Additional pronouns

Chapter 9 gave you the personal pronouns and chapter 11 the demonstratives. This chapter finishes the set: five more kinds, all of them common, and none of them with endings you have not already met.

The one that matters most is the relative pronoun, which occurs 1,408 times and is the main way Greek joins one clause to another.

The relative pronoun

ὅς, ἥ, ὅ — "who", "which", "that". Its endings are the ordinary ones, and its shape is almost the article without the τ:

Every form carries a rough breathing and an accent, and that is what separates it from the article: ἥ is "who", ἡ is "the". One mark.

Where a relative gets its gender and its case

The rule is the one from chapter 9, and it is worth saying again because this is where it earns its keep.

Gender and number come from the antecedent. Case comes from the relative's own clause.

τὰ ῥήματα ἃ ἐγὼ λελάληκα ὑμῖν πνεῦμά ἐστιν

"The words that I have spoken to you are spirit." ἅ is neuter plural because τὰ ῥήματα is; it is accusative because it is the object of λελάληκα inside its own clause. Two facts from two different places, in one word.

So when you meet a relative, ask it two questions rather than one. What does it point back to, and what is it doing where it stands?

ὅστις, the indefinite relative

ὅστις, ἥτις, ὅ τι is ὅς welded to τις, and both halves decline. It occurs 144 times against ὅς's 1,408 — so ὅς is the rule and this is the exception.

It sometimes carries a qualitative sense: not just "who" but "who is of such a kind that". More often it is simply ὅς with no discernible difference, and in the New Testament it appears almost only in the nominative.

Do not build much on it. The qualitative force is real in some places and absent in others, and there is no way to tell from the form which you have.

τίς and τις: one accent apart

Two words, identical in every letter, distinguished only by their accent — and they are almost equally common. τίς, the interrogative, occurs 554 times; τις, the indefinite, 530.

τίς, τί with an acute accent asks a question: "who?", "what?", "why?"

Τίνα με λέγουσιν οἱ ἄνθρωποι εἶναι

"Who do people say that I am?"

τις, τι with no accent of its own means "someone", "something", "a certain".

Ἄνθρωπός τις κατέβαινεν ἀπὸ Ἰερουσαλὴμ εἰς Ἰεριχώ

"A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho." Used with a noun like this it is adjectival, and it is how several of Luke's parables begin.

The indefinite is an enclitic: it usually throws its accent back onto the word before and stands second in its clause, so position helps as much as the accent does. Usually — the plural opens a clause seventeen times, τινὲς δὲ τῶν Φαρισαίων, "some of the Pharisees", and there it has to carry an accent of its own. Even then the placing tells you which word it is: τίνες accents the first syllable and τινὲς the second.

Reflexive pronouns

A reflexive points back at the subject, so it has no nominative — there is nothing for it to do there.

ἑαυτοῦ, "himself, herself, itself" (333 occurrences), declines like αὐτός. The first and second persons are ἐμαυτοῦ, "myself" (37), and σεαυτοῦ, "yourself" (43), both built from the personal pronoun plus αὐτός. In the plural, ἑαυτῶν does duty for all three persons.

Εἴ τις θέλει ὀπίσω μου ἐλθεῖν, ἀπαρνησάσθω ἑαυτὸν

"If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself." Note τις in the same line, indefinite and unaccented — "anyone".

ἐὰν εἴπωμεν ὅτι ἁμαρτίαν οὐκ ἔχομεν, ἑαυτοὺς πλανῶμεν

"If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves." Here the plural ἑαυτούς is doing first person duty.

ἀλλήλων: one another

The reciprocal pronoun, formed from ἄλλος, "other". It occurs 100 times and only ever in three plural forms — ἀλλήλων, ἀλλήλοις, ἀλλήλους — which makes it the smallest paradigm in the language.

ἐντολὴν καινὴν δίδωμι ὑμῖν ἵνα ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους

"A new commandment I give you, that you love one another."

The distinction worth holding is between this and the reflexive. ἑαυτούς is "themselves"; ἀλλήλους is "each other". English blurs them, and Greek mostly keeps them apart — mostly, because a plural reflexive can stand in for "one another": ἀνεχόμενοι ἀλλήλων καὶ χαριζόμενοι ἑαυτοῖς, "bearing with one another and forgiving each other" (Col 3:13). So ἀλλήλων is always "one another"; ἑαυτῶν is usually "themselves", and the sentence shows which it means.

Possessives, and what to watch for

Greek has possessive adjectives — ἐμός "my", σός "your", ἡμέτερος "our", ὑμέτερος "your" — which decline as ordinary adjectives and stand in attributive position.

But they are not the usual way to say it. ἐμός occurs 76 times, σός 25, ἡμέτερος 7 and ὑμέτερος 11, while the plain genitive of the personal pronoun does the job over two thousand times. So when a writer reaches for ὁ ἐμὸς λόγος instead of ὁ λόγος μου, that is a choice, and usually an emphatic one.

ἴδιος, "one's own" (114), belongs here too, and it can be pointed:

εἰς τὰ ἴδια ἦλθεν, καὶ οἱ ἴδιοι αὐτὸν οὐ παρέλαβον

"He came to his own things, and his own people did not receive him."

What to watch for. ἥ against ἡ, and τίς against τις — two pairs where the accent is the entire word. And a relative pronoun needs both its questions asked, not one.