Featured Greek 101

My brain is fried from working right now, so I thought I'd start a thread here. Maybe I can help you who love talking about Bible translation but have never had Greek. So, I'll see how far I can get in getting across some basic Greek, including grammar points to help you with how translation is done.

First task: learn the alphabet. Some letters are not too much different from the English alphabet. You can do this! I'll attach a couple of documents. First of all, here is how to write the upper and lower case letters, from when I taught in Japan, so it has some Japanese on it, but you can ignore that. This document is designed for the Japanese, so there are little arrows showing the directions for the strokes. Unfortunately, my American students mostly ignore that and also how the textbook says to draw them, and do it their own way. Typical Americans!

I'll also attach a little cartoon I give the students telling them never to give up on their Greek.

 

Just a word about the letter sigma. There are two forms of it, with the second one always being used at the end of a word. Also, the iota has an unusual usage. It can drop down below several letters (the omega and eta especially) and become the iota subscript just below the letter. This has significance in grammar, such as indicating the dative case.

Concerning pronunciation, remember that this is Koine Greek from the first century. That is so long ago that no one really knows how it was pronounced. However, there are a few conventions that we teach.

When there is a double gamma, like in ἄγγελος (angel, messenger), or a kappa then a gamma, the first one is pronounced with a nasal sound, so: angelos (ahn-gel-os).

Another convention is the breathing mark, which is above the first letter if it is a vowel, or the second letter of a diphthong (two vowels forming a single sound). A "smooth" breathing mark looks like this, and is not pronounced: ). A rough breathing mark looks like this, and has an "h" sound at the beginning of the word: (. So this word,ὅτι ("that," or "because," or the marker for a quote), is pronounced "hoti."

 

Still have the Thayer's, huh? We require it for Greek 102. Though it's out of date for a professional, it's still useful--and cheap!

I learned from Machen myself, and that's what I taught from in Japan, the only major translation of a Greek beginner's text at that time.

 

So, I just looked at the file I attached on how to write the Greek alphabet, and realized the names of the letters are all in Japanese--no help to you I'm sure. By the way, I always have a contest in Greek 101 (with the students volunteering) seeing who could say the whole alphabet the fastest. Fortunately, they've never asked me to compete--they would win!

So, I'm attaching two files (upper case and lower case) I give the students for practicing the alphabet, which give the names of the letters in English. Print them up and go to it!

 

0Now, a word about the Greek diphthongs. There are 7 of them. A diphthong is a combination of two vowels which are pronounced together as one syllable. Here they are:

αι as in "aisle"
ει as in "eight"
οι as in "oil"
υι as in "suite"
αυ as in "Faust"
ευ as in "feud"
ου as in "soup"

Some students have trouble remembering that these are diphthongs, with only one syllable. I drill them by writing them on the whiteboard, then pointing to them in random with appropriate sounds, which they then holler out: Whee, Ow, Oooh, etc. We have fun!

 

By the way, the beginning textbook I use is Learn to Read New Testament Greek, 3rd ed., by Dr. David Alan Black. He was my son's mentor for the Ph.D., but that's not why I use his textbook. I just find it easier to teach from than Mounce's excellent textbook, and the explanations and exercises are excellent. Also, Dr. Black has some good basic linguistics for the student which help--what are phonemes and morphemes, what is verbal aspect, etc. The only drawback to this text (for the students, anyway ) is that some of the chapters have long vocabulary lists.

Here it is on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Read-N...t_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1590067927

 

Who, me?

 

Now that you've memorized the alphabet, let's discuss verbs briefly. The Greek verb system has various endings for person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and number (singular and plural). The "person" endings indicate if I or we are talking (1st person), if you are talking (2nd person), or if he, she, it, or they are talking (3rd person).

So, the student has to memorize these endings to know what the Greek verb is saying. Tomorrow I'll explain more about verbs, and what those endings are.

 

Here's your first verb conjugation, then, the present active indicative of λυω, "I loose."
λυω, I loose.
λυεις, You (sing.) loose.
λυει, He, she, it looses.
λυομεν, We loose.
λυετε, You (plu.) loose.
λουσι, They loose.

You must memorize this conjugation by Monday, because it will be on your first quiz. Well, might be hard to give a quiz here on the BB.

Now, something I like about Black's beginning grammar is that it starts right out with the verbs instead of nouns, adjectives, etc. that way the student has complete sentences right off the bat! He also includes the future active indicative in the same chapter as the present active indicative. It's easy; you simply add a sigma in there after the root, λυ-, thus:
λυσω, I will loose.
λυσεις, You (sing.) will loose.
λυσει, He, she, it will loose.
λυσομεν, We will loose.
λυσετε, You (plu.) will looser.
λυσουσι, They will loose.

Got it? Good. Study for that quiz, because this conjugation will be on it.

 

Here are your first vocabulary words, which will also be on the quiz. I'll just give a few, the ones that will be most helpful for you who wish to know more about Bible translation.

βαπτιζω, I immerse (baptize). William Carey and his team always translated "immerse." One of them, Nathan Brown, later translated the first Japanese NT, and he also insisted on "immerse," so much so that he left the main committee and did his own translation.
δοξαζω, I glorify
κηρυσσω, I preach, I proclaim--very important in the proclamation of the Gospel, used in 60 verses of the NT.
πιστευω, I believe
σωζω, I save, I heal. Notice the second meaning. the first one is the core meaning, but the second one does occur occasionally, though there is a more common word for "I heal" (θεραπευω), and must not be discounted.

Now, note that these definitions are only glosses, to get the student started. A gloss is a simple, incomplete definition. So many times would be translators on the Internet go with a gloss, like in Strong's concordance, instead of complete definitions as given in actual lexicons and determined by contemporary usage. That is a big mistake. As the students progress into the second semester, in Greek 102 they must buy an actual lexicon. We use Thayer's because it is complete, though out of date, and cheap. The professional does not often use Thayer's, since there are better lexicons out there.

 

Thanks for the input. Looks like a good resource. I don't have it, but I have Bruce Metzger's Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek, which seems somewhat similar.

 

Thanks for that note. Rice did pretty well in Greek. I recently learned that his Greek prof at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was H. E. Dana, of the famous Dana and Mantey intermediate text, A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament.

 

Now, for you to ponder over the weekend, let me describe briefly to you what verbal aspect is. First of all, the Greek tenses have to do with time in what is called the indicative mood, but unlike in English where time is most important, aspect is more important in a koine Greek verb. Aspect is how the verb relates to the action of the sentence. Black defines it: "the view of the action that the speaker chooses to present to the hearer." Now, there is something called aktionsart also, which is defined as the kind of action taking place with a verb. If these two terms sound close in meaning, join the crowd.

Anyway, there are three kinds of action in a Greek verb: imperfective (also called continuous), perfective, and aoristic. Imperfective is when the action is continuing, whether in past time (I was loosing) or present time (I am loosing), or future time (I will be loosing). Perfective action is action which happened in the past, and the results continue. Christ on the cross saying "It is finished" is an example of this. It is very hard to render perfective action into languages which do not have that aspect (most languages). finally, aoristic action is when the verb is looked at as a general action, non-specific. So, for example, "He runs" is aoristic, since you don't know when or how he runs.

 

Okay, I was just kidding about the quiz, but if you want one I'd be happy to oblige.

Now on to nouns. The nouns of koine Greek are quite different from English nouns in that they are highly inflected. Inflection is when prefixes and infixes and suffixes are added to a word for grammatical purposes. Greek has a lot of those. However, the nouns do not have near as many as the verbs. Rejoice!

There are five cases for each noun. Here they are with their basic usages (by no means all the usages there are for each of these):

1. Nominative: this case indicates the subject of a sentence or clause
2, Genitive: this case indicates possession (for some reason many students misspell this one). In English we represent this by "of" or "'s" as in "The car of Sam's" or "Sam's car."
3. Dative: this case is used for the indirect object of a sentence or clause
4. Accusative: this case is used for the direct object of a sentence or clause
5. Vocative: this is the case of direct address, as in "Hypocrite, you do not..."

So, here is the declension for λογος:

nom. sing. λογος
gen. sing. λογου
dat. sing. λογῳ (Notice the little iota below the omega. This is the iota subscript, and can make a difference in the meaning.)
acc. sing. λογον
voc. sing. λογε
nom. plu. λογοι
gen. plu. λογων
dat. plu. λογοις
acc. plu. λογους
voc. plu. λογοι

Now, you must memorize this. It will be on the quiz.

But wait, there is more. This is only the declension for 2nd declension masculine nouns. Yes, Greek has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, and three declensions.

Now this works as you might think for speaking of humans: the two words for "man" are masculine, the word for "woman/wife" is feminine, and so forth. However, you can't normally make a semantic (meaning) thing out of the genders. For example, the Greek word for wind/spirit is πνευμα, which is sometimes mistakenly translated in the KJV as "it," or "itself," even when referring to the Holy Spirit, since it is a neuter noun. (See Rom. 8:16, 1 Peter 1:11, etc.) The Holy Spirit should be translated with a "he" in the pronouns.