Hello, this is Pastor Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona,
and today we're going to talk about Greek adjectives.
Now in the last video, we talked about Greek nouns and how they have to be adjusted
for case endings, you know.
There's the nominative, the genitive, the dative, and the accusative case, and
so the nouns take different endings depending on which case they're being used in.
Adjectives are the same way.
Adjectives have to match the nouns that they modify in gender, in case, in number, okay.
When I say number, I mean singular versus plural.
So I've drawn a chart here similar to the chart that we had with nouns and we're using
an adjective that we've already worked with a lot which is the adjective true, okay.
Remember in John 1-9, it talked about the true light or Jesus said I'm the true vine.
That word true is the word alithinos and alithinos is the masculine singular nominative
form of that word, okay.
We're not going to deal with plurals today, but we're going to learn all these singular
forms of alithinos because when it modifies a masculine noun, we're going to be using
this column of alithinos.
When it modifies a feminine noun, we're going to need to use this column and when it modifies
a neuter noun, we're going to be using these forms, okay.
I hope I'm not losing you with all this grammar.
We're going to get back to analyzing Bible verses and more fun stuff, but honestly this
stuff is important.
We have to stop and kind of digest some of the grammar that we've been seeing before
we move forward.
Obviously, learning Greek is very hard work, otherwise everyone would do it.
That's very difficult learning any foreign language.
There are a lot of things that are hard about Greek, but there are a lot of things
that are very easy about Greek.
It's a lot easier than Hungarian, for example.
Let's go over this listing here and again, I've put the chart in the same order as
I had the chart with nouns.
This is the standard order that you're going to find in most Greek textbooks, but we've
got first of all the nominative case, then we've got the genitive, then we've got
the dative, and we've got the accusative.
And if you're not sure what those mean, you need to watch the previous video.
Okay, now notice that there is a similarity in the endings on the adjective compared to
the endings on the nouns.
So here the endings are os, u, o, and on.
Those are the exact same endings that we had on our masculine singular nouns.
So alithinos, alithinu, alithino, and alithinon are the masculine singular forms
of the word true.
Isn't it great how in English it's just true?
All of this is just one word, true.
In Greek, well, we've got, you know, 12 different words here just for the singular alone.
Alithinos, alithinu, alithino, alithinon.
Then with the feminine, we have these different endings, alithini, alithinis, alithini,
and alithinin.
Now notice these two are pronounced the same, the nominative singular feminine and the dative
singular feminine, but this one has a yoda subscript which helps you identify it, okay,
when it's spelled out.
So that's helpful right there.
Then we move into the neuter column, we've got alithinon, alithinu, alithino, and
alithinon.
Now, again, the neuter nominative and accusative are the same, okay.
So let's think about some examples of this word that we've already come across.
We've come across it, of course, in John 15, 1 where the Bible said,
Ego y mi y ambelos y alithini.
So y ambelos is a predicate nominative because he said, I am the true vine.
A predicate nominative is the noun following the state of being verb.
I am the true vine, okay.
So we're going to be a nominative case.
Vine y ambelos is a feminine singular noun, the vine, y ambelos.
So we're going to take this column right here, y ambelos y alithini.
That's the word we're going to use right there, alithini.
And then when we were dealing with John 1, 9, for example, and it talked about the
true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
The light is tophos, okay.
And we know that to is the word for the when we're dealing with the nominative singular
neuter, all right.
Tophos is a neuter word.
So we have in John 1, 9, y in tophos to alithinon, all right.
Tophos to alithinon, all right.
Again, predicate nominative, we're using the nominative case, singular neuter.
So it's going to be alithinon.
You're going to see a lot of these other ones throughout the Bible too.
Not all of these are used in the Bible, okay.
But most of them are, or several of them are.
I was just reading in 1 John chapter 5 where he said, we know that the Son of God has
come and has given us an understanding to know him that is true.
And we are in him that is true.
Even in his son Jesus Christ, this is the true God and eternal life.
So you're going to find a few forms of this word in that verse,
if you want to look that up in 1 John 5-20.
But anyway, I would memorize this chart,
because a lot of other adjectives are going to follow this exact same pattern.
Obviously, you don't necessarily have to learn this chart for every adjective.
Just like you don't have to learn the other chart for every noun.
But it's good to have a few example words that you memorize the chart for,
and be able to write this out from memory.
That way when you come across adjectives that follow these same patterns,
you can instantly identify whether that adjective is in the nominative case,
accusative case, dative case, genitive case.
And this will help you match up adjectives in the sentence with
the nouns they modify.
Because the adjective is going to match the noun it modifies.
So if we have an adjective that's a feminine, singular, genitive, and
then there's a noun that's a feminine, singular, genitive.
We can see very easily that those two things go together, okay?
If they don't match, if they're in different cases, different genders,
well, then we know that they don't go together.
So that'll just be a quick way when you're reading to just instantly match up
adjectives with the nouns that they modify, and
be able to understand what part of speech,
what role they're playing in the sentence.