Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek and Latin

5. Adjectives, Articles, and Pronouns

79 5 Adjectives, Articles, and Pronouns In the previous chapter we saw that when a noun changes form (in the classical languages, it adds different suffixes or endings) to assume different cases, grammarians say that the noun is “declined .” In Greek and Latin, nouns are not the only words that decline. Pronouns assume different cases, as well (which should not be too surprising, since pronouns are the only words in English that still exhibit different case forms), and so do adjectives. Furthermore, in Greek the article (equivalent to “the” in English ) assumes different cases, as well. (Latin does not have an article.) The fact that all of these words decline may raise questions in the mind of an English speaker. Why do articles need case endings? Why do adjectives need case endings? How can anyone communicate in a language that does not have a word for “a” or “the”? In this chapter, let us examine these questions by looking first at adjectives, then at articles, and finally at pronouns . In the process of treating these three groups of words,1 we will see more clearly some of the advantages of a highly inflected language in communicating ideas clearly. Adjectives and the Advantages of Declining Them An English speaker might be forgiven for thinking that there is no reason to decline adjectives. After all, even if it is okay to 1. I do not call these groups “word classes” or “parts of speech,” because in English categorization, articles are not a formal word class, but are a subcategory of adjectives. In Greek and Latin classification, adjectives are not a 80 Part 2: Nouns and the Words That Go with Them decline nouns (something an English speaker may not be willing to grant), why does one also need to decline the adjectives that modify them? Why cannot the case of the noun identify its function, and then the adjective can just go with the noun? Of course, it can work that way. After all, many languages (like English) get by well enough without declining either nouns or adjectives, so if one can do that, then one can probably get by declining only nouns, but not adjectives. Nevertheless, there are two distinct advantages to declining adjectives, and I would like to consider each advantage in turn. First, if an adjective has case forms, those forms aid the reader /hearer in understanding which noun or pronoun the adjective modifies. Consider Jesus’ statement from Mark 8:38: “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” In this sentence, the adjectives “adulterous” and “sinful” modify “generation,” and in English the adjectives go directly in front of the noun to make it clear that they modify that noun. In both Greek and Latin, however, the words translated “adulterous” and “sinful” in this sentence follow the noun “generation”; they do not precede it. Such placement is rather uncommon in both languages (especially in Latin),2 but because the adjectives are in the same case as the noun (in Greek they are dative, and in Latin they are ablative), there is no ambiguity at all. Declining adjectives helps clarify the relations between the adjectives and the nouns, which in turn gives the speaker or writer more flexibility to compose the sentence in one order or another for emphasis. Second, adjectives are not always used to modify nouns. formal word class, but are a subcategory of nouns. Be that as it may, adjectives , articles, and pronouns are discernibly different groups of words. 2. In Greek this is called “long-form attributive word order,” in which the adjectives follow the noun but are marked off by articles. Literally, this phrase translates as “the generation this the adulterous and sinful.” The repetition of the article “the” helps to show that the adjectives go with the noun in front of them. The shorter form of attributive word order (in this case it would be “the adulterous and sinful generation this”) is more common . Because Latin has no articles, it is much less able to handle long-form attributive word order than Greek is, so this construction is rare in Latin. Adjectives, Articles, and Pronouns 81 Sometimes they are used as nouns. Remember that in chapter 3, I defined a substantive as...