Lesson 3.7 · Words that go with nouns
Relative and indefinite pronouns
Who and which, and the words for “someone” and “anything”.
Two more small stems, both declining like everything else in Part 2 and 3.
h- — who, which, that
This is the word that hooks a second clause onto a noun: "the man who came", "the message which we heard".
| masculine | feminine | neuter | |
|---|---|---|---|
| doing it | hos | has | hem |
| done to | hon | han | hem |
tas angelias han akouanē
the message which we have heard (1 John 1:5)
Read the ending and you know its job inside its own clause:
han is on the receiving end, so it is the message that
was heard, not the message that did the hearing.
tin- — who? someone
The same word does duty for the question "who?" and the vague
"someone", exactly as it does in Greek:
tinos, tinan, tinem. Which
one is meant is a matter of the sentence — a question mark, or a
statement.
tin-. It
looks like the word for "the" with an n in it, but it
is its own stem. ton is "the"; tinon is
"someone".In the Greek — the accent that decided it
Greek writes both words with the same letters, τις, and tells them apart by an accent alone: τίς with an acute is "who?", τις without is "someone". Biblang does not write accents, so it writes one word. Greek readers rely on the same context you will — printed accents were added long after the New Testament was written. Lesson 9.4 comes back to this.
The relative pronoun is Greek's ὅς, ἥ, ὅ, whose rough breathing
is the h- here.
Practice
- In
tos logos hon akouanē, who heard what? - Why is it
honand nothos? - What is
tan agapan han echanō? (ech-have)
Show the answers
- "The word which we have heard."
logosis the subject of the main clause;honis what was heard. - Because inside its own clause it is on the receiving end of
"heard" — the
-nsays so. It is masculine because it points back atlogos. - "The love which we have."