Biblical Greek - Lesson 5

Dr. Bill Mounce
Biblical Greek
NT201-05
Introduction to English Nouns
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:01] Well, good morning. Welcome to chapter five, our first chapter in the actual grammar section. And I would imagine that some of you were a bit surprised to find in a Greek grammar a whole chapter on English grammar. The reason for that is that so many people don't know enough about English grammar, and until they know their English grammar, I can't teach them anything about Greek grammar. So in chapter five, I'm going to introduce the basics of the English noun system. In chapter 15, I'll introduce the basics of the English verbal system. And then what I do at the beginning of each chapter is give you a little more English grammar. Before we get into that particular chapter, the problem is that I need to teach you, for example, about the Greek nominative case. But I can't teach you the nominative case until you know the English subject of case. And in fact, I can't teach you the nominative case until you know what a case is. So we need to spend this time in English. The first thing we need to learn is the whole concept of inflection. Inflection basically means that the form of a word can be altered depending upon either its meaning or its function in the sentence. Now, English is not very inflected. The personal pronouns are inflected, but that's about it. Greek is highly inflected. That's why this is so important. But for example, in terms of meaning affecting a word's form in the pronoun, if it's a man, we would refer to him as he. If it's a woman with referred to her as she can, That's inflection is still the same pronoun. It's the third person singular pronoun, but its form changes because of its meaning. Likewise, you can have a prince if it's a male or a princess.

[00:02:03] She's female. So those are just a few examples in English of how the meaning of a word can change its form. This is inflection. But inflection also comes to play in terms of a word's function. If the third person pronoun is functioning as the subject of the sentence, you would say she is a student of Gordon Conwell. But if that same pronoun is functioning, for example, as a direct object, we would not say she. We would say her right. Okay. These are just examples of what inflection is in English, but the basic concept is quite straightforward. A word can change its form depending upon either its meaning or its function in the sentence. Is that clear? There's three different aspects of grammar that you need to know in connection with the concept of inflection. The first has to do with case. Depending upon what case the word is in can affect the form of a word. Take for example the sentence God loves his people. The word God is acting is the subject of the verb, and therefore in English, it's in the subject of case. People is acting as a direct object and therefore as in the English objective case. And his is functioning to show possession and so is in the possessive case. Those are the three cases in English. Now you notice that the word God and people don't change their form, whether the subject or the direct object. But words generally change their form when they're showing possession. So the apostrophe s business in English. How do you define the subject of a sentence? Basic grammar, which you've just got to know this stuff. What's the subject of a verb? Yeah. Basically the subject is the word that performs the action of the verb.

[00:04:18] God loves who loves God loves the direct object is just the other side of things. It's the word that receives the action of the verb. God loves his people. It's God doing the loving. It's the people being loved. So we have subjects in English that are put in the subject of case, and we have direct objects that are put in the objective case. And if a word is showing possession, it's in the possessive case. Sackler. All right. The second thing that affects inflection is the issue of number. And in English, we have two numbers, singular and plural, and most words are inflected in English to indicate number, right? There are a few that can be singular and plural and have collective nouns and a few other things like that. We basically have singular one or plural, more than one. And the third thing that can affect inflection is the whole issue of gender. And again, in English, we don't generally differentiate gender except in the pronouns. So if the subject is masculine, we would say, he if it's feminine, we would say she. And if it's anything else, we say it. It's one of the words. We have three genders in English masculine, feminine and neuter. An English generally follows what is called natural gender. In other words, do you think of MAT as a male or a female? When we think of MAT as a male and therefore we refer to your head to as he. But if it's a rock, you generally would say it. There's one other thing related to inflection you need to know, and I'm using the word declension. It's not actually an English grammatical term as far as I know. I don't think there is one in English, but it's the Greek term, so we'll use it in this case.

[00:06:21] All the declension means is that different words follow different patterns of inflection. In other words, there's patterns that English follows in inflecting its words. Right. For example, what is the general way of shifting from singular to plural? An. Okay, that's one inflection pattern. But another pattern is the shift, one of the stem vowels. And so man goes to men. And then there's another pattern that doesn't differentiate number. And so fish goes to fish. In other words, you can have one fish or you're going to have a whole bunch of fish. And the singular and plural forms are the same. So all that I want you to see at this point is that words will follow different inflection patterns. Few other odds and ends in this chapter. And again, I'm not covering everything in the chapters, so be sure you read it all carefully, subject and predicate. This is a confusing thing in English grammar because the same words have different meanings in different contexts. What I mean when I talk about subjects and predicate in this context is that you can divide in a sentence into two basic parts. You can divide a sentence into its subject, and that means the subject of the verb and anything that modifies it. The big bad teacher will all be considered the subject, and then the predicate is the verb, and everything else is teaching too long this morning. Okay, so when we talk about dividing a sentence into its subject and predicate, the subject is the subject to the verb and everything that modifies it. And the predicate is everything else, especially the verb. What we're going to learn to do is to divide sentences into their halves and then subdivide them further. So I'll be talking about dividing a sentence into its subject and predicate.

[00:08:22] There's one thing I need to say about verbs. We generally put off verbs until chapter 15. This can be some more verbs in chapter eight, but upfront you need to know something about verbs in order to do the exercises for this chapter. In a Greek verb, the speaker always identifies the person and number of the subject, and they do it by adding an ending on to it. For example, if you see Sue Gras face, Sue is the second person. Personal pronoun means you singular graph face the word graph, lexical forms graph. So it means I write. But Graph A's absolutely not. A sigma is a second person singular ending meaning you. In other words, the verb has to agree with its subject. So Sue Gras face means you, right? Now, here's the little tricky part because the subject is contained in the verb. The Greeks don't have to actually give you the subject. In other words, Paul could say Sue Gras face or he could say gruff face. And both mean the same thing. They both mean you, right? So what I do in the exercise is after every verb, when I give you the definition of the word in parentheses, I will also give you the person a number. I will say, I write or you write. Or if it's third person, I'll say he or she. It writes. And you have to figure out from the context whether it's masculine, feminine or neuter. But the point is that you're going to have some exercises that don't have an express subject, don't have to have an express subject. The subject can be in the verb.