Chapter 5- Grammatical Terms

Question 1

What is a noun?

Answer 1

A noun is a word that represents a person, thing, concept, or place
* “Bill threw his big black book at the strange teacher.”
* The words “Bill,” “book,” and “teacher” are nouns.

Question 2

What is a preposition?

Answer 2

• A preposition is a word that shows the relationship between two items.
  Ex: The relationship can be spatial (“ The Greek text is under the bed”) Ex: The relationship can be temporal (“ The student always studies after the ball game”).
• The word or phrase following the preposition is the object of the preposition (“bed” in the first example, “game” in the second). The preposition, its object, and any modifiers, is a prepositional phrase (“ the ball game”).

Question 3

What is a conjunction?

Answer 3

A conjunction is a word or phrase that connects words, phrases, clauses, and sentences together. The word and is a commonly used example of a conjunction. Here are two examples of how we can use a conjunction like and in both a simple and complex way:

The flower is yellow and white. (connects two adjectives)
The flower is yellow, and it has a particular smell. (connects two sentences)

Question 4

What is elision?

Answer 4

Elision is the expulsion of a short vowel at the end of a word before a word beginning with a vowel. An apostrophe (‘) marks the place where the vowel is elided.
Thus ἐπ’αὐτόν, against him, for ἐπι αὐτόν.

Question 5

What is an adjective?

Answer 5

An adjective is a word that modifies a noun (or another adjective).
* “Bill threw his big black book at the strange teacher.”
* In the sentence above, “big,” “black,” and “strange” are adjectives that modify nouns.

Question 6

What is a subject and predicate?

Answer 6

A sentence can be broken down into two parts. The term subject describes the subject of the verb and what modifies the subject. Predicate describes the rest of the sentence, including the verb, direct object, etc.

Question 7

What is a definite article?

Answer 7

The definite article is the word “the”. In the sentence, “The student is going to pass,” the definite article is identifying one student in particular - not just any student, but the student.

Question 8

What is the indefinite article?

Answer 8

The indefinite article is the word “a”. In the sentence, “A good student works every day on her Greek,” the article is indefinite because it does not identify any one particular student.

Question 9

Special note #1

Answer 9

The ending of the Greek verb indicates person and number. “I” and “we” are considered first person, “you” is second person, and everything else (including “he,” “she,” “it,” and all nouns) is third person.

• γράφεις means “you write”.
• The εις ending on γράφεις tells you that the subject is “you”.
• γράφει means “he writes,” “she writes,” or “it writes.”
• The ει ending on γράφει tells you that the subject is “he,” “she,” or “it.”

Question 10

Special note #2

Answer 10

An important consequence of this is that a Greek sentence does not need to have an expressed subject; the subject can be contained in the verb.
* So, σὺ γράφεις and γράφεις both mean, “You write.” The “you” can come from either the pronoun σύ or the personal ending εις.