[B-Greek] 3rd Declension NSN Case Endings

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Oct 15 08:43:26 EDT 2003


At 8:19 AM -0400 10/15/03, Barry W. Hickey wrote:
>In BBG Bill Mounce states that neuter, singular nouns of the third
>declension take no case ending.  Now, the genitive singular of FWS is FWTOS.
>Following Mounces advice of removing the genitive singular ending -OS I
>would have guessed that the nominative singular form would be FW, not FWS.
>Where is the sigma coming from?  What am missing here?

I no longer have a copy of BBG in my reference library to check the wording
of Mounce's statement, but I would offer a couple comments:

(1) It is not easy to frame a rule about any grammatical category so
concisely and accurately that it clearly covers every instance within that
category; if Mounce's text makes the statement as you report it, I would
say that it's not so much wrong as it is misleading;

(2) Phonological principles play a considerable role in shaping the actual
historical forms of declension of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns and of
conjugations of verbs, often such that striking anomalies are evident in
the morphoparadigms (as when we see that a nominative QRIX has a genitive
singular form TRICOS). In my own teaching of beginning Greek over the years
I have felt that the role played by phonology is significant enough that a
student ought to become familiar with the chief phonological principles
governing ancient Greek. I have made available the "compendium of Greek
phonology" that I regularly distributed to my beginning Greek classes at my
web-site for download as a PDF file at
http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/Docs/CompPhon.pdf .

(3) The phonological principle here is the fact that the final T of the
noun root FWT becomes S at word-end following a long vowel. The only
consonants that are allowed by ancient Greek at a word-end are N,R,S and
compounds of S such as X (KS), Y (PS). Following a short vowel a consonant
at word-end other than those just listed is dropped; thus the root ONOMAT
in the nominative singular loses the final -T and becomes simply ONOMA-.
Thus it is actually true that neuter nouns of the third-declension are
ending-less -- but the actual historical form may involve a phonetic
transformation even of the simple noun root.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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