Lesson 2.3 · Nouns
The nominative
The case for the one doing the action.
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.
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
| Word | Means |
|---|---|
logos | a word (doing something) |
agapas | love (doing something) |
anthrōpos | a person (doing something) |
kurios | a lord, the Lord (doing something) |
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.
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.")anthrōposagain. The word order changed but the endings did not, so the meaning did not either.logos— stemlog-, masculineo, thens.