8.1 Now that you have learned some nouns and verbs, you are ready to begin reading sentences in Greek. Note that in English sentences, the form of a word hardly ever reveals its function in a sentence. Rather, English relies upon WORD ORDER to determine the function of a given word in a sentence. As a result, The cat chases the dog expresses something rather different than The dog chases the cat.
In Greek, it is not word order, but the INFLECTION OF ENDINGS that determine a noun’s function in a sentence. In other words, if a noun is in the NOMINATIVE case because it serves as the subject of a verb, it remains the subject of the verb no matter where it is placed in the sentence. While there are some constraints on Greek word order that are discussed below and in later chapters, for now it is good to expect the unexpected.
This lesson offers some preliminary observations and notes on translating simple Greek sentences into English. Let us use the following sentence as an example:
- ὁ Μάρκος δίδωσι τοῖς ἄρχουσι τὸν παῖδα τοῦ Πείσονος.
- Marcus gives the rulers the child of Piso.