Nouns of the second declension

English tells you what a noun is doing by where it sits. The dog bit the man means something different from the man bit the dog, and nothing has changed but the order.

Greek does it with endings. That is why word order in Greek can be so free, and it is why the ending is not a detail to be got through on the way to the meaning — it is the meaning.

Nouns fall into three declensions, which are just three patterns of endings. The second is the most regular, so it comes first.

λόγος — masculine

A few nouns ending in -ος are feminine — ἡ ὁδός (way) and ἡ ἔρημος (wilderness) are both in this chapter. They decline exactly like λόγος, and only the article tells you they are feminine at all. That is the first hint of how much work the article does.

The same word, three jobs

Here is λόγος doing three different things, in three real sentences. Watch only the ending.

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος

Nominative — the subject. "In the beginning was the Word."

ἀκούσας δὲ ὁ νεανίσκος τὸν λόγον ἀπῆλθεν

Accusative — the object. "But when the young man heard the saying, he went away." The young man is the subject and the saying is what he heard, and you know that from -ον against -ος.

ὑπηρέται γενόμενοι τοῦ λόγου

Genitive — "having become servants of the word." The of is in the ending.

The dative is the fourth, and chapter 5 introduces it properly with the prepositions that take it. There is a fifth: the vocative, used for addressing someone directly, and it occurs 668 times.

Κύριε, σῶσον

"Lord, save!" That is κύριε, not κύριος — the disciples are speaking to him. In the plural the vocative is identical to the nominative, so it usually goes unnoticed; in the singular of the second declension it ends in -ε, and once you have seen it you will see it everywhere.

ἔργον — neuter

Neuter differs from masculine only in the nominative and accusative, and in those two it has one form doing both jobs. Everywhere else the endings are identical.

εἴ τινος τὸ ἔργον μενεῖ

"If anyone's work remains." Nominative or accusative? Only the sentence can tell you, and here μενεῖ needs a subject, so it is nominative.

A neuter plural takes a singular verb

This looks like a mistake the first several times and it is not.

πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο

"All things came into being through him." πάντα is neuter plural; ἐγένετο is singular. Greek regularly treats a neuter plural subject as a single collective, so the verb agrees with the idea rather than the number. Do not correct it.

Why lexicons list three things

λόγος, -ου, ὁ gives you the nominative, the genitive ending and the article. The genitive tells you which declension the word follows; the article tells you its gender. You need both, and neither is guessable from the nominative alone — which is why ἡ ὁδός exists to catch you.

Learn every noun in that full form from the first day. It costs a second and saves an hour.

The definite article

The article occurs 19,769 times in the New Testament — one word in every seven. It agrees with its noun in gender, number and case, which means that once you know the article you can read the case of almost any noun attached to one, even a noun you have never met.

That is the single highest return in first-year Greek. Seventeen forms, and they parse a quarter of the sentences you will read. There is a drill for exactly these seventeen, and it is worth doing until it is boring.

Greek has no indefinite article. λόγος on its own is a word or the word, and only the sentence decides.

What the article's absence tells you

Greek has no indefinite article, so the choice is not between the and a — it is between the article and nothing, and the nothing is meaningful.

Broadly: the article points at particular identity, and its absence throws the weight onto quality or character. Those are tendencies rather than rules, as the next two verses show.

ἱλάσθητί μοι τῷ ἁμαρτωλῷ

"Be merciful to me, the sinner." It is tempting to make that article say the sinner above all others, and you will hear it preached that way. Do not. A noun in apposition to a pronoun regularly takes the article, and Luke writes ὑμῖν τοῖς Φαρισαίοις and ὑμῖν τοῖς πλουσίοις the same way six times over, meaning nothing more than "you Pharisees", "you rich". He could hardly have written it without. Whether the tax collector means the sinner or a sinner is an argument from the parable, and not from the article.

Παῦλος ἀπόστολος, οὐκ ἀπ’ ἀνθρώπων

"Paul, an apostle — not from men." Here is the caution, and it is worth more than the rule. Fourteen letters open by naming their writer ἀπόστολος or δοῦλος, and not one of the fourteen uses an article. The bare noun is the form a greeting takes. The arguing is done by the words after it.

So do not over-read an absence. Greek uses the article in plenty of places English would not, and its absence after a preposition often means nothing at all. The test is whether the writer could have written it the other way — and in a greeting he could not.

What to watch for

λόγων is genitive plural and so is ἔργων — the genitive plural is -ων in every gender and every declension you will meet. That makes it easy to spot and useless for telling you the gender, so take the gender from the article.

And the dative singular ends in a long vowel with an iota written underneath it: λόγῳ, ἔργῳ. It is silent, it is small, and at reading speed it looks like a plain omega. Chapter 1 said to train your eye for the subscript. This is the ending it was for.