21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 10, nouns

The morphology of Greek nouns is complicated, not just because they have multiple cases, but also because of the many variations in declensions. Students have to learn the noun, not rely on categorization, the same as they have to learn the verb, not its categorization.

The entire discussion of cases in grammars has serious problems:

1.                  The impression that cases of like names operate in like fashion.

2.                  The incorrect association of verb categories with specific cases.

3.                  The invalid concept of oblique absolutes as using morphology to identify timing.

No two languages use cases in the same way.

1.                  Some, like English and Hebrew, require free-standing or agglutinated prepositions to produce the meanings of morphology in languages like Greek or Russian.

2.                  This led grammars to ignore that Greek uses two different forms of instrumental, one for inanimate objects and the other for agents in non-transitive structures.

3.                  It is more useful to characterize cases by their morphology than by a label that gives the false impression of showing function, so: -oi for “nomnative”; -on for “genitive”; -ois for “dative”; and -ous for “accusative”.

Grammars and lexicons support a faulty view of how verbs and oblique predicates work.

1.                  The grammars contain sections declaring that certain categories of verb meaning require specific cases. In fact it’s the reverse; lexicons show that which oblique case is used for the object of a verb changes the meaning of the verb.

2.                  The categories focus on one meaning of a verb while the lexicon may present several; the categorization prevents students from appreciating the wide number of contexts in which a verb may appear and causes translation problems.

3.                  Lexicons that focus on invalid grammatical descriptions cause problems of understanding instead of helping the scholar.

The “oblique absolute” concept that expresses timing is obsolete.

1.                  The timing of a context may be contained in the wording or in external knowledge, but not in morphology.

2.                  The oblique absolutes are poorly described, and the morphology has been confused with the interpretation of the passages based on timing clues in the wording or external knowledge.

3.                  Descriptions of cases using concepts like “up to” (“accusative”), “at” (“dative”) or “after” (“genitive”) do not match contexts in which the nouns are used. We need studies, author by author, to see how they use prepositions, with distinctions between set idioms and more flexible contexts.

Prepositions, like verbs, change meaning depending on the case of the object of the preposition.

1.                  There are a very few prepositions that use only one case; en is an example, using the -ois case.

2.                  As with verbs, it is necessary to study the preposition to know which meaning goes with which case.

3.                  Lexicon entries for prepositions suffer the same problem of verb categorization that noun cases do. Pros is an example.