NEED HELP WITH BIBLICAL GREEK GRAMMAR TERMINOLOGY

I just discovered a downloadable e-book ($8) that you might find useful: A Review of English Grammar for Students of Biblical Greek and Other Ancient Languages. It's written for the Christian classical homeschooling market, but says it's suitable for ages 12 to adult. I took a look at the table of contents and sample pages and it looks pretty good. I almost hesitate to refer you to it here because it's the kind of thing I think Logos ought to sell, and hopefully it will someday, so this would become a competing product. But for now it's not.

Rosie Perera said:

I just discovered a downloadable e-book ($8) that you might find useful: A Review of English Grammar for Students of Biblical Greek and Other Ancient Languages. It's written for the Christian classical homeschooling market, but says it's suitable for ages 12 to adult. I took a look at the table of contents and sample pages and it looks pretty good.

This looks like it would be ideal.  I've had to look up several terms since it's been awhile since grammar class.  The resources that I find helpful are the Pocket Dictionary for the Study of New Testament Greek which is part of the Essential IVP Reference Collection; Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Glossary, a part of the Lexham Syntactic NT; Greek New Testament Insert, a very affordable and concise aid; and Glossary of Morpho–Syntactic Database Terminology, which Dr. Heiser refers to in his videos.

Nice explanation Paul!!!!!

Thanks.

MJ. Smith said:

Substantives usually means nouns and words functioning as a noun - which can include adjectives, participles, demonstrative pronouns. But I do know that grammars are inconsistent in terminology so you may be right - I'm just saying double check.

That's what I'd thought, too, and what the sample pages of A Review of English Grammar I pointed to above said. Substantive comes from Latin substantia, substance. So it would make sense that it's a noun or something acting in the role of a noun. I've just done a bit more review on the web. Substantives can include:

• nouns - plain and simple old nouns you know and love (cat, boy)
• pronouns - I, you, they, ...
• gerunds (the "ing" form of the verb when it's functioning as a noun, e.g., "hiking is a fun activity") - I think that's what Martha is referring to by "participles"; there might be a subtle difference between gerunds and participles but I'm not sure
• the infinitive (the plain vanilla form of the verb, with "to" in front of it) when used as the subject ("to err is human") or direct object ("I like to hike") of a verb (in general the subject is the person or thing doing the action of a verb and in English usually comes right before the verb in the simplest sentences; the direct object is the thing or person the action is being done to and in English usually comes right after the verb)
• adjectival nouns (an adjective serving as a noun), e.g. "the land of the free and the home of the brave"
• demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, those - when used as nouns, not when used as adjectives/modifiers) - e.g., "this is my mother" but not "this woman is my mother"
• groups of words that function as a noun ("those two people like to hike")

That's for English. I'm not sure if the exact same principles apply in Greek.

Paul said:

I think this was one of those cases where two semesters of Greek isn't enough.  After reading a little further yes Substantive is more of a position and not just dealing with adjectives.

There are substantive adjectives, pronouns, participles, etc.

A better way to say this is an adjective or participle that normally functions to describe a noun, when substantive, takes the steering wheel and kicks the noun out completely!

The concept still deals with adjectival purposes.

Your initial description of substantive was exactly right...for adjectives when they are substantives. Your example was very similar to mine. In my example ("the land of the free and the home of the brave"), the adjectives "free" and "brave" are serving in the place of nouns and are thus substantives. The noun ("people") is understood in both cases and is omitted. The phrase means "the land of the free people and the home of the brave people," but those adjectives are so flexible they can do double duty as nouns. [:)]

As you rightly pointed out in this second post, other things can be substantives besides adjectives (and they're only a small fraction of the things that can).

Rosie Perera said:

The noun ("people") is understood in both cases and is omitted. The phrase means "the land of the free people and the home of the brave people,"

If you put the extra words back in, it makes the Singing at the Ballgame more tricky than it already is.

I really really really would like Mounce's BBG V3 in Logos. I have paper V2, but I'm learning to not want to use books any more. They don't have scalable fonts for when I'm tired and like it bigger, and easy to read.

vince said:

No, I did not use a standard dictionary  because I thought these terms would have a specific Koine Greek definition that could potentially be different than Engish grammar defintions. Is that an incorrect assumption?

For the most part grammar terms are descriptive and apply across languages. There are language specific nuances that a standard dictionary wouldn't catch. However, for most terms, a regular dictionary will give you a good definition to start with until you can find one specialized for Greek Grammar.