Lesson 2.2 · Nouns
Gender
Masculine, feminine and neuter — a property of the word, not of the thing.
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.
| Vowel | Class | Example |
|---|---|---|
o | masculine | log·o·s — a word |
a | feminine | agap·a·s — love |
e | neuter | bibli·e·m — a book |
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 iso. "World". - Feminine —
zō·a·s, the vowel isa. "Life". - Neuter —
pneum·e·m, the vowel ise. "Spirit", or "wind".