Lesson 1.1 · Getting started
What you're reading
By the end of this course you will be able to open the Bible and
read it in the language it was written in, without a translation
standing between you and the page. You need no Greek to start, and
no grammar training. If you can read this sentence, you can begin.
The language you are learning is called Biblang.
It is the Greek New Testament
with one Biblang word standing for every word of the original, in
the original's order, each one built on the stem of the word it
stands for, with every grammatical fact still marked. Only the
spelling is new — and the spelling is the part that used to take
people years.
Why this is learnable
Languages are hard mostly because of exceptions. This one has
almost none in its endings. Every word is built the same way:
a stem — the word's dictionary form — with small
markers added to the end, one per job, always in
the same order.
Here is a whole word, taken apart:
logword
oits gender
sit is the one doing something
logos — "a word", as the subject of a sentence. That
is the entire mechanism of the language. Every lesson after this one
teaches you one more marker.
How to use the course
- Go in order the first time. Each lesson is
short and teaches exactly one thing. Nothing later assumes
anything you haven't met.
- Do the practice boxes. Most lessons end with
three questions and a hidden answer. Two minutes each; they are
what makes the endings stick.
- Keep the reader open in another tab. Tap any
word in it and you get the meaning, the parts it is made of, and
what each part is doing. You cannot get stuck.
- The grey notes are optional. Where a lesson has
a box marked In the Greek, that is for the curious: what
the original does at this point, and why. Skipping every one of
them costs you nothing.
In the Greek — what a beginner normally faces
Ordinarily, learning to read the Greek New Testament means
learning a new alphabet, three noun declensions with several
sub-patterns each, verbs with six principal parts that can change
the shape of the stem beyond recognition (λύω, ἔλυσα, λέλυκα…),
contract verbs whose vowels merge with their endings, and a set
of accent rules on top. Most of that effort goes into
recognising words rather than reading them.
Biblang keeps all the grammar Greek marks — case, gender, number,
tense, voice, mood, person — and drops only the irregularity in
how those are spelled. That is why a course that would normally
take a year of evenings fits into the lessons on the left.
Open the reader
Start Lesson 1.2 ›
Lesson 1.2 · Getting started
The letters
There is no new alphabet to learn. Words are written with the
letters you already read, and each letter always makes the
same sound. There are no silent letters and no words that
look one way and sound another. Read exactly what you see.
The five vowels
Two more vowels, with a bar
Two vowels are written with a bar over the top. The bar means
hold it longer, and it makes the vowel a different letter,
not a decoration:
Where you will see the bar. Inside a
word's stem, where it is simply part of the spelling
(zō-, fōt-, prōt-) — and on
one verb ending you will meet in Part 4. Nowhere else. If you are
typing and cannot make the bar, write e: and
o:.
The consonants
These are read exactly as you would expect in English:
b d f g
k l m n
p r s t
v x z
Four are worth a word. g is always hard, as in
go — never soft as in gem. r is
tapped or rolled, as in Spanish or Scottish English.
x says ks, as in axe. And
v is the v of van.
You will meet v in two places. It sits inside a
number of ordinary words — basilevos "king",
archierevos "chief priest", david
"David" — and it is also the letter for "ye", the plural
you: vis "ye", agapavō "ye
love". Those come in Lessons 3.4 and 4.2.
Read these aloud
logos · theos · kosmos · agapas · pneumem · christos
word · God · world · love · spirit · Christ
You have just read six words of the Bible's own vocabulary. Say
them out loud once; the sounds are all there is to the alphabet.
In the Greek — which letters these stand for
Each letter above corresponds to exactly one letter of the Greek
alphabet, so a Biblang spelling can always be turned back into its
Greek one:
The bar is doing real work here: Greek has two e letters
(ε and η) and two o letters (ο and ω), and they are
different letters in different words. e and
ē, o and ō keep them apart,
so nothing is lost.
v is the one letter with no Greek letter of its own —
and it is not an invention either, because the sound was
already there. By New Testament times the u of the pairs
αυ and ευ had come to be said as a v when a vowel
followed. That is why βασιλεύς "king" is basilev-
here and Δαυίδ is david: the spelling simply writes
what the word had come to sound like. (β was drifting the same way
over the same centuries, from a b toward the v
it is in Greek today.)
Because no Greek letter is transliterated as v, the
letter was also free to take as the marker for "ye" without ever
colliding with a word.
Lesson 1.3 · Getting started
Two-letter sounds
A few sounds are written with two letters, exactly as English
writes sh or ch. Each pair below is a single
sound, and each is always spelled that same way.
Three consonant pairs
Vowel pairs
When two vowels sit side by side they usually glide together into
one sound. Nothing is hidden — you say both letters, quickly:
So kai (and) rhymes with eye,
tou (of the) is too, and huios
(son) starts hwee-.
An h at the start
Some words begin with an h, and it is pronounced, just
as in English house: huios (son),
hoti (because), hagios (holy),
hōras (hour). Words that don't have it don't take it.
Where the stress goes
Stress the last syllable of the stem — the part of the word before
the grammar markers. So a·GA·pas,
LO·gos, an·THRŌ·pos. It never changes the
meaning of a word, so if you get it wrong nothing breaks; it is
there to help you read aloud.
In the Greek — single letters and breathing marks
th, ch and ps are the
single Greek letters θ, χ and ψ, and x is ξ. Written
with two of our letters, they still count as one letter of the
original.
The h is Greek's "rough breathing" — a small mark
like an apostrophe over the first vowel of a word (ὑιός, ὅτι,
ἅγιος) rather than a letter of its own. Here it is simply
written as the letter it sounds like.
Greek also writes accents (ά ᾶ ὰ) on almost every word. They
were added centuries after the New Testament was written, and
they almost never change which word is meant, so they are not
written here. Lesson 9.4 lists the two places where that costs
you something.
Practice
Read each aloud, then check the sound you expected:
ouranoseirēnashagios
Show the answers
- oo-ra-NOS — sky, heaven. The
ou is one sound, oo.
- ei-RĒ-nas — peace.
ei as in eight, and the bar makes a long e.
- HA-gi-os — holy. The
h is pronounced; the g is hard.
Lesson 1.4 · Getting started
How a word is built
This is the one idea the whole language rests on. Learn it now and
every later lesson is just filling in a blank.
Every word starts with its stem
The stem is the word itself — its meaning, with no
grammar attached. It is what you would look up in a dictionary, and
it never changes and never moves. It is always the first thing you
see:
Grammar is added to the end
Everything grammatical — who is doing it, when, how many — is a
small marker added after the stem. Never in front, never in
the middle. So the front of a word is always the word itself, and
you can look anything up on sight:
agaplove
agender
nit is what is being loved
agapan — "love", as the thing something is being done
to. Change one marker and you change one fact; nothing else in the
word moves.
The markers never blur together
Two markers side by side stay two markers. Nothing merges, nothing
is dropped, no letter goes missing at the join. What you see is
exactly what is there:
luloose
ahe does it
m“I”
eit was going on
luame — "I was loosing". Four pieces, four facts, in
that order, every time.
The two shapes to expect
Nouns take up to four pieces and verbs up to five, always in this
order. Don't memorise this — it is a map of the lessons ahead, and
you will learn one box at a time:
NOUN = stem + gender + plural + job
VERB = stem + voice + person + mood + tense
Part 2 does the noun, one box per lesson. Part 4 onwards does the
verb.
In the Greek — where the irregularity went
Greek does not work this way. Its endings fuse several facts into
one syllable that cannot be split (-ουσιν is "they", present,
active, indicative all at once), the vowels of a stem change from
tense to tense (λύω, ἔλυσα, λέλυκα), past tenses add a syllable at
the front of the word (the augment: ἔ-λυε), and
contract verbs merge their last vowel with the ending
(ἀγαπά-ω → ἀγαπῶ).
All of that is absorbed in a single step: choosing one stem per
dictionary word. ἀγαπάω, ἠγάπησεν and ἀγαπᾷ are one stem
agap- here; ὁράω / εἶδον / ὄψομαι — three unrelated
Greek roots that share one meaning, "see" — collapse to one stem
too. After the stem, everything is regular, which is why there are
no principal parts to learn in this course.
Practice
Where does the stem end in each of these?
logosagapanluame
Show the answers
log + os. The stem means "word".agap + an. The stem means "love".lu + ame. The stem means "loose";
the other three letters are three separate facts.
Lesson 2.1 · Nouns
Endings do the work
In English, the order of the words tells you who did what:
The dog bit the man.
Swap the two nouns and you change who got bitten.
This language does it differently. The ending of
each word tells you its job, so the words can stand anywhere in the
sentence and still mean the same thing. Look at the last letter:
Same word, five jobs, five forms. That is the single most
important thing in Part 2, and the next lessons take those five
jobs one at a time.
Reading a noun
Every noun you meet is built out of three things, and you read them
left to right:
theGod
ogender (Lesson 2.2)
nthe job (Lessons 2.3–2.7)
You already know how to find the stem: it is the front of the word.
The rest is two letters, and this part of the course is about
those two letters.
The word you'll see in the reader.
Tap a noun in the reader and it names the job with a traditional
grammar word — nominative, accusative,
genitive, dative, vocative. Those are
just labels for the five jobs above, and each lesson tells you which
one it is teaching. You never have to use the words yourself.
In the Greek — the same idea, spelled many ways
Greek marks these same five jobs, and this is the reason Greek
word order can be so free: the endings carry the meaning, so an
author can put a word first for emphasis without confusing anyone.
Biblang keeps that order untouched (Lesson 8.4).
The difference is how many spellings there are. Greek marks the
job with a different set of endings for each of its three
declensions, plus sub-patterns within them — λόγον, ἀγάπην,
βιβλίον, πόλιν, βασιλέα are all "the one it is done to". Here
there is one letter, n, for all of them.
Lesson 2.2 · Nouns
Gender
Straight after the stem comes a single vowel. It says which of
three classes the word belongs to. The three classes have
traditional names — masculine,
feminine and neuter — but the
class has very little to do with male and female. It is simply a
label the word carries, like der, die and
das in German.
It comes with the word
You do not choose the gender of a noun; it is part of the word, and
it never changes. agap- "love" is feminine in every
sentence it ever appears in. Words for people usually match the
obvious sense — patēros "father" is masculine — but
plenty of others do not, and that is normal rather than strange:
hodos — a road, feminine.
teknem — a child, neuter.
Nobody is claiming a road is female. It is a class,
not a description.
Why it matters
Two reasons, and both pay off later. First, it is one of the three
things that lets you tell words apart at a glance. Second, the words
that go with a noun — "the", and describing words — have to
carry the same vowel, which is how you know which words
belong together in a long sentence. That is Part 3.
In the Greek — genders and declensions
Greek nouns have exactly these three genders, and it is the same
gender for the same word, so nothing here is invented: ἡ ὁδός
"road" really is feminine and τὸ τέκνον "child" really is neuter.
What Greek does not do is show the gender with one
consistent letter. Gender is tangled up with the noun's
declension: most -ος nouns are masculine, but ὁδός is feminine;
most -η and -α nouns are feminine, but προφήτης "prophet" is
masculine; third-declension nouns (πόλις, βασιλεύς, πνεῦμα) give
no reliable signal at all, which is why Greek dictionaries print
the article beside every noun. Here the vowel says it outright.
Practice
Which class does each word belong to, and how do you know?
kosmoszōaspneumem
Show the answers
- Masculine —
kosm·o·s, the vowel after the stem
is o. "World".
- Feminine —
zō·a·s, the vowel is a.
"Life".
- Neuter —
pneum·e·m, the vowel is
e. "Spirit", or "wind".
Lesson 2.3 · Nouns
Who is doing it
The first job, and the one you will meet most often. A word ending
in -s is the one doing the action —
what English grammar calls the subject of the sentence.
theGod
omasculine
sthe one doing it
So in any sentence, hunting for the word that ends in
-s tells you who the sentence is about:
agapatō tos theos ton kosmon.
God loves the world.
The verb comes first here, which is perfectly normal, and it does
not matter: theos ends in -s, so God is
the one doing the loving.
Every class does it the same way
The neuter class is the one exception, and it gets its own lesson
(2.9) — for now, just know that neuter words don't take the
-s.
Its grammar-book name is the nominative.
That is what the reader will call it when you tap a word. It also
marks the word that is something: in "God is love", both
"God" and "love" take this ending.
In the Greek — where the -s comes from
The -s is not arbitrary. Greek's commonest
masculine subject ending is -ος (λόγ-ος, θε-ός, κόσμ-ος), and its
final sigma is exactly this letter, so logos and
λόγος are the same shape. Where Greek's other patterns diverge
(ἀγάπη, πόλις, πνεῦμα), Biblang keeps the -s
anyway.
Practice
Which word is doing the action?
agapatō tos anthrōpos ton kosmonton theon agapatō tos anthrōpos- What would "the word" look like as the one doing something?
Show the answers
anthrōpos — the person. ("The person loves the
world.")anthrōpos again. The word order changed but the
endings did not, so the meaning did not either.logos — stem log-, masculine
o, then s.
Lesson 2.4 · Nouns
Who it's done to
A word ending in -n is on the
receiving end: the thing being loved, seen, given, made. English
grammar calls it the object.
kosmworld
omasculine
nthe one it is done to
With the previous lesson you can now read a complete sentence, and
read it in any order it comes:
agapatō tos theos ton kosmon.
God loves the world. — theos does the
loving, kosmon is loved.
ton kosmon agapatō tos theos.
Exactly the same sentence, rearranged for
emphasis. The endings decide, not the order.
The pair to know by heart
One letter apart, every time. If you can see the difference between
-s and -n at the end of a word, you can
follow the backbone of any sentence in the Bible.
Its grammar-book name is the accusative.
It has one other common use: after some of the little words in
Lesson 8.1, such as eis "into" and pros
"toward" — pros ton theon, "toward God".
In the Greek — a familiar letter
Greek marks the object with -ν in a great many words: τὸν λόγον,
τὴν ἀγάπην, τὸν υἱόν. ton theon is πρὸς τὸν θεόν
letter for letter, which is a fair sign of how close the two
sit here.
Practice
Translate the pieces:
tos huios agapatō ton patēronagapatō tos patēros ton huion- Which word is the son in each?
Show the answers
- "The son loves the father."
huios ends in
-s, so he does the loving.
- "The father loves the son." Now
patēros is
doing it and huion is on the receiving end.
huios in the first, huion in the
second — same word, different job, one letter's difference.
Lesson 2.5 · Nouns
Saying “of”
A word ending in -u means
of that thing. It is how the language links one noun to
another:
tem fōtem tou kosmou
the light of the world (Matthew 5:14)
kosmworld
omasculine
uof
It also does possession
There is no separate word for "my", "his" or "the church's". You
say "of" and put the owner in this form, after the thing owned:
Notice tou theou: both the word for "the" and the noun
take the -u, because they belong together. You will
meet that agreement properly in Lesson 3.1.
Its grammar-book name is the genitive.
It covers more than ownership: of, from,
belonging to, about. When a phrase resists you,
try plain "of" first — it fits most of the time.
In the Greek — the range of this ending
Greek writes it -ου, -ης, -ος and several other ways, all
collapsed here to a single -u. Its range in Greek is
genuinely wide: possession (τοῦ θεοῦ), source ("from"), material
("made of"), time within which, and comparison ("greater
than"). Biblang does not narrow that range — the same one
ending covers the same spread of senses, and context decides,
exactly as it does in Greek.
Practice
- What is
tos logos tou theou?
- What is
tos theos tou logou?
- How would you say "the son of the Lord"? (Lord =
kuri-, masculine.)
Show the answers
- "The word of God."
logos ends in -s
so it is the main thing; theou ends in
-u, so God is what it is "of".
- "The God of the word" — the two have swapped roles. Endings,
not order.
tos huios tou kuriou.
Lesson 2.6 · Nouns
Saying “to” and “with”
This job adds no letter at all. The word simply
stops after its gender vowel. It means to, for,
with, by or in — whichever fits.
theGod
omasculine
nothing added: to, for, with
So the four masculine forms you now know run
theos · theon · theou ·
theo. That last one, ending bare in its gender vowel,
is this lesson's form.
In real verses
It is the form that follows en "in", and the form for
the person something is said or given to:
en pneume kai alētheia
in spirit and truth (John 4:24)
legata auto
he said to him (John 20:28)
Its grammar-book name is the dative.
It is doing several English prepositions' work at once, which is why
the reader glosses it as "to, for". If "to" doesn't fit a phrase,
try "with" or "in" before looking anything up.
In the Greek — three old cases in one
Greek's dative absorbed what were once three separate cases —
the dative proper ("to/for"), the instrumental ("with, by means
of") and the locative ("in, at"). That is why one Greek ending
covers so much ground, and Biblang inherits exactly that range
rather than splitting it up.
Greek spells it -ῳ, -ῃ, -ι and more, often with a tiny iota
written underneath the vowel (the iota subscript: τῷ
λόγῳ). That mark is easy to miss on the page and is not written
here; the bare gender vowel does the job instead.
Practice
What job is each word doing?
theotheouagapa
Show the answers
- "To / for God" — nothing after the gender vowel
o.
- "Of God" — the
-u from the last lesson.
- "To / for / with love" — feminine
a, then
nothing. (Careful: agapas with the -s
would be love doing something.)
Lesson 2.7 · Nouns
Speaking to someone
The last of the five jobs, and the easiest to spot. A word ending
in -r is being spoken to — you are
calling or addressing that person directly:
kurilord
omasculine
rI am speaking to you
Kurior, sōzasar.
"Lord, save!" (Matthew 8:25)
Patēror nu tor en toi ouranoi
Our Father in the heavens (Matthew 6:9)
English does this with punctuation and tone — "John, come here"
versus "John came here". Here it is a letter, so it is never
ambiguous.
Remember this letter. The
-r turns up once more, on the end of a command
(Lesson 6.3): sōzasar above is "save!". Both are the
speaker addressing someone directly — a person, or an action they
want done. Wherever you see a final -r, somebody is
being spoken to.
Its grammar-book name is the
vocative.
In the Greek — a case that only half exists
Greek has this form too (κύριε, πάτερ, Ἰησοῦ), but only in the
masculine and feminine singular, and even there many words simply
reuse the subject form. Sometimes it is introduced by the particle
ὦ, the "O" of older English Bibles. Biblang gives every word a
distinct -r, so an address is always visible.
Lesson 2.8 · Nouns
One or many
To make any noun plural, slip an i in
before the job letter. Nothing else changes:
logword
omasculine
imore than one
sthey are doing it
So the whole plural set is the singular set with an i
slotted in:
And the same for any other word: agapas →
agapais, anthrōpon →
anthrōpoin, bibliem →
biblieim.
In real verses
en toi ouranoi
in the heavens (Matthew 6:9) — ouran·o·i,
plural, "to/for/in" form.
huper teiu probateiu
for the sheep (John 10:11) — probat·e·i·u,
neuter, plural, "of".
In the Greek — no separate plural set
Greek does not have a plural marker. It has an entirely separate
set of endings for the plural, different again in each declension:
λόγος/λόγοι, λόγον/λόγους, ἀγάπη/ἀγάπαι, πόλις/πόλεις. Learning
them roughly doubles the number of endings to memorise. Here one
letter does it, and the job letter after it stays exactly the
same.
Practice
- What is
anthrōpois?
- What is
anthrōpoin?
- What is
tou anthrōpou, and how many people is
that?
Show the answers
- "People", doing something —
anthrōp·o·i·s.
- "People", on the receiving end — the same word with
n instead of s.
- "Of the person" — one person, because there is no
i before the u.
Lesson 2.9 · Nouns
Neuter words
Neuter words — the ones whose gender vowel is e — work
exactly like every other word with one difference: they do not
distinguish doing it, done to and spoken
to. All three are a single form ending in
-m.
So a neuter word has three forms where other words have five. If
you see a word ending -em or -eim, it is
neuter, and it is either doing the action or having it done — the
rest of the sentence tells you which:
pneumem tos theos.
God is spirit. (John 4:24) — theos
takes the -s, so pneumem is what he
is.
Vis avō tem fōtem tou kosmou.
You are the light of the world. (Matthew 5:14)
In the Greek — this is not a simplification
Greek spells the neuter subject and object identically in every
declension, singular and plural — τὸ πνεῦμα is both, and always
has been. So a Greek reader has the same three-way form and works
out the role from context. Biblang does not resolve what the Greek
leaves open; it says the same thing the same way.
Practice
- Is
onomem doing something, or having something
done to it?
- What is
teu euangelieu?
- What is
biblieim?
Show the answers
- Impossible to say from the word alone, and that is correct —
"name" is neuter, so one form covers both. The sentence around
it decides.
- "Of the gospel" — neuter
e, then the
-u of Lesson 2.5. (It opens Mark 1:1.)
- "Books", subject or object —
bibli·e·i·m, with the plural i from
the last lesson.
Lesson 2.10 · Nouns
The whole noun table
You have now met every piece of a noun. Here they are together —
and this is the entire noun system of the language. There is no
second pattern, no list of exceptions, and nothing else to come:
Read as a formula, a noun is:
NOUN = stem + gender + plural + job
And here is one word taken all the way through, in all three
genders. Every noun in the Bible follows this table by swapping the
gender vowel for its own:
This table is generated by the reader
itself — the same rules that spell the text you read. It
cannot fall out of date, and the same table sits behind the reader's
Grammar button while you read.
What this buys you
Everything else in the noun family reuses this one table. The word
for "the" (Lesson 3.1), describing words (3.2), pronouns like "he"
and "this" (3.5), and even verbs turned into describing words
(7.2) all take these same endings. Learning this table once is most
of the work of the whole course.
Practice
Say what each word is doing. Stems: log- word,
agap- love, pneum- spirit.
agapaislogoiupneume
Show the answers
- Feminine, plural, doing it — "loves" as the subject.
- Masculine, plural, "of" — "of the words".
- Neuter, singular, "to / for / with" — "in spirit", as in
John 4:24. (Nothing after the gender vowel.)
Try a chapter of 1 John
Next: the word “the” ›
Lesson 3.1 · Words that go with nouns
The word “the”
The word for "the" is the shortest word in the language: the stem
t-, with the endings you learned in
Part 2 — nothing new whatsoever.
tthe
omasculine
sdoing it
tos "the", with a masculine word that is doing
something. Change the noun's job and "the" changes with it:
The two words rhyme, and that is not an accident: "the" and its
noun always carry the same gender vowel, the same plural
i, and the same job letter. This is called
agreement, and it is the single most useful reading
aid in the language — in a long sentence, the words that match
belong together.
There is no word for "a" or "an".
A noun on its own is "a word": logos. With
tos in front it is "the word". So the presence or
absence of this little word is meaningful — worth noticing rather
than skipping over.
In the Greek — an old friend
Greek's article is ὁ / ἡ / τό, and almost all of its forms
already begin with τ: τόν, τοῦ, τῷ, τήν, τῆς, τό, τῶν, τοῖς. The
stem t- is that τ made regular, which is why
ton theon is πρὸς τὸν θεόν letter for letter.
Greek also has no indefinite article, and it uses the definite
one in places English would not — before abstract nouns, before
names, and to turn almost anything into a noun. Biblang keeps the
article exactly where the Greek has it, so what you see is the
author's own choice, not a translator's.
Practice
- Fill in:
___ agapan — "the love", as the thing
being loved.
- What is
tou huiou?
- Why is
tem pneumem spelled with -em
twice?
Show the answers
tan agapan — feminine a, done-to
n, on both words.- "Of the son."
- Because "spirit" is neuter, and neuter words use one form
for doing-it and done-to (Lesson 2.9). "The" agrees, so it
takes the same ending.
Lesson 3.2 · Words that go with nouns
Describing words
Words like good, holy, eternal and
great take exactly the same endings as nouns, and they
agree with the word they describe: same gender,
same number, same job.
tos poimēnos tos kalos
the good shepherd (John 10:11)
Every word in that phrase ends the same way, because all three
belong together. Now put the whole phrase on the receiving end of a
verb and all three change together:
A describing word takes its noun's gender, not its own
This is the one thing to get straight. A noun's gender is fixed
forever; a describing word has no gender of its own and simply
borrows whichever one it needs:
zōan aiōnian
eternal life (John 3:16) — "life" is feminine and
on the receiving end, so "eternal" is feminine and on the
receiving end too.
Reading tip. When a sentence gets
long, matching endings are your thread. Words that end alike are
working together; a word that ends differently belongs to a
different part of the sentence.
In the Greek — agreement, minus the classes
Greek adjectives agree the same way, and this is one of the
things that makes Greek readable at all. What Greek adds is
paperwork: adjectives come in patterns of their own (καλός, καλή,
καλόν versus ἀληθής, ἀληθές versus πᾶς, πᾶσα, πᾶν), and the
adjective's endings need not look like its noun's — ἡ ὁδὸς ἡ
ἀγαθή pairs a feminine noun in -ος with a feminine adjective in
-η. Here the vowel is the same vowel on both.
Practice
- Make "the good word" (
agath- good) as the thing
being done to.
- In
tan agapan tan kalan, how many words are
feminine?
- What tells you
aiōnian goes with
zōan and not with something else?
Show the answers
ton agathon logon.- All three —
t·a·n, agap·a·n,
kal·a·n. They agree completely.
- They match: both feminine, both singular, both on the
receiving end.
Lesson 3.3 · Words that go with nouns
Bigger and biggest
To say -er or -est, add one marker between the
stem and the gender vowel. There are two, and they are the same two
for every describing word in the language:
meggreat
otermore (–er)
omasculine
sdoing it
The result is still a describing word, so it still ends with the
gender and job of whatever it describes:
ton megoteron logon, "the greater word", on the
receiving end.
Nothing is irregular here. English
swaps the whole word — good, better, best — and so does
Greek. In Biblang the comparative of agathos is
agathoteros, every time, with no separate word to
learn.
In the Greek — where these two markers come from
They are Greek's own: -ότερος and -ότατος (σοφώτερος "wiser",
ἁγιώτατος "holiest"). Greek also has a second pattern in -ίων /
-ιστος and a set of suppletive forms — μέγας/μείζων/μέγιστος,
ἀγαθός/κρείσσων, πολύς/πλείων — which is where the memorising
comes in. Biblang builds all of them from the plain word.
A handful of Greek comparatives long ago became words in their
own right — πρῶτος "first", πρεσβύτερος "elder" — and those are
kept as ordinary words here, with no marker.
Lesson 3.4 · Words that go with nouns
I, you, we, ye
Four little words, each a stem plus the same job endings you
already know:
English lost the difference between one "you" and several, so this
course uses the old words you and ye to keep them
apart. It matters more often than you would think — many of the
Bible's promises and commands are addressed to a group, and here you
can see it.
nis agapanō, hoti autos prōtos agapata nin.
We love, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)
nis is "we" doing the loving; nin is "us"
being loved. Same word, one letter apart, exactly like
theos and theon.
Learn these four letters now:
m, s, n,
v. They come back in Part 4 as the letters
that say who is doing a verb. One set of sounds, learned once, used
twice.
In the Greek — four suppletive stems
Greek's personal pronouns are among its most irregular words:
ἐγώ / ἐμοῦ / μοι / με for "I", and σύ / σοῦ / σοί / σέ, ἡμεῖς,
ὑμεῖς. Biblang gives each one a fixed stem
(mi-, si-, ni-,
vi-) and then runs it through the ordinary endings.
The stems themselves are simply chosen — this is one of the few
corners of the language where a form has to be learned rather than
worked out.
The -i drops before the "of" ending, giving
mu and su — which land exactly on Greek's
μου and σου.
Lesson 3.5 · Words that go with nouns
He, she, it, this, that
These are ordinary stems with ordinary endings — there is genuinely
nothing new in this lesson except three words to know:
Every other form follows the noun table:
auton "him", autou "of him",
auto "to him", autois "they",
autoin "them".
The gender is the word's, not the person's
"He" and "she" here are just the masculine and feminine of one
word. Which you get depends on what is being referred to — and
because a thing can be masculine or feminine (Lesson 2.2),
autos can perfectly well mean "it":
Houtas atō tas entolas tas emas
This is my commandment (John 15:12) — "commandment"
is feminine, so "this" is feminine.
Where autos means
"himself". Standing beside a noun rather than replacing it,
this word emphasises: autos prōtos agapata, "he
himself loved first" (1 John 4:19).
In the Greek — the same three words
They are αὐτός, οὗτος and ἐκεῖνος, and they behave in Greek much
as they do here, agreeing in gender, number and case with what
they point at. Greek's οὗτος shifts its vowels as it declines
(οὗτος, αὕτη, τούτου, ταύτης); Biblang holds the stem still.
Lesson 3.6 · Words that go with nouns
My, your, his
There are no separate words for my, your,
his or our. You use the "of" form from Lesson 2.5,
placed after the thing owned. Literally you say "the word of me":
It works for any owner at all, not just pronouns — put any noun in
its "of" form and you have possession:
Tor kurior mu kai tor theor mu.
"My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28) — note the
-r endings: Thomas is speaking to him.
Word order. The owner normally
follows the thing owned, so when you hit a short word ending in
-u, look at the word just before it: that is what it
belongs to.
In the Greek — same construction
Greek does this identically: ὁ λόγος μου, τὸ ὄνομά σου, ἡ ψυχὴ
αὐτοῦ. It also has a set of adjectives for "my" and "your" (ἐμός,
σός), which behave like ordinary describing words and appear here
as ordinary describing words too — tas emas "my", in
John 15:12.
Lesson 3.7 · Words that go with nouns
Who, which, someone
Two more small stems, both declining like everything else in Part
2 and 3.
h- — who, which, that
This is the word that hooks a second clause onto a noun: "the man
who came", "the message which we heard".
tas angelias han akouanē
the message which we have heard (1 John 1:5)
Read the ending and you know its job inside its own clause:
han is on the receiving end, so it is the message that
was heard, not the message that did the hearing.
tin- — who? someone
The same word does duty for the question "who?" and the vague
"someone", exactly as it does in Greek:
tinos, tinan, tinem. Which
one is meant is a matter of the sentence — a question mark, or a
statement.
Careful with tin-. It
looks like the word for "the" with an n in it, but it
is its own stem. ton is "the"; tinon is
"someone".
In the Greek — the accent that decided it
Greek writes both words with the same letters, τις, and tells
them apart by an accent alone: τίς with an acute is "who?", τις
without is "someone". Biblang does not write accents, so it writes
one word. Greek readers rely on the same context you will —
printed accents were added long after the New Testament was
written. Lesson 9.4 comes back to this.
The relative pronoun is Greek's ὅς, ἥ, ὅ, whose rough breathing
is the h- here.
Practice
- In
tos logos hon akouanē, who heard what?
- Why is it
hon and not hos?
- What is
tan agapan han echanō? (ech-
have)
Show the answers
- "The word which we have heard."
logos is the
subject of the main clause; hon is what was
heard.
- Because inside its own clause it is on the receiving end of
"heard" — the
-n says so. It is masculine
because it points back at logos.
- "The love which we have."
Lesson 4.1 · Verbs
How a verb is built
A verb is built exactly like a noun: a stem, then markers on the
end. It just has more of them, because a verb carries more
information — including who is doing it, which in English
takes a separate word.
VERB = stem + voice + person + mood + tense
Here is one, whole:
luloose, untie
athe subject does it (5.1)
m“I” (4.2)
ōnow (4.3)
luamō — "I loose". Four letters after the stem would
be five, except that one box is empty: a plain statement adds
nothing for mood, which is why this word has four pieces and not
five. You will meet that box in Part 6.
A verb can be a whole sentence
Because the person is built into the word, you do not need a
separate "I" or "he":
agapamō.
I love. — one word, complete.
When a separate word for "I" or "he" does appear, it is
adding emphasis, not filling a gap:
mis agapamō is "I love".
Reading order
The two markers you will lean on most are the last
letter (when it happened) and the letter just
before the middle (who did it). Get into the habit of
reading a verb from both ends:
In the Greek — why verbs are the hard part
A Greek verb marks the same facts, but fuses them into endings
that cannot be taken apart: -ουσιν says "they", present, active
and indicative all at once, and a different fusion applies in
every tense. On top of that the stem itself changes — λύω, ἔλυσα,
λέλυκα, ἐλύθην are one verb — and past tenses add a syllable to
the front (ἔ-λυον). Learning a Greek verb traditionally means
learning six "principal parts" for it.
Here there are none: one stem, and one marker per fact, always
spelled the same and always in the same order.
Lesson 4.2 · Verbs
Who is acting
One letter in the middle of the verb says who is doing it. Four of
the six are the pronoun letters you already met in Lesson 3.4:
Six letters, and they never change — not in any tense, not in any
part of the language. Learn these six and you will always know who a
sentence is talking about.
A memory hook.
mi → m, si →
s, ni → n,
vi → v. The pronouns and the verb letters
are the same sounds. Only t (he/she/it) and
l (they) are new.
In the Greek — six endings per tense, times many tenses
Greek marks person too, but with a different set of six endings
for each tense and voice: -ω -εις -ει -ομεν -ετε -ουσιν in the
present active, -ον -ες -ε -ομεν -ετε -ον in the imperfect,
-μαι -σαι -ται… in the middle and passive, and so on. That is
dozens of forms to recognise. Here it is one letter, in one
place.
Practice
- Who is acting in
pisteuavō?
- Who is acting in
legatō?
- Make "we love" from
agap-.
Show the answers
v — ye, more than one person. "Ye believe."t — he, she or it. "He says."agapanō.
Lesson 4.3 · Verbs
Happening now
The last letter of a verb says when. If it ends in
-ō, it is happening now — or happening
repeatedly, or generally true:
agaplove
athe subject does it
the/she/it
ōnow
That is the whole present tense. Here it is for all six persons —
and note that only the middle letter moves:
Three English tenses in one
English splits this into "I love", "I am loving" and "I do love".
One form covers all three here, and the context decides which
sounds best in English:
nis agapanō, hoti autos prōtos agapata nin.
We love, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)
agapanō ends in -ō: it is going on now.
agapata ends in -a: that one is past, and
it is the next lesson but one.
In the Greek — a tense about kind, not just time
Greek's present is really about ongoing action — action
viewed as in progress — and only secondarily about the present
moment. That is why it is often best translated "is loving"
rather than "loves", and why it turns up in past narrative
("and he says to them…") where English would use a past tense.
Lesson 4.6 takes this up properly.
Lesson 4.4 · Verbs
Was happening
Change the last letter to -e and the
action moves into the past — and stays ongoing there. It is
English's "was doing", "used to do", "kept doing":
That last one is the single most useful word in this lesson, and it
opens the most famous sentence in the New Testament:
En archa ate tos logos
In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1)
Read it piece by piece: en "in", archa
"beginning" in its to/for/in form, ate "was",
tos logos "the Word" doing the being. You have now read
a clause of the Bible without help.
In the Greek — the augment
Greek marks this tense by adding a syllable to the
front of the verb — the augment: λύει "he looses"
becomes ἔλυε "he was loosing", and ἀγαπᾷ becomes ἠγάπα. It is one
of the reasons a Greek word can be hard to look up: the front of
the word, where you would start searching, is not the word.
Biblang never puts anything in front of the stem. The same fact
is marked at the end instead, so the front of every word is always
the word itself.
Practice
- What is
agapale?
- What is
ane?
- Which is now and which is past:
pisteuamō,
pisteuame?
Show the answers
- "They were loving" —
l is "they",
e is ongoing past.
- "We were." The verb "to be" with no stem at all; Lesson 4.9
explains why.
pisteuamō is "I believe" (now);
pisteuame is "I was believing".
Lesson 4.5 · Verbs
Simply happened
A verb ending in -a is the plain
past: it happened. Not "was happening" over a stretch of time —
just happened, taken as one whole event. It is the tense
that carries most of the storytelling in the Gospels:
dakruata tos Iēsus.
Jesus wept. (John 11:35)
The shortest verse in the Bible, and you can now read all of it:
dakru·a·t·a — weep, he, past — and tos Iēsus,
Jesus, doing it.
Houtōs gar agapata tos theos ton kosmon
For God so loved the world. (John 3:16)
Its grammar-book name is the aorist
— a Greek word meaning "unbounded", because it does not say anything
about how long the action took. English usually renders it with a
simple past: loved, said, went.
In the Greek — the tense that changes the stem most
The aorist is where Greek verbs are least predictable. Regular
verbs add -σα (ἔλυσα), but a large group forms it from a
different stem entirely (λέγω → εἶπον, ὁράω → εἶδον, φέρω →
ἤνεγκα), and these have to be memorised one at a time. It is the
main reason Greek students learn principal parts.
All of that irregularity lives in the choice of stem here, which
is made once per word — so legata is visibly the same
word as legatō, where εἶπεν and λέγει are not.
Practice
- What is
pisteuala?
- What is the difference between
agapate and
agapata?
- Read:
legata tos Iēsus.
Show the answers
- "They believed."
l they, a past.
- Both are past.
-e presents it as going on
("he was loving"); -a presents it as a single
event ("he loved"). Next lesson is about exactly this.
- "Jesus said."
Lesson 4.6 · Verbs
Why there are two pasts
You have met two past tenses, -e and -a,
and they do not differ in when. They differ in how the
writer is looking at the action. This idea is called
aspect, and once you have it, a lot of the Bible
reads differently.
The same choice exists in English, though we make it with extra
words: "I read the letter" versus "I was reading the letter". A
Bible writer makes it with one letter, and makes it constantly.
Why it is worth noticing
Because the choice is often the point. A writer who says "he
kept on asking" rather than "he asked" is telling you
something about the person. When a verse feels oddly emphatic in an
English Bible, this is frequently why.
How to read it. Don't try to force
an English tense out of it. Ask instead: is the writer showing me a
process, or an event? -e and -ō show
process; -a shows an event.
In the Greek — aspect is the backbone of the verb
In Greek, aspect is more basic than time. Outside plain
statements — in commands, wishes and "so that" clauses — the
tenses do not mark time at all, only aspect: a present imperative
asks for ongoing behaviour ("keep loving"), an aorist imperative
asks for the act ("love!"). This is why Greek grammars insist that
"tense" is a misleading name for what Greek is really marking.
Biblang keeps the distinction exactly where Greek makes it. The
same six endings appear on commands and subjunctives, and they
carry the same aspectual meaning there.
Lesson 4.7 · Verbs
Will happen
A final -i puts the action in the
future:
kai poiami vin halievoin anthrōpoiu.
and I will make you fishers of men. (Matthew 4:19)
Everything in that line is now readable: poiami
"I will make", vin "you" (more than one, on the
receiving end), halievoin "fishers" — plural, on the
receiving end — and anthrōpoiu "of men", plural, "of".
Four down, two to go. You now know
four of the six endings that go on the end of a verb:
ō now, e was going on, a
happened, i will happen. Two more in the next
lesson.
In the Greek — the future is its own stem
Greek forms the future by adding -σ- to the verb stem, which
collides with whatever consonant is already there and changes it:
πέμπω → πέμψω, ἄγω → ἄξω, ἐλπίζω → ἐλπιῶ. It is also the one
Greek tense with no aspect choice — there is a future, and that
is that, which is exactly how it works here too.
Lesson 4.8 · Verbs
Has happened
Two endings left, and they are a pair. A final
-ē — the long bar vowel — says the
action happened and the result is still standing. English
usually says "has":
tas angelias han akouanē apo autou
the message which we have heard from him
(1 John 1:5)
And one step further back
A final -elē does the same thing from
a point in the past: it had happened, and the result was
standing then. luamelē, "I had loosed". It is rare —
fewer than a hundred times in the whole New Testament — so
recognise it and move on.
This is the one ending with a bar on it.
Everywhere else the bar means you are still inside the stem. At the
very end of a verb, ē means "has happened".
In the Greek — a famous example
Greek's perfect is built by doubling the first sound of the stem
(λύω → λέλυκα, τελέω → τετέλεσται) — another change at the front
of the word.
Its meaning is worth the effort, though. The word Jesus speaks
from the cross, τετέλεσται (John 19:30), is a perfect: not "it
finished" but "it has been finished, and stands finished". In
Biblang that word is Telitē — and the
-ē is doing the same work.
Practice
All six tense endings, on agap- with "he":
- Which means "he loves"?
- Which means "he has loved"?
- Which means "he will love"?
Show the answers
agapatō — ō.agapatē — ē. (Compare
agapate, "he was loving": the bar is the whole
difference.)agapati — i.
Lesson 4.9 · Verbs
The verb “to be”
"Am, is, are, was, were" is the commonest verb in the Bible, and
here it is the simplest word in the language: it has
no stem at all. It is pure grammar — just the
endings you already know, with nothing in front of them.
athe subject does it
the/she/it
ōnow
atō — "he is". Every form follows the ordinary rules;
there is simply nothing before them:
Learn this table and a startling amount of the Bible opens up:
Vis avō tem fōtem tou kosmou.
Ye are the light of the world. (Matthew 5:14)
tos theos agapas atō.
God is love. (1 John 4:8)
In that second one, notice that both theos and
agapas take the doing-it ending. That is normal with
"to be": it links two things rather than acting on one, so both
sides get the same ending.
In the Greek — the most irregular verb of all
εἰμί is irregular in every Greek textbook: εἰμί, εἶ, ἐστίν,
ἐσμέν, ἐστέ, εἰσίν in the present, ἤμην, ἦς, ἦν in the past, plus
a separate future ἔσομαι. Beginners memorise it as a special
case.
Giving it an empty stem is what makes it regular here — the
endings alone are the word. It is also why ate "he
was" looks so bare in John 1:1.
Practice
- What is
alō?
- What is
ase?
- Read:
tos logos ate pros ton theon.
Show the answers
- "They are."
- "You were" — one person.
- "The Word was with God" (John 1:1).
pros is
"toward, with" and takes the done-to ending on what
follows.
Lesson 5.1 · Who is affected
The subject does it
Every verb you have read so far has had an a sitting
just after the stem. Now it is time to say what it means.
luloose
athe subject does it
the/she/it
ōnow
That a says the subject is the one doing the
action: luatō, "he looses". This is called the
active, and it is the ordinary, everyday choice —
most verbs in the Bible have it.
The point of this box is that there are two other possibilities,
and swapping the letter swaps who is affected:
The next two lessons take the other two. The grammar-book name for
this box is voice.
One letter, one fact. Nothing else
about the word changes. luatō, luitō,
luetō — same stem, same person, same tense, three
different meanings.
In the Greek — three voices, many endings
Greek has the same three voices, but marks them by swapping the
entire ending set: λύει (active), λύεται (middle and passive
together in the present), ἐλύθη (aorist passive, with its own -θη-
marker). In several tenses the middle and passive are spelled
identically and only context tells them apart — a real ambiguity
that Lesson 9.4 comes back to.
Lesson 5.2 · Who is affected
Done to the subject
Put an i after the stem and the
subject stops acting and starts being acted on:
Everything else about the word is unchanged — the person letter
still says who the subject is, the last letter still says when. Only
the direction has flipped.
Telitē.
"It is finished." (John 19:30) — tel·i·t·ē:
finish, done to it, it, and still standing so.
Its grammar-book name is the
passive. English builds it with a helper verb — "is
loosed", "was loved". Here it is one letter, so a passive is never
longer than an active.
Who did it, then?
Often the sentence does not say — that is frequently the point of
using a passive. When it does say, the doer appears with one of the
little words from Lesson 8.1, most often hupo "by".
In the Greek — the divine passive
Greek's aorist passive is marked with -θη- (ἐλύθη), which is
usually easy to spot, and its present passive shares its endings
with the middle, which is not.
One thing worth knowing as a reader: Jewish writers of the period
often used a passive to avoid naming God directly. "Blessed are
those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" means, in
context, that God will comfort them. Nothing marks this in the
grammar — it is a habit of speech — but noticing passives is how
you notice it.
Practice
- What is
agapimō?
- What is
agapamō?
- What is
pisteuita?
Show the answers
- "I am loved" —
i, done to me.
- "I love" —
a, I do it.
- "He was believed" —
i done to him,
t he, a past.
Lesson 5.3 · Who is affected
Doing it to yourself
The third possibility has no equivalent in English, which is why it
gets a lesson of its own. An e after
the stem means the subject is doing the action to or
for itself — it is involved in the action, not just
performing it.
English needs extra words for this — "he washed himself",
"he chose it for himself" — and often just lets it go.
Verbs that are only ever this way
Here is the practical part. A sizeable group of very common verbs
always carry the e, with no particular "to himself"
meaning left in them. Treat these as ordinary verbs that happen to
be spelled with an e:
Its grammar-book name is the middle
— so called because it sits between doing and being done to. When it
resists you, read it as an active and carry on; the reader's word
panel will tell you if the middle is carrying weight.
In the Greek — deponents, and a merged spelling
The verbs in the second table are what Greek grammars call
deponent: ἔρχομαι, δύναμαι, ἀποκρίνομαι have middle
endings but active meanings, and there are hundreds of them.
Greek also spells the middle and the passive identically in
several tenses, so λύεται is "he looses himself" or "he is
loosed", and only context decides. Biblang has to pick one —
luetō or luitō — which makes reading
easier and hides the fact that a choice was made. This is the
most important limitation of the whole system, and Lesson 9.4
sets it out properly.
Lesson 6.1 · How it is meant
Plain statements
One box in the verb is still empty. It says how the verb
is meant: as a fact, as a possibility, as a command, or as a wish.
Its grammar-book name is mood.
VERB = stem + voice + person + mood + tense
The default — a plain statement of fact — adds
nothing at all. Every verb you have read so far has
been one:
luloose
athe subject does it
the/she/it
a plain statement: nothing
ōnow
So if there is nothing between the person letter and the final
vowel, the writer is simply telling you that something is so. Its
grammar-book name is the indicative.
What can go in that box
Most of what you read is in this lesson's mood, so the practical
skill is spotting the other three when they appear.
In the Greek — the same four moods
Greek has indicative, subjunctive, imperative and optative, and
marks them by altering the vowel before the ending and swapping
the ending set — λύει, λύῃ, λυέτω, λύοι. The changes are small and
easy to misread, which is a common source of beginners' errors.
Here each mood has its own letters and nothing else moves.
Lesson 6.2 · How it is meant
May and might
ei before the tense vowel means the
action is not being stated as a fact. It is possible, intended,
hoped for, or being proposed:
echhave
athe subject does it
the/she/it
eimay, might
ōongoing
Its commonest home by far is after hina, "so that" —
which is how the best-known verse in the Bible ends:
hina … mē apollueteia alla echateiō zōan aiōnian.
so that … he should not perish but have eternal
life. (John 3:16)
Both verbs there carry the ei: they describe the
purpose, not something that has happened.
hina agapaveiō allēloin
that ye love one another (John 15:12)
Its grammar-book name is the
subjunctive. Three quick reading cues: after
hina "so that", after ean "if", and in
questions like "what should we do?" — all of them talk about
something not (yet) a fact.
In the Greek — a lengthened vowel
Greek marks the subjunctive by lengthening the vowel before the
ending: λύει becomes λύῃ, λύομεν becomes λύωμεν. The difference
can be a single letter, or only a mark under one, which is why
beginners so often read straight past it. Here it is two letters
in the middle of the word.
The tense on a subjunctive is not about time — it is aspect
only (Lesson 4.6). echateiō with ō is
"may keep having"; the aorist would be "may have".
Lesson 6.3 · How it is meant
Commands
A command puts an r at the very end
of the word — after the tense vowel, as the final letter:
sōzsave
athe subject does it
syou
aas one act
rdo it!
Kurior, sōzasar.
"Lord, save!" (Matthew 8:25)
You have seen that final -r before, on
Kurior — the ending for speaking to someone
(Lesson 2.7). It is the same letter for the same reason: the speaker
is addressing you. On a noun it calls a person; on a verb it calls
for an action.
Commands to "him" and "them", too
English can only command "you". This language can command any
person, and English has to fall back on "let":
hagiazitar tem onomem su
let your name be made holy (Matthew 6:9) —
hagiaz·i·t·a·r: made holy, done to it, it, as one
act, command.
proseuchevōr vis
pray, ye (Matthew 6:9) — v is "ye", so
it is addressed to a group.
Its grammar-book name is the
imperative. A final -r anywhere in a sentence
means someone is being addressed — a person, or an action being
asked for.
In the Greek — present versus aorist commands
The tense on a command is aspect, not time (Lesson 4.6), and the
difference can matter. A present imperative asks for ongoing or
habitual behaviour — "keep on asking"; an aorist imperative asks
for the act itself — "ask". Both appear constantly in the New
Testament, and both are visible here in the vowel before the
r.
Greek marks its imperative with endings like -ε, -έτω, -ετε,
-έτωσαν, which overlap confusingly with ordinary statements:
λύετε is "ye loose" or "loose!" depending on context. Here the
r settles it.
Lesson 6.4 · How it is meant
Wishes
The last mood, and the rarest — fewer than seventy times in the
whole New Testament. oi before the tense
vowel expresses a wish or a remote possibility: "may it be so",
"would that it were":
mē ginetoia.
"May it never be!" (Romans 6:2)
Paul's favourite exclamation, and the most common place you will
meet this mood. Take it apart:
gin·e·t·oi·a — become, to itself, it, wish, as one act.
With mē "not" in front, it is a firm "certainly
not!"
Its grammar-book name is the optative
— from Latin optare, to wish. Recognise the oi
and read it as "may…"; you will not need to produce it.
In the Greek — a mood on its way out
The optative was in decline by New Testament times — classical
Greek used it far more — and it survives mainly in fixed phrases
like μὴ γένοιτο and in polite wishes ("may the Lord grant…").
Greek marks it with -οι- or -αι- before the ending, which is where
the oi here comes from.
Lesson 7.1 · Verbs used as other words
“To do”
Sometimes a verb is not about anyone in particular: "to loose", "to
believe", "to be". For that, put an r
where the person letter would go, and keep the tense vowel:
luloose
athe subject does it
r“to …”
ōongoing
datō proskunarō
it is necessary to worship (John 4:24)
ouk dunetō polias kruptira
a city cannot be hidden (Matthew 5:14) —
krupt·i·r·a: hide, done to it, "to…", as one act.
Don't confuse it with a command. A
command ends in r; an infinitive has the r
in the middle and ends in its tense vowel.
luasōr is "loose!"; luarō is "to loose".
The difference is the last letter, which is where your eye already
is.
In the Greek — one of its most flexible tools
Greek's infinitives end in -ειν, -σαι, -θῆναι and more (λύειν,
λῦσαι, λυθῆναι). Greek uses them far more freely than English
does: with the article in front (τὸ λύειν, "the loosing"), after
prepositions to mean "while", "after" or "because", and to report
what someone said. Where an English Bible has a long "that…"
clause, the Greek is often a single infinitive.
Lesson 7.2 · Verbs used as other words
“Doing”, “the one who does”
The last piece of the language, and the one that unlocks the most
text. A participle is a verb wearing a noun's
clothes: "loosing", "the one who looses", "having believed".
Take the r from the last lesson, keep the tense vowel,
add a joining t, and then finish it with the noun
endings from Part 2:
luloose
adoes it
rverb-as-word
ōongoing
tjoining letter
omasculine
sdoing it
luarōtos — "loosing", or "the one who is loosing", as
the subject of its sentence. Long, but every letter is one you
already know, read left to right.
It agrees like a describing word
Because it ends with noun endings, it agrees with whatever it
describes — and that agreement tells you who is doing the
"loosing":
In real verses
tos pisteuarōtos eis auton
the one believing in him (John 3:16)
legarōtois
saying (Matthew 8:25) — plural, so: "they, saying…"
With the article in front, a participle simply becomes a person:
tos pisteuarōtos, "the believing one", "whoever
believes".
This is the payoff of one noun table.
Greek's participles are famous for being hard. Here they are two
systems you already know, joined by a t — nothing new
to learn at all.
In the Greek — why these are the hurdle
A Greek participle is a full verb and a full adjective at once,
so it carries tense, voice, gender, number and case in a single
fused ending — λύων, λύοντος, λύουσα, λυθείς, λελυκώς — and there
are dozens of shapes. Greek also leans on them constantly, where
English would start a new clause: "and having gone, they woke him,
saying…" is one Greek sentence with three participles in it.
The word order and the clause structure here are the Greek's, so
you are reading the same sentence shape — only the endings are
predictable.
Practice
- What is
agaparōtos?
- What is
agaparōtas?
- What makes
luirōtos passive?
Show the answers
- "Loving", or "the one who loves" — masculine, the subject.
(It is the participle in 1 John 4:8.)
- The same thing about a feminine subject.
- The
i straight after the stem, exactly as in
Lesson 5.2.
Lesson 8.1 · The rest of the sentence
Little words in front
A small set of words sits in front of a noun and says where, when
or how: in, into, from, with.
They never change their spelling — learn each one once and you have
it for good.
en archa … pros ton theon
in the beginning … with God (John 1:1)
They come with a job ending attached
Each of these words expects the noun after it to be in a particular
form, and that is good news: you do not have to remember which,
because the noun tells you. en takes the "to/for/in"
form (en archa, en pneume);
eis and pros take the done-to form
(eis auton, pros ton theon);
apo and ek take the "of" form
(apo autou).
Just read the endings. If you
recognise the little word and read the ending on the noun after it,
you have the phrase. There is nothing to memorise here.
In the Greek — a preposition can take three cases
These are Greek's own prepositions, unchanged. In Greek several
of them govern more than one case, and the case changes the
meaning: μετά with the genitive is "with", with the accusative
"after"; διά with the genitive is "through", with the accusative
"because of". The noun's ending tells you which is meant, here as
there — which is why the ending on the noun is worth reading even
when the preposition looks familiar.
Greek also drops the final vowel of some prepositions before a
vowel (ἀπ' αὐτοῦ for ἀπὸ αὐτοῦ). Biblang never does; the word is
always spelled in full.
Lesson 8.2 · The rest of the sentence
Words that never change
Beyond the prepositions, a large group of very common words have
exactly one form each. They are pure vocabulary — meet them a few
times and they stick.
Joining words
kai alone accounts for about one word in every fifteen
of the New Testament, so that is a good one to learn first.
Names
Hebrew and Aramaic names keep one form in every sentence:
Abraam, Israēl, Ierousalēm,
Iakōb, Mariam. The word for "the" beside
them still shows the job — tou Abraam, "of Abraham".
Greek names behave like ordinary nouns: Iēsus,
Petros, Iōannos.
Numbers
From "two" upward they never change: duo,
treis, hepta (seven),
hekaton (hundred). Only "one" declines, because it
agrees with its noun like a describing word.
In the Greek — why the names don't decline
They do not decline in Greek either. Ἀβραάμ, Ἰσραήλ and
Ἰερουσαλήμ came into Greek from Hebrew and were never fitted to
Greek endings, so Greek does exactly what Biblang does: it leaves
the name alone and lets the article carry the case.
The little joining words are among the hardest things to
translate and among the easiest to read. δέ in particular is a
gentle "and then" that English Bibles often leave out entirely;
seeing it is one of the small pleasures of reading the text
itself.
Lesson 8.3 · The rest of the sentence
Saying “not”
There are two words for "not", and which one is used tells you
something about the sentence:
The word goes in front of what it negates:
tos mē agaparōtos ouk ginōskata ton theon
the one not loving did not know God (1 John 4:8)
Both appear in that half-verse, and each is doing its own job:
mē before the participle "loving", ouk
before the plain statement "knew".
Both together are stronger, not weaker.
ouk mē is an emphatic denial — "shall never at all".
It is not a double negative that cancels out.
tos akoloutharōtos mi ouk mē peripatateia en ta skotia:
"whoever follows me will never walk in the darkness" (John
8:12).
In the Greek — οὐ and μή
These are Greek's two negatives, and the split is Greek's own: οὐ
(spelled οὐκ or οὐχ before a vowel) denies facts, μή denies
everything else. The pair οὐ μή with a subjunctive is the
emphatic "never" above.
Because the two negatives divide up this way, a Greek question
can signal the answer it expects: a question with οὐ expects
"yes", one with μή expects "no" — a nuance English can only get
by tone of voice.
Lesson 8.4 · The rest of the sentence
Word order
You have been reading sentences that do not run the way English
does — the verb first, the object before the subject, a "the"
floating away from its noun. That is not a quirk of this language.
It is the order the Bible was written in, kept exactly, word for
word.
agapata tos theos ton kosmon
literally: loved — God — the world (John 3:16)
Why the order is free
Because the endings already say who does what, the order is not
needed for that job — so it is free to do a different one:
emphasis. A word moved to the front is being
stressed. When John writes theos ate tos logos with
"God" first, he is making a point that word order alone can carry.
How to read it
- Find the verb. It is the word with a person
letter in it, and it can be anywhere.
- Find the
-s. That is who is doing
it.
- Find the
-n. That is who it is
done to.
- Then read the phrase in English order in your
head. It gets faster quickly, and after a while you stop
rearranging at all.
The reader can help here. Tap a word
and the panel lays out the clause it belongs to — who does it, what
happens, who it happens to — in English order, so you can check
yourself against it.
In the Greek — nothing was moved
This is one of the places where Biblang is at its most literal:
one word for every Greek word, in the Greek's own order, with
nothing rearranged and nothing inserted. An English translation
has to reorder — that is what translating is — and in doing so it
quietly loses the emphasis the order was carrying.
Greek's default order is loosely verb-first, but any word can be
fronted, and the New Testament does it constantly. Reading in the
original order is the single thing you get here that no
translation can give you.
Lesson 9.1 · Reading
Reading a whole verse
You now know every marker in the language. Here is John 1:1, in
full, with nothing in it you have not met:
En archa ate tos logos, kai tos logos ate pros ton
theon, kai theos ate tos logos.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)
What the endings are telling you
archa ends bare in its gender vowel, so it is the
"in / to / for" form — hence "in the beginning".ate ends in -e, so this is an ongoing
past: not "became", but "was, and went on being".- In the last clause,
theos and logos
both end in -s. With the verb "to be", both sides
take the same ending — and the writer has put theos
first for emphasis.
That is the whole skill. Read left
to right, take each word's ending as it comes, and let the reader
fill in vocabulary you do not know yet. Everything from here is
mileage.
Read John 1
Try a harder verse ›
Lesson 9.2 · Reading
A harder verse
John 3:16 uses almost everything in this course at once — a past
tense, a participle, a subjunctive, a middle, and agreement across
four words. Read it before you look at the notes:
Houtōs gar agapata tos theos ton kosmon hōste ton
huion ton monogenon dōata, hina pantos tos pisteuarōtos eis auton mē
apollueteia alla echateiō zōan aiōnian.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son, so that everyone believing in him should not perish but have
eternal life. (John 3:16)
agapata — agap· a· t· a: loved, he, as one event
(4.5).tos theos … ton kosmon — who loved,
and what was loved. The endings, not the order (2.3, 2.4).ton huion ton monogenon — three words all ending
-on: the son, the only one, all on the receiving end
of "gave" (3.2).tos pisteuarōtos — the one believing: a participle
with "the" in front, so it means a person (7.2).mē apollueteia — "should not perish":
e middle, ei subjunctive,
mē because it is not a plain statement (5.3, 6.2,
8.3).echateiō zōan aiōnian — "may have eternal life":
subjunctive again, then two feminine words agreeing on the
receiving end (3.2).
If you followed that, you have read the most famous sentence in the
New Testament in the language it was written in — and you did it
from a course that started at the letters.
When a word doesn't yield, tap it.
The reader shows the meaning, the pieces, and what each piece is
doing. Read the breakdown, say the word once, and carry on. That
loop — read, check, continue — is the entire method.
Lesson 9.3 · Reading
How to study
The grammar in this course can be read in an afternoon. Turning it
into fluent reading takes mileage — and a small daily habit beats
long, rare sessions every time.
A daily method
- Read a little, every day. Ten minutes of actual
text daily beats an hour once a week. Start with a verse, work up
to a paragraph, then a chapter.
- Tap before you guess. When a word does not
yield, tap it: you get the meaning, the pieces, and the parse.
Read it, say the word again, move on.
- Turn on the Greek line. The reader can show the
original under each verse, and an English translation beside it.
Read Biblang first, then check yourself.
- Re-read. The second pass through a chapter is
where the endings stop needing a lookup and start being
obvious.
- Keep this course one tab away. Every table here
is also behind the reader's Grammar button.
A reading order
Not all of the Bible is equally easy. Start where the sentences are
short and the words repeat:
- Weeks 1–2 — 1 John.
Short sentences, a small repeating vocabulary, the gentlest Greek
in the New Testament. The ideal first book.
- Weeks 3–5 — John's Gospel.
Simple, concrete language and familiar verses you can
anticipate.
- Then — Mark, fast plain
narrative; and the shorter letters like
Philippians.
What progress feels like
- Hour one: you read Jesus wept and
John 1:1 and understand every ending.
- Week one: you follow the sense of a short
chapter of 1 John, tapping a handful of words.
- Month one: who-does-what and now-versus-past
are automatic; you tap for vocabulary, not grammar.
- Later: participles and the middle stop slowing
you down — you are reading, not decoding.
None of it is wasted
What you are really building is the reflex to see a case or a tense
as a discrete part of a word — and that reflex is what reading Greek
asks for too. The grammar is Koine's own, the word order is the
author's own, and many of the markers deliberately echo the real
endings, so nothing here has to be unlearned if you go on to the
Greek alphabet. See the About page
for more on that.
Start with 1 John
Last lesson ›
Lesson 9.4 · Reading
What this doesn't show you
You can read Biblang and never go on to the Greek alphabet, and get
real, lasting use out of it. What that asks in return is that you
know where Biblang and the Greek do not line up exactly. None of
what follows is a reason to read less — all of it is a reason to
keep the Greek line switched on underneath.
1. It is sometimes more definite than the Greek
This is the one that matters most. A Greek form is often ambiguous:
the same letters can be two different things, and a printed Greek
text simply leaves that standing for the reader to weigh. Biblang
cannot. It is built from an analysis that has already chosen, and it
spells that choice as plainly as it spells everything else — so a
decision somebody made arrives looking like a fact.
Most of the time the choice is uncontroversial and the context
settles it anyway. Occasionally it is exactly the question an
interpreter is asking — and there the Biblang word will not tell you
that a question was ever there. If a reading matters to you, look at
the Greek line under the verse: the ambiguity is visible there, and
nowhere else.
2. It is sometimes less definite than the Greek
- Accents and breathings are not written. Greek
tells τίς "who?" from
τις "someone" by an accent alone, and
Biblang writes both
tinos. (Worth knowing: the
earliest manuscripts had no accents either — they are a later
help, not part of what was written.)
- A few dictionary doublets are spelled alike on
purpose. Where a lexicon lists one word under two
headwords — μέγας and
μείζων, "great" and "greater" — Biblang
treats it as the one word it is, and builds the comparative
regularly:
megos, megoteros.
3. Where Greek is ambiguous, Biblang often keeps it that way
The system does not invent distinctions the Greek does not make.
Greek neuters use one form for the subject and the object
(πνεῦμα is both), and Biblang does the same:
pneumem is doing-it, done-to and spoken-to together.
Where Greek merges, Biblang merges.
4. What is simply not here
- The alphabet. Reading Greek letters is a
separate skill, and you will want it if you go on.
- Textual variants. The text follows one
edition and carries no
apparatus, so where manuscripts differ you are reading the
editors' choice without being told a choice was made.
- Sound. Rhyme, alliteration and puns that work
in Greek letters may not survive a respelling.
- Full definitions. The gloss in the word panel
is one English word for a word with a range. It is a prompt, not a
definition — for weight, use a lexicon.
The habit that covers all of it
Read in Biblang; keep the Greek line on; when a word or a reading
matters, drop your eye to the Greek and look. That one habit turns
every limit on this page into something you can see for yourself.
Start with 1 John
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