Numismatic and History Discussion Forums > Greek Coins Discussion Forum

Num. Greek 101, lesson #2

(1/1)

EmpressCollector:
Lesson #2 Nouns, titles and adjectives.

There are a couple of nice things about limiting our discussion to Greek for coins.  There is little need to learn verbs, which anyone who has studied Greek will tell you is the most difficult part of the whole endeavor.  Just think--no contract verbs, no principal parts, no participles, no infinitives, no voices, tenses or moods!

Most of the nouns are names of people and places or titles, and the list is limited.  Furthermore, there is little need to learn the various cases, as the only ones used with any deal of frequency are the nominative and genitive in the singular, and the genitive in the plural.

The nominative case

The nominative case is used to indicate the subject of a sentence.  It is used in titles and names.  Unlike in English, where word order determines what is the subject, in Greek, this is indicated by various case endings.

The genitive case

This is the case used to indicate posession.  It is also used to indicate separation in time or space of one thing from another.  It is also used to relate two things to each other, but only seldom on coins is it used in this way.  It is usually translated by the English prepositions, "of" or "from" followed by the noun which is in the genitive case.  Like with the nominative, the genitive is indicated by various case endings.

We will not cover the accusative, dative or vocative cases because they are not usually used on coins.

Gender

While the concept of grammatical gender is not a new one to most people who speak languages other than English, it is a strange concept for persons who only speak English, because English words have no gender.  Like German, Greek has three genders: Masculine, Feminine and Neuter.  The masculine gender is the one that is most frequently used on coins, the feminine being confined to attributes of empresses and goddesses.  Ethnic descriptions derived from place names appear only in the masculine forms on coins.

Declensions

Declensions are patterns that words follow when they change form depending on the case.  There are three declensions in Greek.  The first declension consists of words whose stem ends in A or H.  The second declension consists of words whose stem ends in O.  The third declension consists of words whose stem ends in a consonant (including the consonantal iota, a term which does not concern the numismatist).

Adjectives

Adjectives are words that modifiy nouns or pronouns.  In Greek they may come either before or after the noun which they modify.  They agree in gender, case and number with the noun they modify.  As a general rule, they are declined like nouns.

EmpressCollector:
I will post the actual declensions with their case endings here in the upcoming days.

decius:
To anyone interested in learning to read the ancients, look here...

http://www.textkit.com

Decius  :D

esnible:
I looked at the TextKit stuff but got frustrated.

I bought a textbook to teach myself Greek.  I felt like I was learning it, but I couldn't be sure because the workbooks did not have answer sheets.  After a few chapters I wasn't sure if I was learning it or just thought I was learning it.

I bought another textbook and found the same problem.

Navigation

[0] Message Index