Greek Grammar in Greek

William S. Annis
Scholiastae.org
February 5, 2012
Sometimes it would be nice to discuss grammar without having to drop back to our native
language, so Ive made a collection of Greek grammatical vocabulary. My primary source is E.
Dickeys Ancient Greek Scholarship. Over more than a millennium of literary scholarship in the
ancient world has resulted in a vast and somewhat redundant vocabulary for many corners of
grammar. Since my goal is to make it possible to produce Greek rather than to provide a guide to
ancient scholarship for which Dickeys book is the best guide I have left out a lot of duplicate
terminology. In general I tried to pick the word that appears to inspire the Latin, and thus the
modern, grammatical vocabulary. I also occasionally checked to see what Modern Greek uses for
a term.

Parts of Speech
The Greeks divided up the parts of speech a little differently, but for the most part weve inherited
their division.

part of speech
, noun
adjective (in ancient grammar considered a kind of noun)
, verb
, participle (which we now think of as part of the verb)
, article and also relative pronoun in the scholia
, pronoun

relative
demonstrative
possessive, i.e., , , .
, preposition

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license,
visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

 , adverb but also covering some particles in the scholia

, conjunction but, again, also covering some particles in the scholia
There was no classical word that matched the contemporary notion of a particle, which were
described by their function as either or . The Puristic word for a particle is
, which seems as good a choice as any, with the warning that in ancient grammarians
sometimes the word is used to describe a part of speech (a variant of .)

Phonology
, word (in grammatical texts means many things, but it doesnt usually mean
word)
, syllable
, sound/letter
(-) vowel
consonant
Vowels may be:

long ( lengthen; be (scanned, used as a) long)

short ( shorten; be (scanned, used as a) short)
() common, that is, it can be either long or short
Further a vowel may have:

breathings
rough ( to aspirate; to write with a rough breathing or aspirated consonant)
smooth ( write/pronounce with a smooth breathing or unaspirated consonant)
Theres an extensive taxonomy for consonants. The most important words are:

bare or unaspirated stops (, , )

aspirated (lit., hairy) stops (, , )
voiced (lit., middle) stops (, , )
The many marks of aspiration, accent and punctuation together are called :

, accents; verb to accent, , (it is) not accented correctly.

2

 syllables having an acute accent, (), are or, as a verb, ; also

describes words with an acute in the final syallable
paroxytone words (penult acute) are , verb
proparoxytone (antepenult acute) are , verb
words with a circumflex accent, , are , verb
penult circumflex are , verb
unaccented syllables are , verb
Other useful words:

Contraction is , verb . Vowel changes may occur , as

in, .
Crasis is . Changes happen , by crasis, as in ,
.

Nouns and Adjectives

, gender
masculine (also , with the usual Ionic/Koine variation in - for
both)
feminine (also )
neuter
, number
singular
dual
plural
, case

nominative (also, )
genitive
dative
accusative
vocative
ablative (in case you want to discuss Latin grammar)

to decline a noun
, declension
syntactic roles (from to act):
the subject
the object
3

For a noun in a case, use + gen., , it is paroxytone also

in the accusative.
The gender of a noun is described with the genitive or with + acc., as in
, here is (of)
neuter; it may also be feminine. It may also be described with a simple predicate adjective,
.
Adjectives may be:

comparative
superlative

Verbs
Verbs have

, mood

indicative
imperative (lit., commanding)
optative
subjunctive
infinitive

, voice
, active, adj.
, passive, adj.
, middle, adj.
, person
first
second
third
, tense

present
past
imperfect
perfect
pluperfect
aorist (lit., indefinite, also used to describe a class of pronouns)
future

, conjugation
Verb conjugation is described by accenting except for the - verbs:
4

 the ordinary -verbs, since they have recessive accent

contract verb (since they often have circumflex accents in the present)
- ending in -
A verb may be:

transitive
intransitive

Dialects
Most often dialectical features are described with adverbs, but verb forms exist, too.

, , Attic
, , Aeolic
, ; , Ionic
, , Doric
Koine

, , the preposition is construed with the dative in Koine, but in the genitive elliptically in Attic.

Speaking Grammatically
Greek grammatical vocabulary was far more lush than what I have given here. In addition to this
vocabulary there are certain habits of syntax, as well as specialized uses of well-known words,
that are common in grammatical commentary.
Because ancient Greek didnt have quotes, a word or phrase under discussion is generally
brought into the grammar of the sentence by tacking onto it. So one may speak of ,
the verb . However a particular part of speech might take the article matching the term
for that part of speech, such as , the (preposition) . Since computers these days offer
both quotes and underlines you should mark off a word or phrase with more than just , to avoid
confusion. Letters and parts of words (such as inflectional endings) in the ancient commentaries
generally had an overline, but theres no reason not to indicate endings in the usual modern way,
with a leading dash. Finally, words under discussion usually have their accent in dictionary form.
Since many grammatical terms are nominalized adjectives, they will typically agree with
whatever grammatical term has been dropped. For example, words related to tense will often
agree with , though they may also agree with , the part of speech.
Just as in English, a full grammatical description of a word may result in quite the pile-up,
, no indicative, singular first person verb...
5

When citing the usage of an author, use + dat., as . A characteristic habit of

a particular author may be indicated with , as in , T.
often does this.
+ acc. can mean goes with, in the grammatical sense, ,
goes with .
Grammatical agreement is indicated with + dat., as in
, the articles: agreeing with the nouns... To not agree is expressed with
with + acc. indicating the feature in which the concord is missing, as in
.
To discuss spelling, + gen. is usual, , it is written with an alpha. When
discussing word endings is used, as - , verbs ending in -.
The verb is often omitted, though it is also common for a word to have an ending,
- , and have the genitive in
-, e.g., and .
The usage of a word may be described with , use, or in the passive to describe
grammatical phenomena (be found, occur, admit) as in , occurs sometimes in the accusative. Another word is arrange, place together,
construct with the dative of case, , Alexion uses the
preposition with the genitive. Or in the passive,
, the preposition is used not only with the genitive but also the accusative.
Another: . Note that the case name sometimes uses the article,
sometimes not.
When something is omitted the usual verb is or , as in , the
(preposition) is omitted or , the verb is often omitted.
The perfect passive of () is used to note exceptions, as in
noting the unusual vocative of .
When giving examples of usage, use e.g., such as. This is a common prose use of .
When the word order is tricky, a reordered version of a phrase is introduced with .
The usual word for meaning (of a word, a phrase, etc.) is . A definition is ,
, the verb define is .
A copy of a manuscript is usually , in which a text is transmitted. The
itself has words, examples, etc. One may also speak of the , tradition, though in modern textual criticism this word is often brought into English, paradosis,
meaning the text as it has reached us, free of recent editorial tinkering.

Further Reading
By far the most important resource for people wanting to get a better understanding of how
the ancient Greeks themselves commented on difficult parts of, say, Pindar, is Eleanor Dickeys
Ancient Greek scholarship: a Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica and Grammatical Treatises, from Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period, Oxford University Press,

2007. Much of this summary comes from that book. However, one can easily find works of the
ancient grammarians themselves these days.
The grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus had a great influence on the study of grammar for
nearly two millennia.

A. Schmidhauser has the four surviving treatises available as text and pdfs at Apollonius
Works in Greek
Archive.org has the Maas edition of On Pronouns
Only one of Dionysius Thraxs works survive, The Grammatical Art, and thats not even surely
his.

a text version can be found at Bibliotheca Augustana

there is a Google Books version of the Uhlig edition, as well as Hilgards edition of the substantial scholia on that work