Lesson 2.1 · Nouns
Inflection
The ending of a word, not its place in the sentence, tells you its job.
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:
| Word | Job |
|---|---|
theos | God — the one doing something |
theon | God — the one it is done to |
theou | of God |
theo | to or for God |
theor | speaking to God: "God!" |
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:
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.
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.