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PRONUNCIATION REVIEW Here is our first example of a primary source Greek passage from the Gospel of John 1:1-5. It contains all the letters of the Greek alphabet except μ, ξ, and ψ. Practice reading this passage aloud today in class and throughout the week. Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν ὃ γέγονεν. ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων. καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν. THE GREEK VERB SYSTEM As in English, the great majority of Greek sentences contain verbs (the grammatical action of a sentence) as one of their most important elements. The Greek has very complex yet exact system of expressing such actions through what is called inflection. When a word undergoes inflection, (coming from the Latin inflecto, meaning “I bend”) it means that some component of a word is changed or “bent” from its simplest form, giving the word a precise function. We will be learning how verbs undergo inflection for the next two or three weeks. But before we begin analyzing the changes themselves, we must firstly and most importanly understand the general concept of inflection. INFLECTION Both Greek and English use inflection, but Greek in specific is a very highly inflected language. Inflection refers to the changes that words undergo according to their grammatical function in a sentence. Greek contains many uninflected words, but most do undergo inflection. These words – verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and even the definite article “the” – can all take on different forms which specify things like gender, number, and case. These grammatical terms will all be explained in later lessons, but for now we will focus solely on Greek verbs and their inflections. WHAT IS A VERB? I’m so glad you asked! A verb is a word that either: (1) makes a statement about a subject, (He is Irish) or (2) transfers an action from a subject to an object (She loves Irish boys). Each of the above examples is a clause or group of words forming a sense unit and containing one finite verb. A finite verb is a verb that functions as the basic verbal element of a clause. For instance, in English we can say “Jonny cried” and make a coherent statement because “cried” is a finite form of the verb “cry”. However, we cannot say “Jonny crying” (as a complete sentence) and still be coherent because “crying” is a non-finite form of the verb “cry”. Finite verbs in Greek contain two basic parts: (1) the stem of the verb which is the “dictionary definition” of the word’s meaning, and (2) one or more affixes which specify the grammatical function of the verb in its sentence. An affix that is added to the beginning of a word is called a prefix, one that is added in the middle of a word is an infix, and one that is tagged on to the end of a word is a suffix. An example of these two basic parts in an English verb would be the verb “break”. “Break-” is the present tense stem, and if we add a third person singular suffix (“s”) to this stem to indicate who is doing the verb, we get “breaks”. Likewise, when we want to indicate a past tense form, the stem becomes “brok-”, and the affix can be either “-e” or “en” giving us either “broke” or “broken”, each of which conveys a different sense to us. Many people attempting to learn Greek become unnecessarily overwhelmed by the complexity of the Greek verb system in comparison with that of English. Lets look at an example of a common English verb and its various inflections in the present tense: SINGULAR PLURAL 1ST PERSON I make we make 2ND PERSON you make y’all make 3RD PERSON he makes they make We notice first that English utilizes the personal pronoun to indicate person and number (who and how many is doing the action). The form of the verb “make” undergoes only one inflection which occurs only in the 3rd person singular form where the affix “-s” is added onto the end of the stem “make-”. But what English does in only one of these six forms other languages can accomplish in all six of the same present tense forms by means of inflection! Lets examine the Spanish verb hacer (to make) and see the differences: SINGULAR PLURAL 1ST PERSON (yo) hago (nosotros) hacemos 2ND PERSON (tú) haces (vosotros) hacéis 3RD PERSON (ella) hace (ellas) hacen The personal pronouns above are in parenthesis because in Spanish, you don’t even have to use them to indicate who is doing the action because both the person and number are contained within the verb forms themselves! To say “I am making…”, a Spanish speaker would merely need to say “Hago…”. German uses a combination of both the pronoun and the verb ending to get the idea across, as in the verb haben, “to have”: SINGULAR PLURAL 1ST PERSON ich habe wir haben 2ND PERSON du hast ihr habt 3RD PERSON er hat sie haben Just like in English, the German personal pronoun is not optional when using the inflected verb. But notice that unlike English, a majority of the German verb forms are different from one another. The Greek language, however, is more like Spanish in this sense, because a different verb form is used to indicate both person and number. This is done by adding person-number suffixes to the verb stem. This verb stem is called the lexical morpheme since it conveys the lexical meaning of the word (i.e., the meaning found in the dictionary). Thus the Greek word for “I have”, ἔχω is composed of both the lexical morpheme ἔχ- (meaning “have”) and the person-number suffix -ω (meaning “I”). Adding the different suffixes of the present tense onto the stem, we get the following forms: SINGULAR PLURAL 1ST PERSON ἔχω (I have) ἔχομεν (we have) 2ND PERSON ἔχεις (you have) ἔχετε 3RD PERSON ἔχει (he/she/it has) ἔχουσι (they have) (y’all have) These suffixes are used in many other verbs that we will encounter. When the same pattern of suffixes is used by several words, that pattern is called a paradigm (from the Greek word for pattern or model: παράδειγμα). HOMEWORK FOR THE WEEK Sadly, there will be no written homework for this week’s lesson. But you will be expected to be able to give a brief definition or example of the terms we learned today like: verb, clause, affix, suffix, prefix, stem, personal pronoun. But most importantly, try as best you can to understand the concept of inflection itself by re-reading today’s lesson, watching the video online, or doing some of your own searching online. Also, please feel free also to email me with any questions or suggestions for online resources and I’ll be sure to respond as quickly as I can: [email protected]