Masculine and Feminine nouns....
What is the best way to determine if a word is fem. or masc? It seems to me if the stem of the word ends in o it is masculine and if it ends in a or h it is fem. Is this correct?
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William Bingham said:
What is the best way to determine if a word is fem. or masc? It seems to me if the stem of the word ends in o it is masculine and if it ends in a or h it is fem. Is this correct?
I hate to be picky ... but in what language?
okay the nominative singular is probably the dictionary form.
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William Bingham said:
What is the best way to determine if a word is fem. or masc? It seems to me if the stem of the word ends in o it is masculine and if it ends in a or h it is fem. Is this correct?
I assume you mean in Greek? I don't know about Greek, but in other languages I've studied that have masc. and fem. nouns (such as French) there are some basic rules but there are usually some exceptions. The best way to know for sure is to look the word up in a dictionary which will always list what gender it is. Any Greek or Hebrew lexicon should tell you whether a noun is feminine or masculine. The abbreviations you'll probably see will be n.m. (noun, masculine) and n.f. (noun, feminine):
Note: I can't find that info in BDAG and am unfamiliar enough with Greek to not be quite sure how to tell from BDAG. Someone else help me out here.
In this entry, are ᾶς and ἡ both possible endings that γενεά can take? Or is only an ᾶς ending and ἡ the article? If the latter, then you can tell whether it's masc. or fem. by the article. I know this from the French articles le and la, which mean the, m. and f., respectively (la maison = the house, is feminine; le son = the sound, is maculine; note that you can't tell by how the words end what gender they are). I haven't learned the Greek articles yet.
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OH! Space Cadet First Class William at your service! [:$][:$][:$]MJ. Smith said:I hate to be picky ... but in what language?
It is Koine Greek.
I am still confused. I see the first table has hs as the ending for Nom Masc. It is the s, I know that tells me it is masc, nom. case. I did not expect to see the h.
Rosie, is it the article that signifies the gender?
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William Bingham said:
Rosie, is it the article that signifies the gender?
The article has to match the gender of the noun. I guess I'm going to have to learn Greek articles now in order to finish answering your question (I should remember this from the one semester of it I had back in college 25 years ago, but alas I don't):
OK, so the Greek definite articles are ὁ, ἡ, and τό (masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively). A "definite article" means one that indicates a specific thing. In English we have only one definite article: "the" (since we don't have gendered nouns). When we say "the book" we are talking about a particular book. The "indefinite article" in English is "a" (when we talk about "a book" we could be talking about any book). Greek doesn't have an indefinite article.
So yes, you can tell what gender the noun is by looking at its article, though that isn't the only marker. But it will be a dead giveaway.
Incidentally, ὁ, ἡ, and τό are all singular and in the nominative case, which is the basic case for nouns when they are the subject of a sentence (you'll learn about different cases -- genitive, accusative, dative -- later on in Greek). The article gets inflected (i.e., its form/spelling changes) when the noun it goes with is in a different role in the sentence other than the subject. So you'd have to memorize all the different cases of all the genders of article (in both singular and plural) to be able to recognize the gender of all nouns when you see them with their articles. But for lexicon lookup in BDAG, it appears that learning the nominative singular articles is sufficient.
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I thought you just had "to know" through memorization when you don't have the context of a sentence. Is there a better way?
[Edit} Ack, I thought we were talking about individual nouns.
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Paul said:
I thought you just had "to know" through memorization when you don't have the context of a sentence. Is there a better way?
[Edit} Ack, I thought we were talking about individual nouns.
I thought we were too. Aren't we? Enlighten me.
I don't know whether it's possible to tell by looking at the word. I suspect that like with French, you have to memorize the gender when you learn the nouns. There is often no rhyme or reason with why some nouns are masculine and others are feminine. With the exception of some animate beings (people in particular), it's usually a purely grammatical construct. I suppose in French you do distinguish between female and male dogs when talking about them, but the noun for dog (chien) is masculine. We have a tiny holdover of gender for in English, when we talk about a country or a ship being "she" (there's nothing about the quality of a country or a ship that would tell you that it's feminine; it's just a convention you have to know). And we have a few nouns (many of which are falling out of favor) for which there's both a masculine and a feminine version (aviator, aviatrix; steward, stewardess; actor, actress; waiter, waitress). And, believe it or not, there is still one adjective in the English language that has both a masculine and feminine spelling: blond (for a male) / blonde (for a female). That word is a noun too, and also has the two different spellings. I know of no other adjectives in English that have that property.
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In Greek, the Gender of a Noun is always only one of masculine, feminine, or neuter, and does not change. (Mounce's BBG says there are a few exceptions)
The spelling at the end of the noun generally gives the answer. See the chart in about the 2nd post in this thread.
The gender of the noun does not match what you might expect. Its just something about that word. BBG gives a few examples.
Many guides/grammers/etc for Biblical Greek assume you are attempting to read/translate/understand something already written (scriptures). So the answers about case, gender, number etc is already there in the spelling. And if you have Logos, the Morph codes are already done by someone.
Somewhere, I have a paper book I got in 1982. It attempts to list every word, and derives the morph codes for every entry. Takes forever to look up a few words in even a single verse. In Logos, I can display them on screen with a mouse-hover or click or two. WOW - sometimes computers are cool!
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William Bingham said:
What is the best way to determine if a word is fem. or masc? It seems to me if the stem of the word ends in o it is masculine and if it ends in a or h it is fem. Is this correct?
Hi William,
There are 2 ways to know for sure:
- Memorize the stem endings... Greek as MJ listed, Hebrew has another set, & again you have to deal with gender.
- Right click on lemma / left click on info & get the morph data in Logos.
For me, way # 2 is much more reliable. [;)]
Grace & Peace,
Bill
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William Bingham said:
What is the best way to determine if a word is fem. or masc? It seems to me if the stem of the word ends in o it is masculine and if it ends in a or h it is fem. Is this correct?
Not always. For example, prophetes is masculine, and hodos is feminine.
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Here is a link to the logos chart, there is a free pdf download on the page. (Just in case you don't have it.)
http://www.logos.com/greekparadigms
Also Bill Mounce's site teknia.com has a resource section with another free chart at the bottom of the page. Bill Mounce is a great teacher and his textbook is awesome.
The chart:
http://www.learnbiblicalgreek.com/bbg_resources
Info on the book and mp3 lectures which you can purchase:
http://www.learnbiblicalgreek.com/bbg3
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Thanks for the help everyone. I am going to re-read this grammar and see what I can figure out about these nouns. I may very well need to write another question or two. Hopefully though, with the input I have here and my further search I will figure things out. Again thanks for the help!
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