So, the thing about ancient Greek is that it expresses relationships between words in a fundamentally different way to English. If you’ve ever studied Latin you can probably skip most of this.
In English, we might say, for instance,
“The farmer looks at the house.”
And that would be fine. There is a house, there is also a farmer, and he is looking at it. All is right with the world. But we could also rearrange the words, and say,
“The house looks at the farmer.”
What? There’s still a house, and there’s still a farmer, but now it is looking at him? Where does that start to work out? It gets even worse if we say,
“Looks at the farmer the house.”
What does that even mean? At least the last one was a proper sentence; it was bizarre and unsettling, but it did say something. This is just gibberish.
Now let’s do this with the same sentence in Greek.
“ὁ αὐτουργος τον οἰκον βλεπει." The farmer looks at the house. Fine.
"τον οἰκον ὁ αὐτουργος βλεπει." This still means "the farmer looks at the house.”
“βλεπει τον οἰκον ὁ αὐτουργος." Still means the same thing.
"ὁ τον βλεπει οἰκον αὐτουργος.” This one would sound really weird and people would probably look at you funny if you said it outside of poetry, but it still means “the farmer looks at the house.”
So how the hell do we say “the house looks at the farmer?” Assuming we ever want to, for whatever reason.
Like this:
“ὁ οἰκος τον αὐτουργον βλεπει." Can you see what the difference is between this and the second sentence? Look back and figure it out. I’ll wait.
…
So, you’ve worked it out? The ends of the words have changed – in the second sentence, the word for "farmer” ended with -ος (αὐτουργος) and the word for “house” ended with -ον (οἰκον). In the last sentence, those endings are reversed – the words became αὐτουργον and οἰκος. The order of the words has no signficance here, as it does in English. The different forms – what we call the inflection of the words – conveys that information instead.
In English, a simple sentence normally begins with its ‘subject,’ which is the technical term for the person or thing performing the action (or existing in the state) described by the sentence. Now, when you use the word ‘subject’ in a non-technical context, you might mean what the sentence is ‘about’ – if you see a sentence like “he sees the house,” you might think that sentence is ‘about’ the house, but that doesn’t make the house the ‘subject’ of the sentence in grammatical terms. The subject of that sentence is ‘he,’ because ‘he’ is the one doing the seeing, whereas the house is being seen. The person or thing on the receiving end of an action – ‘the house’ here – is called the ‘object,’ and in an English sentence the object normally comes after the verb. We determine which noun is the subject and which is the object based on where the words appear in the sentence. Ancient Greek does not work this way.
Nouns in Greek have five different forms called ‘cases,’ all of which have fancy names. We’ve just met two of them – the nominative and the accusative. When a noun is the subject of a sentence, it will appear in its nominative form, like ὁ αὐτουργος or ὁ οἰκος (this is the form that will be listed in a dictionary if you look the word up). When a noun is the object of a sentence it will appear in its accusative form, like τον αὐτουργον or τον οἰκον. You can tell from the words themselves which one is the subject and which one is the object.
The other cases get brought in for more complicated sentences. One is called the genitive, and it is used to show possession or origin – if I want to say, for instance, "the slave sees the farmer’s house,“ the word for farmer appears in its genitive form, to show that the farmer is the person to whom the house belongs, and that looks like this: "ὁ δουλος τον του αὐτουργου οἰκον βλεπει.” See how the word for farmer has changed again? The other commonly used case is called the dative, and it denotes what we call the ‘indirect object’ of a sentence. Some verbs naturally have two different objects – ‘give,’ for instance; think “he gives the farmer the rock." The subject of that sentence is ‘he’ – the one doing the giving – but what’s the object here? Is it ‘the farmer’ or ‘the rock’? Well, the rock is the thing being given, so it’s the regular sort of ‘object’ which goes into the accusative form. The person (or thing) to whom something is given, shown, or told, or for whose benefit something is done, is the ‘indirect object’ – not actually on the receiving end of the verb as such, but still somehow impacted by it – and this is what the dative form is for. The sentence we end up with is "τῳ αὐτουργῳ τον λιθον διδωσι." There’s the word for farmer again, in another form. The last case is called the vocative, and it’s not really very important, partly because it doesn’t come up as often as the others, partly because it’s very easy to recognise when it does. The vocative is the form used in direct speech for addressing a person – so if you’re talking to a farmer, he is "ὠ αὐτουργε." It’ll normally be obvious from context that a word is vocative, so you don’t really need to devote a whole lot of effort to learning the vocative forms of words.
These forms still exist in modern Greek, but have become less and less important over the last couple of centuries as people rely more on word order to convey grammatical information, in the English fashion. You don’t really need to know them to make yourself understood (…more or less) when speaking modern Greek, and they’ll probably drop out of the language completely, given time. The same thing is starting to happen in German, and actually happened to English as well at a much earlier stage of its development – we retained our cases only for some of our pronouns. ‘I,’ for instance, is nominative, while ‘me’ is accusative/dative and ‘my’ is genitive. Similarly, ‘who’ is nominative, ‘whom’ is accusative/dative and ‘whose’ is genitive – and now you know when it is and is not correct to use ‘whom’ ("I saw the farmer who gave me the rock” – ‘who’ is the subject of ‘gave’ – versus “I saw the man whom Achilles killed” – ‘whom’ is the object of ‘killed’).
All of these cases have separate forms for singular and plural as well – if you’re talking about multiple farmers, they could be οἱ αὐτουργοι (nominative – subject), τους αὐτουργους (accusative – object), των αὐτουργων (genitive – possessor) or τοις αὐτουργοις (dative – indirect object). To make matters worse, there are three different families of nouns in ancient Greek, known as ‘declensions’ – and each declension has its own set of case endings, as well as a few clusters of weird variations – but I’ve probably terrorised you all enough for one day.
Pokémaniacal 