Lesson 2.7 · Nouns
The vocative
The case for addressing someone directly.
The last of the five jobs, and the easiest to spot. A word ending
in -r is being spoken to — you are
calling or addressing that person directly:
Kurior, sōzasar.
"Lord, save!" (Matthew 8:25)
Patēror nu tor en toi ouranoi
Our Father in the heavens (Matthew 6:9)
English does this with punctuation and tone — "John, come here" versus "John came here". Here it is a letter, so it is never ambiguous.
-r turns up once more, on the end of a command
(Lesson 6.3): sōzasar above is "save!". Both are the
speaker addressing someone directly — a person, or an action they
want done. Wherever you see a final -r, somebody is
being spoken to.In the Greek — a case that only half exists
Greek has this form too (κύριε, πάτερ, Ἰησοῦ), but only in the
masculine and feminine singular, and even there many words simply
reuse the subject form. Sometimes it is introduced by the particle
ὦ, the "O" of older English Bibles. Biblang gives every word a
distinct -r, so an address is always visible.