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Greek language - Grammar

Greek language - Grammar: Encyclopedia II - Greek language - Grammar

Ancient Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages, was highly inflected. For example nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Verbs have four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative), three voices (active, middle and passive), as well as three persons (first, second and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated in four main tenses (present, a ...

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Greek language, Greek language - Classification, Greek language - Consonants, Greek language - Examples, Greek language - Geographic distribution, Greek language - Grammar, Greek language - Historical sound changes, Greek language - History, Greek language - Lexica, Greek language - Literature, Greek language - Official status, Greek language - Orthography, Greek language - Phonology, Greek language - Sandhi rules, Greek language - Some common words and phrases, Greek language - Special characters, Greek language - Spell checkers, Greek language - The Iliad in Homeric Greek Lines 1-7, Greek language - The Lord's Prayer in Greek Matt. 6:9-13, Greek language - The Nicene Creed in Greek, Greek language - Typography, Greek language - Vowel sounds, Greek language - Writing system, List of Greek words with English derivatives, Greek dialects

Greek language: Encyclopedia II - Greek language - Grammar

Greek language - Grammar

Ancient Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages, was highly inflected. For example nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Verbs have four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative), three voices (active, middle and passive), as well as three persons (first, second and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated in four main tenses (present, aorist, perfect, and future), with a full complement of moods for each main tense, although there is no future subjunctive or future imperative. (The distinction of the "tenses" in moods other than the indicative is actually mostly of aspect.) In addition, indicative forms of the imperfect, pluperfect and future perfect exist. There are infinitives and participles for all corresponding finite combinations of tense and voice, excluding the imperfect and pluperfect. However, usage of ancient/obsolete grammatical forms and phrases is becoming increasingly common in current language in the absence of similar modern forms (e.g.: ειρήσθω εν παρόδω, French: à propos; ευκαιρίας δοθείσης, Latin: data occasione).

Modern Greek has simplified some aspects of this system but is still largely a synthetic language. It is one of the few Indo-European languages that has retained a synthetic passive. The dative is lost except for in a few expressions like εν τάξει (en táxei /ɛn ˈdaˌksi/), which means "OK" (literally: "in order"). Other noticeable changes in its grammar include the loss of the optative mood, infinitive and the dual number (with the exception of δύο, the numeral two, used undeclined in all cases); the reduction in the number of noun declensions, and the number of distinct forms in each declension; the adoption of the modal particle θα (a corruption of ἐθέλω ἵνα > θέλω να > θε' να > θα) to denote future and conditional tenses; the introduction of auxiliary verb forms for certain tenses; the reduction of participles to only two, one active and one passive; the extension to the future tense of the aspectual distinction between present/imperfect and aorist; the loss of the third person imperative, except in archaicisms such as ζήτω! ('long live!'); and the simplification of the system of grammatical prefixes, such as augmentation and reduplication. Some of these features are shared with other languages spoken in the Balkan peninsula (see Balkan linguistic union).