroma is concrete, as you can detect it with smell). Abstract Noun: an abstract noun refers to a concept rather than an actual physical person place, or thing; e.g. justice. Collective Noun: a word that names a group of people, animals, or things, like a bunch of grapes (ἀσταφίς) or age-mates (ἡλικία). Adjective Basic Definition: a descriptor that modifies or is grammatically linked to a noun, e.g. red. Adjectives can modify nouns directly (e.g. the red ball rolls). This is called an attributive adjective. Alternatively, adjectives can be linked to the noun by a linking verb,See linking verb below e.g. Socrates is smart. In the latter case, smart is a predicate adjective (also known as a predicate nominative). In English, adjectives modify nouns based upon word order. Attributive adjectives modify then noun that they directly precede while predicate adjectives follow a linking verb. In Ancient Greek, the word order does matter, but it is more flexible because Greek is inflected language. As such, the endings of the words (case endings) establish the relationship between noun and adjective as well as word order. There is still, however, a marked word order difference between attributive adjectives and predicated adjectives: Attributive adjectives may come between the article and the noun: come after the article when the article follows the noun: come after the article when the article is repeated both before and after the noun: Predicate adjectives may come in any other position in the sentence beside one of these three. One common predicate adjective position is as follows: Article An article, abbreviated art., is any of a small set of words or affixes (such as a(n) and the in English) used with nouns to limit or give definiteness to the application. These words represent a specific object, depending on the situation, but a is less specific than the. Articles combine with nouns to form noun phrases and typically specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun phrase. In English, "the" and "a" are the definite and indefinite articles, respectively. Ancient Greek articles, however, also carry additional grammatical information such as gender, number, and case of the nouns they accompany, but are only definite. Articles are part of a broader category called determiners, which also include demonstratives, possessive determiners, and quantifiers. Pronoun A pronoun (e.g., I, we, thou, you, he, she, it, they) replaces a noun to avoid repetition. Like nouns, pronouns can refer to people, things, concepts, and places. Most sentences contain at least one noun or pronoun. ἐγὼ ἐβᾰ́πτῐσᾰ ῡ̔μᾶς ῠ̔́δᾰτῐ, αὐτὸς δὲ βᾰπτῐ́σει ὑμᾶς ἐν πνεύμᾰτῐ ᾰ̔γῐ́ῳ — I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit (Mark 1.8). Verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. In English, three tenses exist: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; and future, to indicate that an action will be done, expressed with the auxiliary verb will or shall. For example: Lucy will go to school. (action, future) Mike Trout became the American League (AL) Most Valuable Player (MVP) in 2014. (occurrence, past) the Universe is expanding. (state of being, present) Every language discovered so far makes some form of noun-verb distinction,[1] possibly because of the graph-like nature of communicated meaning by humans, i.e. nouns being the "entities" and verbs being the "links" between them.[2] The word verb comes from Latin verbum 'word or verb' and shares the same Indo-European root as word.[3] Adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by answering questions such as how, in what way, when, where, to what extent. This is called the adverbial function and may be performed by an individual adverb, by an adverbial phrase, or by an adverbial clause. Adverbs are traditionally regarded as one of the parts of speech. Modern linguists note that the term adverb has come to be used as a kind of "catch-all" category, used to classify words with various types of syntactic behavior, not necessarily having much in common except that they do not fit into any of the other available categories (noun, adjective, preposition, etc.).[1] Conjunction A conjunction is an uninflected linguistic form that joins together sentences, clauses, phrases, or words. Greek conjunctions work like those in English, but they are used much more often and in a more subtle way. Greek tends to connect sentences and clauses rather than separate them. While in English we often mark the end of a sentence with a period, Greek prefers to use conjunctions such as "and", "but", or "therefore" to chain ideas. References