English vs.

Ancient Greek

Word order vs. word endings

Ancient Greek word order is more flexible than in English and usually different.

Where English says “The neighbours cuts the hedge”, Greek prefers the word order “The neighbour
the hedge cuts” (but “Cuts the neighbour the hedge”, “The hedge cuts the neighbour” or “The hedge
the neighbour cuts” would be possible too!). Greek has the option of placing the words in any order
without altering the meaning of the sentence by using a rich system of word endings to convey
information such as the relationship between an adjective and the noun it describes or the role of a
noun within a sentence.

This approach to conveying information would be recognisable to speakers of German, Polish,

Russian, Finnish or indeed any of a large group of ‘inflected’ languages, ‘inflection’ being the name
given to a change in the shape of a word. English itself was originally more inflected than it is today,
and still retains some examples, as we shall see later.

Look at the following example:

a) English: The army pursues the man. (The army: subject; the man: object)

Greek: ἡ στρατια διωκει τον ἀνθρωπον.

Let’s turn things around:

b) English: The man pursues the army. (The man: subject; the army: object)

I have changed the grammatical function of the words by changing the WORD ORDER.

Greek: την στρατιαν διωκει ὁ ἀνθρωπος = The man pursues the army.

I have NOT changed the word order in Greek, but the WORD ENDINGS to change the
grammatical function of the words!

ἡ στρατια: “the army” in its subject form  την στρατιαν: “the army” in its object form.

ὁ ἀνθρωπος: “the man” in its subject form  τον ἀνθρωπον“the man” in its object form.

Since it is the ending of a word that tells you what grammatical function it has in the
sentence, word order is quite flexible:

διωκει την στρατιαν ὁ ἀνθρωπος = The man pursues the army.

την στρατιαν ὁ ἀνθρωπος διωκει = The man pursues the army.

ὁ ἀνθρωπος την στρατιαν διωκει = The man pursues the army

In Greek, you’ll have to get rid of the left-to-right reading and start looking at word endings
instead to figure out who’s doing what in the sentence.