Lesson 3.5 · Words that go with nouns
Demonstratives
This and that, and the words for he, she and it.
These are ordinary stems with ordinary endings — there is genuinely nothing new in this lesson except three words to know:
| Stem | Means | masculine | feminine | neuter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
aut- | he, she, it, they | autos | autas | autem |
hout- | this | houtos | houtas | houtem |
ekein- | that | ekeinos | ekeinas | ekeinem |
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.
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.