Nouns and case

The ending tells the job

In English, word order does the work. "The dog bites the man" and "The man bites the dog" use the same words, and only the order changes who does what. Greek mostly works the other way. The ending of a noun changes to show what that noun is doing in the sentence, and this job is called its case. That is why the app's 원어 panel labels every noun with a case, a number and a gender: those labels are the reader's map of the sentence.

English keeps a tiny trace of this in its pronouns: "he" is the subject, "him" is the object, "his" shows possession. Greek does the same with every noun. Take the word for "word", λόγος (logos). In John 1:1 it is the subject, "the Word". In 1 John 1:1 we meet λόγου, "of the Word" in "the Word of life". In John 5:24 Jesus says "whoever hears My word", and "word" is λόγον. The meaning is the same each time; only the ending, -ος, -ου or -ον, has changed.

Because the endings carry the sense, Greek word order is fairly free, and writers can move a word to the front for emphasis without confusing anyone. Even in John 1:1 the word for God appears twice with different endings: θεόν and θεὸς. The first follows the preposition πρός, which is the subject of the lesson on prepositions; the second is explained in the next lesson. For now just notice that one word with two endings does two jobs.

The five cases

Greek has five cases. The table gives each one a main job as a rule of thumb. It does not cover everything, but it is a good guide when you begin to read.

The dative does the work of several English words, "to", "for" and "in", and context decides which one fits. The vocative is the rarest. The first words of the Lord's Prayer, πάτερ "Father", are a vocative: Jesus is speaking to Him. The panel also adds the tag "Person Gentilic" to this word; that is a quirk of the database's labels on words of address, so you can ignore it. When a preposition is added, the case can take on a slightly different sense, and the prepositions lesson will deal with that.

Nouns also have number, singular and plural, shown by the ending in the same way. In John 1:4, ἀνθρώπων means "of men" (genitive plural). In the Lord's Prayer, οὐρανοῖς is "in the heavens" (dative plural). Greek commonly puts "heaven" in the plural where English uses the singular.

The endings of -ος nouns

Here are the endings of the most common masculine nouns, those like λόγος. Learn the bold ones first. The genitive plural -ων is especially useful, because you will meet it on nouns of every kind.

Notice that the nominative and vocative plural look the same. One ending can serve two cases, so an ending alone does not settle everything; context and the panel's label work together. Gender, masculine, feminine and neuter, is the topic of the next lesson.

Reading it in a verse

Read part of John 8:34, "everyone who sins is a slave to sin".

The subject is "everyone who sins", and δοῦλός (doulos), "a slave", says what that person is. In a sentence with "is" (ἐστιν), the word that describes the subject is also nominative; the next lesson comes back to this. Then ἁμαρτίας, "of sin", is a genitive. It ends in -ας, not -ου, because it belongs to a different family of nouns, which we sort out two lessons from now. What matters here is that the endings, not the order, tell you how the words relate.

The new words of this lesson are all nouns of this kind. In John 1:40 Andrew is introduced as the ἀδελφὸς (adelphos), "brother", and the next word, Σίμωνος, is the genitive "of Simon". In John 1:17, νόμος (nomos), "law", is the subject of "the law was given". In Matthew 1:20 an ἄγγελος (angelos), "angel", appears to Joseph. In John 2:16, οἶκον (oikon), "house", is the object of "do not make My Father's house a house of trade". In John 6:2, ὄχλος (ochlos), "crowd", is the subject: a great crowd followed Him.

Summary

A Greek noun shows its job by its ending. The nominative is the subject, the genitive means "of", the dative "to, for, in", the accusative is the object, and the vocative is for addressing. Each comes in a singular and a plural. You do not need to memorise all the endings: start with -ος, -ου, -ον and -ων, and lean on the panel's labels for the rest.

Words in this lesson

• ἀδελφόςadelphosbrother343 times in the NT
• νόμοςnomoslaw193 times in the NT
• ἄγγελοςangelosangel167 times in the NT
• δοῦλοςdoulosslave129 times in the NT
• οἶκοςoikoshouse: home77 times in the NT
• ὄχλοςochloscrowd175 times in the NT

Practice