Day 26 | Accusative & Genitive

Reading back over my last post ("the" from last September) it seemed pertinent to scope out this definite article.  This is because, unlike in English, not only does "the" change based on whether it is male, female, neutral or plural, but also when the context is accusative or genitive (and the changes are exponential, because they too have gender and plural definitions).  In other words, there are 12 more the's to learn.

When I say accusative, I mean a sentence in which the subject is being acted on (with a verb).  For example, the dog eat's the ball, where the second the has become accusative (the first the being nominative).  This sentence in Greek becomes:

ο σκύλος τρώει την μπάλα

The reason it isn't η (as ball μπάλα is female) is because of the following table of accusative definite articles:

	Singular	Plural
male	τω(ν)	τους
female	τη(ν)	τις
neuter	το	τα

The reason why the ν is in brackets is because in some cases you put τω or τη (male and female without the ν) based on the next letter of the next word.  If you struggle to remember the list of appropriate letters in which you should or shouldn't apply the ν the rule of thumb is: if the next letter is a vowel, add the ν, otherwise drop it.  I guess based on this it is a matter of how it sounds when you say it out loud.

Similarly, the definite article can also change if the subject owns the object in the sentence.  For example, the dog's ball.  We in English don't use "the" when it comes to owning something, instead we use the 's against the owner, but in Greek the object will carry the article (to help denote the gender), so it becomes the dog's the ball.  More than that, in Greek, you have to flip the whole sentence the wrong way round, as the object comes before the owner.  So it now becomes: the ball the dog (or in literal terms: the ball of the dog).  So for this phrase (the dog's ball) ends up being:

η μπάλα του σκύλου

The observant amongst you will notice something strange happened to the word for dog.  Σκύλος has become σκύλου.  That is because the ending of the owner has to match the ending of the genitive article (in most cases!).  So του has turn σκύλος into σκύλου.  Here are the rest of the genitive definite articles:

	Singular	Plural
male	του	των
female	της	των
neuter	του	των

This is a little easier to remember than the accusative articles, because there are less of them to learn based on patterns.  All the plural articles (male, female & neutral) are των and the male and neutral singular share the same (του).  In effect, there are only 3 to learn instead of 6!

Remember, this is in conjunction with the nominative cases.  An overview of that has already been provided in my last post.

I hope you found that useful.  I know it's been a while since my last post, so please leave a comment in the section below & I hope to get some more frequent posts out there soon!