21st Century Classical Greek -- declension categories

All right, section 2, subsection 2. This is long so go through it first and mark everything you’ve seen before.

τῆς γὰρ ἐμπορίας οὐκ οὔσης, οὐδ᾽ ἐπιμειγνύντες ἀδεῶς ἀλλήλοις οὔτε κατὰ γῆν οὔτε διὰ θαλάσσης, νεμόμενοί τε τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστοι ὅσον ἀποζῆν καὶ περιουσίαν χρημάτων οὐκ ἔχοντες οὐδὲ γῆν φυτεύοντες, ἄδηλον ὂν ὁπότε τις ἐπελθὼν καὶ ἀτειχίστων ἅμα ὄντων ἄλλος ἀφαιρήσεται, τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀναγκαίου τροφῆς πανταχοῦ ἂν ἡγούμενοι ἐπικρατεῖν, οὐ χαλεπῶς ἀπανίσταντο, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ οὔτε μεγέθει πόλεων ἴσχυον οὔτε τῇ ἄλλῃ παρασκευῇ.

Having learned the declension of the definite article, you know what case emporias is.

But why is it the -on case? Check ousis. It’s from eimi, “be”. How could you have “be” with anything but the -oi case?

It’s not the “be” guiding the grammar here, it’s the ouk, a negation.

Goodwin does not discuss this issue.

But it’s familiar to me because I know Russian, another Indo-European aspectual language. In Russian, nyet yeyo means “she’s not here” and uses the negative particle plus the genitive of the pronoun.

Which is an important illustration of how confusing case labels can be.  The same pronoun form yeyo is also accusative. You have to look at the context to know which case you’re using.

The old Greek grammars try to place nouns into categories (“o declension” etc.) that are supposed to predict what the declension is. But there are so many categories, and so many variations within the categories, and so many nouns that you would think fit in one category but actually belong to a different one, that once again, the categories stress your mind without helping you memorize the actual nouns.

You have to learn the noun just like you have to learn the verb.  

So I will give you high-frequency nouns to memorize, and since Thucydides is about to analyze the history of the Greeks, you need to know thalassa, sea, and gi, earth. These are the two theaters of operation in wars of the Greeks throughout their history.

And of course, as I said several weeks ago, I’m going to use different labels for the cases.

Nominative becomes -oi;

Genitive becomes -on (meaning omega nu);

Dative becomes -ois;

Accusative becomes -ous.