[B-Greek] Feminine declension in stem endings Alpha or Eta
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Apr 18 19:27:34 EDT 2007
On Apr 18, 2007, at 6:53 PM, Delbert Flora wrote:
> To Whom This Concerns:
>
> I noticed your service on the Internet and wanted to make use of it
> if that
> is acceptable. I will be asking some very elementary questions in
> virtue of
> the fact that I am just now learning Greek. (If you do not bother
> with such
> trivial questions, do you know of a service like yours but for
> novices?)
>
> I am reading a book by Wm. Mounce on the Basics of Greek and he
> said that
> the First Declension nouns are Feminine and Second Declension nouns
> are
> Masculine and sometimes Neuter. For Second Declension nouns he
> gives as
> example LOGOS. The stem is LOGO, and since it ends in O, it is Second
> Declension. That is all well and fine. But then he tells the reader
> that
> GRAFH is Feminine since it ends in Eta. But if LOGOS acts like
> GRAFH, then
> I'm wondering if the stem of GRAFH is GRAF? And if it is, why is it
> called a
> noun with an ending in Eta, not PHI?
(1) Rest assured that the most elementary questions from one engaged
in learning Biblical Greek are welcome here.
(2) Different textbooks introduce the declensions in different ways.
Personally I would prefer to speak of the first declension as an "A"
declension and the second declension as an "O" declension rather than
to characterize either of them as distinctly associated with a
grammatical
gender (most first-declension nouns are feminine, but quite a few are
masculine -- but all first-declension nouns have stems in -A or what
is a lengthened form of that -A which shifted in Attic-Ionic dialect to
-H; most second-declension nouns are masculine and neuter, but quite
a few are feminine -- but all second-declension nouns have stems in -O).
I would indicate the stem of GRAFH as GRAFH since the -H- is the
characteristic vowel some modification of which appears in all the
endings of the noun GRAFH (it was originally GRAFA, but the A
lengthened to a long A which came to be H; in the plural endings
that original -A is discernible.
I would indicate the stem of LOGOS as LOGO-; in fact, however,
it is the set of characteristic case- and number-endings rather than
the stem itseslf that one needs to discern.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list