Jubal Learns Ancient Greek

[Jubal]

I'm learning Ancient Greek! I'm not a great linguist and it's all a bit miserable, but anyway, this will be for a) moaning about learning Greek and also b) sharing resources I come up with on the way.

[Jubal]

Information Post I: Articles and Cases and Stuff

So basically sentence order in Greek doesn't matter much because it's case based. That means that the job a word does in a sentence is encoded into the word, not its sentence position.

Example
In English: "The cat sat on the mat" and "The mat sat on the cat" are different sentences. The subject of the verb (what does the doing) comes at the start, then the object.

In Greek on the other hand, there would be different words for "cat object" and "cat subject", "mat object" and "mat subject". We'll denote these with obcat and subcat, obmat and submat.

So... "The subcat sat on the obmat" and "The obmat sat on the subcat" are now the same sentence, as is "Sat on the obmat the subcat". The word order is irrelevant, because what each noun does is encoded into it.

So...
The upshot of all this is that Ancient Greek has lots of different forms of its nouns in different cases. This is further complicated by the fact that just about everything has one of three genders for no especially obvious or good reason.

The cases are:
Nominative - usually, the subject of the sentence, nice and easy
Accusative - the object of the sentence, similarly simple
Genitive - A case used for possession or attributes (People of Exilian, a block of cheddar, Glaurung's gold)
Dative - A case used for an indirect object (He gave the cereal to the Cowman)
Vocative - used when the object is being addressed directly ("Jubal, the pangolins have arrived!" would have Jubal in the vocative)

Each case and gender and number has a suitable definite article (and probably also an indefinite article but we haven't learned those yet!) So there's a "masculine singular vocative" and a "feminine plural dative" etc, leading to over twenty different words replacing "the" in English.

Resources

Sporcle
Masculine cases based on articles quiz
Feminine definite articles quiz
Feminine cases based on articles quiz

[Glaurung]

Good luck with the language learning - going from a language (English) which has pretty much lost cases and grammatical gender to one which still has both is not easy. I'll be interested to hear how it goes. Hopefully it will get easier with practice, and at least (I assume) you won't have to translate anything into Greek.

This is further complicated by the fact that just about everything has one of three genders for no especially obvious or good reason.

This is pretty much what I think of grammatical gender whenever I run into it. It becomes especially obvious when you find otherwise parallel words in closely related languages that have different genders!

In Greek on the other hand, there would be different words for "cat object" and "cat subject", "mat object" and "mat subject". We'll denote these with obcat and subcat, obmat and submat.

Just checking: in Greek it's the end of the word that's mutated for cases, isn't it? Some languages (notably Welsh) modify the start of words, but I think that would make my head hurt even more.

Genitive - A case used for possession or attributes (... Glaurung's gold)

The 's formation is about the only survivor in modern English of the very similar case structure that existed in Old English a thousand years ago.

You didn't say anything about articles - I'm guessing those are excitingly complicated too.

[Jubal]

Added a final sentence on that - yes, the articles also vary by case and gender and singular/plural. It's the end of the word that's mutated for everything so far - there are definitely places in Greek where the starts of words are modified though, I think the past tense of verbs involves sticking an epsilon on the front of them.

Actually, we get tested by having to translate into Greek rather than from Greek - presumably because it ensures we actually know the grammar rather than doing what I do all the time when translating and managing to read quite quickly but ignoring the rote-learned grammar because a lot of the above is usually extremely obvious from context (if there's a slave, and an ox, and one is driving another, it's pretty unlikely to be the ox driving the slave). Indeed I'm fairly sure context-based reading is how most people read most languages most of the time, though there is of course a lot to be said for really knowing the grammar at times.