Lesson 3.6 · Words that go with nouns
Possessives
My, your, his: saying whose something is.
There are no separate words for my, your, his or our. You use the "of" form from Lesson 2.5, placed after the thing owned. Literally you say "the word of me":
tos logos mu | the word of me — my word |
tem onomem su | your name (Matthew 6:9) |
tan psuchan autou | his life (John 10:11) |
Patēror nu | our Father (Matthew 6:9) |
It works for any owner at all, not just pronouns — put any noun in its "of" form and you have possession:
Tor kurior mu kai tor theor mu.
"My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28) — note the
-r endings: Thomas is speaking to him.
Word order. The owner normally
follows the thing owned, so when you hit a short word ending in
-u, look at the word just before it: that is what it
belongs to.In the Greek — same construction
Greek does this identically: ὁ λόγος μου, τὸ ὄνομά σου, ἡ ψυχὴ
αὐτοῦ. It also has a set of adjectives for "my" and "your" (ἐμός,
σός), which behave like ordinary describing words and appear here
as ordinary describing words too — tas emas "my", in
John 15:12.