21st Century Classical Greek -- case labels

For our first look at the third subsection, once again, go through and identify everything we’ve already talked about.

τὰ γὰρ πρὸ αὐτῶν καὶ τὰ ἔτι παλαίτερα σαφῶς μὲν εὑρεῖν διὰ χρόνου πλῆθος ἀδύνατα ἦν, ἐκ δὲ τεκμηρίων ὧν ἐπὶ μακρότατον σκοποῦντί μοι πιστεῦσαι ξυμβαίνει οὐ μεγάλα νομίζω γενέσθαι οὔτε κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους οὔτε ἐς τὰ ἄλλα.

1)         The syntax particle gar

2)         The definite article ta, which is feminine singular, with kinisis from subsection 2 as its antecedent.

3)         auton in genitive plural, object of the preposition pro.

4)         palaitera, a comparative adjective also with kinisis as an antecedent.

5)         heurein, which you should be able to tell is an imperfective eventive impersonal gerundive. If you know what eureka means, you have an idea of what heurein means.

6)         in, which you know from memorizing eimi.

7)         tekmirion, a noun related to the previous tekmairomenos, object of the preposition ek which ought to look familiar if you know about the prefix exo-, “out of”.

8)         makrotaton, a superlative adjective, object of epi; epi makrotaton “as much as possible”.

9)         genesthai, which you know from memorizing gignomai.

I’ll wrap up the grammar of this subsection next week because the analysis goes hand in hand with the structure and it’s pretty complicated. That discussion will show you how the structural context affects the necessary grammatical assignments.

Our next big leap is case labels. I’m going to re-label the noun cases as follows:

Nominative becomes -oi;

Genitive becomes -on (meaning omega nu);

Dative becomes -ois;

Accusative becomes -ous.

Using the old case labels is based on a misconception that they are useful. Every language that has a case structure, whether it’s morphological or periphrastic, uses cases differently.

For example, there is no fifth case for instrumental in Greek – and no separate morphology in Biblical Hebrew or Arabic, two other aspectual languages older than Greek, but also originating in NE Anatolia, the homeland of the Indo-European peoples (as genetic evidence shows). The two Semitic languages use periphrasis, with agglutinated prepositions.

Classical Greek uses two of its four surviving cases for instrumental in different situations.

Russian, on the other hand, which is a modern aspectual Indo-European language, has an instrumental morphology distinct from all of its other cases.

On the other other hand, the preposition used for instrumental in Biblical Hebrew is also used for locative case – which in Russian is another separate case morphology (total six) and in Greek requires a non-agglutinated preposition.

Greek uses a specific case morphology for “of”; so does Russian, which uses the same case in “for [the benefit of]”, but Greek uses a different case morphology for “benefit”. In BH a specific grammar means “of” but “for” uses a preposition.

Case labels don’t mean the same thing in all languages and using the same labels for all languages creates misconceptions. So I’m changing the labels in Classical Greek, which will reveal more information that the grammars don’t have – that no grammar has to date, as far as I have found from the Internet.