As with verbs, Greek nouns consist of a stem and an inflection that denotes the gender, number, and case of the noun. There are five cases in Greek, each describing the role of a noun within a sentence. Thanks to…
In Greek, there are two forms of the negative adverb “not”: one for indicative verbs (e.g. He is not teaching.) and one for imperative verbs (e.g. Do not teach.) The negative adverb is placed immediately before the verb. The following table shows the two…
Present Active Imperative verbs give commands. These commands have an imperfective aspect. In other words, they command for an action to happen continuously or repeatedly. In English, there are imperative verbs in second person singular and plural, but they are identical…
Present Active Infinitive verbs describe actions that either complement another verb (e.g. I want to teach), or that function as a noun (e.g. To teach is difficult.) As shown in the previous examples, infinitives can be complementary verbs or subjects. They can also…
Present Active Indicative verbs denote actions occurring in the present. These verbs can refer to an action occurring at the moment of the sentence (e.g. I am teaching.), a continuous action that occurs before, during, and after the sentence (e.g. I teach for…
Greek verbs consists of a stem and an inflection (a suffix or prefix that denotes the properties of the verb). Each verb has up to six stems. In Greek, verbs have the following properties: Person First the subject is the…
The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, most of which were adapted from Phoenician letters. Since we won’t use transliteration (Latin letters) in the Greek readings in these lessons, it’s important to learn the Greek alphabet before moving on: Letter…
This post is part of a series of Classical Greek lessons I’m compiling. Today, we’ll cover present active indicative verbs, but before getting our hands dirty, it would be good to go over some basic terminology: Verbs are “action” words (or, at…
This post is part of a series of Classical Greek lessons I’m compiling. Today, we’ll cover present active indicative verbs, but before getting our hands dirty, it would be good to go over some basic concepts about verbs: Verbs are words that…