21st Century Classical Greek -- the article

Warning. You will have to memorize things to get the most out of this blog. I’m sure you can find websites that will say you don’t, and I hope you will use them if that’s what you want.

I said last week that John White’s First Greek Book had useful paradigms. The grammar explanations are old-think and are not complete. White’s online text is locked against editing; that’s why I give you page numbers, you can’t set your own “here” notes inside it. 

https://www.textkit.com/learn/ID/136/author_id/39/

And for your first task, turn to White’s paradigms, his page 234, section 758. Memorize the definite article. White has a couple of dozen sample paradigms for nouns, which will be hard to memorize and at any rate are not as useful as the old grammarians thought they were. But memorize the article and, when the writer uses it, you will know for sure what gender, number, and case the noun is in. Now go through the first section of Thucydides and identify all the articles.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0199%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D1

The declension of Greek nouns is rather Protean. Proteus was an old Greek god who could assume many forms. Nouns take many forms in declension, but the article only takes the one set of forms.

Of course, not all nouns come with definite articles. Once you know the plural forms of the definite article, you know the plural endings of many noun declensions. The two facts combined will help you with something like 75% of nouns. The plural endings also work for adjectives and some verbal derivatives that you used to call participles (I’ll label them something else), so that helps you recognize about 80% of non-verbs.

I won’t give you reasons for everything I ask you to memorize. I will try to put the important or high-frequency ones first.

So that’s enough for this week. Next week we’ll get started on revolutionizing the verb structure in Classical Greek.