We have already defined nouns in a previous lesson, but let's repeat the definition here:
Nouns are words that describe people, places, or things. Here are some English nouns: book, person, chewing-gum, country, county, city, road, field, justice, peace, language, concept, man, woman, god, programmer, linguist. In the first lesson, we learned a few Greek nouns:
Articles are those little words in front of the noun. In English, there are two articles: "the" is the definite article, and "a" is the indefinite article. Greek has only one article - since there are 24 forms for it, they couldn't afford a second one. The Greek article is definite, and it is often translated "the", but it functions very differently from the English "the". We will learn how the article functions and learn how to recognize 8 of the 24 forms in this lesson.
Position means just what the word implies, and refers to the position with respect to the article and a noun. In Greek, the position of a word can drastically change its meaning, e.g. the word autoV , which we have translated "he" in our earlier chapters, can also mean "even" if it appears in the right position, so it is important to understand how position functions when you translate some words!
A full understanding of Greek nouns requires us to know some Greek nouns. Let's start by learning two sets of very common Greek nouns. Here is the first set:
When you learn nouns, always learn the form of the article that goes along with it. Nouns may be masculine, feminine, or neuter, and if you do not know the gender of a noun, you will not know what grammatical forms it will take. These nouns are all masculine, because they take the masculine article.
Let's get out the good old gizmo and practice these nouns:
And now let's translate from English into Greek:
Now let's learn a second set of nouns:
Practice by translating the Greek into English: