Lesson 8.2 · The rest of the sentence
Particles and conjunctions
Indeclinable words: and, but, for, therefore.
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
| Word | Means | Word | Means | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
kai | and, also, even | gar | for, because | |
de | but, and, now | hoti | that, because | |
alla | but | hina | so that | |
oun | therefore, then | hōs | as, like |
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.
Everything else
Prepositions, conjunctions, particles: transliterated, indeclinable (kai, en, pros, hoti…).
Hebrew and Aramaic names: transliterated too, and indeclinable, because they do not decline in Greek either — Abraam, Israēl, Ierousalēm, Iakōb, Mariam, pascha are one form in every case. The article beside them still shows the case: tou Abraam, ton Isaak. Greek names decline as normal (Iēsus, Iōannos, Petros).
Adverbs: transliterated too. Most Koine manner adverbs already end in -ōs (kalōs, dikaiōs, homoiōs); a short hand-picked list is respelled to match (eu → euōs, lian → liōs). Place, time and negation adverbs keep their own shape (nun, ekei, tote, ouk).
Negation: ouk in the indicative (οὐ), mē elsewhere (μή).
Word order: the original Greek order, verbatim.
Macron vowels (ē ō) occur inside stems and in the markers listed above that carry one.
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.