Here is a song describing Greeks from Horrible Histories:

Like English, the Greek language has adjectives. School House Rock has a song if you are struggling with what these are. I think most of us studying Greek as first year students would unpack “frustrated” first too. Of course adjectives describe nouns and thankfully they function in the same way in both languages. But School House Rock left out some other things adjectives can do as there are actually three functions that adjectives play.

• attributive – the typical usage, which is to describe a noun
• predicate – also describes a noun but it implies the verb “to be”
• substantival – in this case the adjective is also the noun. The noun is implied.

For example in English the word “bad” is the adjective describing house (attributive):

The bad house

In Greek that would be written as:

ὁ κακός οἰκος

or

ὁ κακός ὁ οἰκος

The key here is that the adjective has the definite article in front of it.

However if we wrote the following the adjective form changes:

κακός ὁ οἰκος

Notice that all we did was remove the definite article from the adjective. Now the adjective is in the predicate case. This would be translated “the house is bad”. However notice that the verb “to be” is implicit since the word ἐστιν is not supplied.

Finally we could write this in another form:

ὁ κακός

Notice here that there is no noun. Now the adjective is in the substantival case. This would be translated “the bad (thing)”. What is bad would have to be derived from the context. Here there is no context supplied.

As you may (or may not have noticed) adjectives use the same case ending as the nouns. This is how we can identify the noun that the adjective describes. However, adjectives are “weird” in that the Greek word can be used in all three genders. Nouns can’t. This is because the adjective must agree with the noun it modifies in case, number, and gender. And thankfully the Greeks did not invent a new word for each gender.

For example we could write “the bad house” using the feminine Greek word for house, instead of the masculine word above. Don’t ask me why there is a different Greek word for house in the masculine and in the feminine rather than one word in the neuter. In any case that would be result in:

ἡ κακια οἰκια

Here the important thing to notice is that the adjective κακός, -ἡ, -όν took on the feminine definite article and the case ending for the feminine nominative singular case.

Three simple rules to help identify how the adjective is functioning in the sentence:

1. if the adjective does not have a definite article (and there is a noun with a definite article) then it is a predicate
2. if the adjective has the definite article (and there is a noun with or without a definite article) then it is attributive
3. if the adjective has the definite article (and there is no noun) then it is substantival

Here is a chart I have been using to work on the vocabulary in BBG2. And here is the answer key generated from Bible Works.

Unlike most classes in seminary there is no “off” week in Greek. Everything builds upon the prior week and the pace of the class is very quick. One topic this week is the prepositional phrase. Like most topics this requires understanding the English so that a student can understand the Greek.

School House Rock never disappoints:

Here is the lyric which says it all:

Nine or ten of them
Do most all of the work
Of, on, to, with, in, from
By, for, at, over, across
And many others do their jobs,
Which is simply to connect
Their noun or pronoun object
To some other word in the sentence.

The prepositional phrase contains the preposition and the object of the preposition (a noun or pronoun).

into the house

This phrase contains the preposition “into” and “house” functions as the object of the preposition.

In Greek this would be:

εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν

There are two keys to the Greek preposition:

• the meaning of the preposition depends on the case of the prepositional object
• the preposition is not inflected

In the phrase above the word for house (οἰκία) is in the accusative case and the preposition (εἰς) means in, into with the accusative case. Actually in this case the preposition only takes an accusative case.

A more interesting example would be using a preposition that takes different cases.

παρά τὴν οἰκίαν

Here the preposition (παρά) with a noun in the accusative case means “alongside the house”.

However if it was written like this (with house in the genitive case)

παρά τὴς οἰκίας

it means “from the house”. Notice that in these last two examples the prepositional object (house) changed cases but the preposition did not. However, how the preposition was translated depended on the case of the noun.

This worksheet can be used to practice learning the pronouns (at least those covered in BBG2 chapters 1-8).

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