Wednesday, February 21, 2024

More Pertaining to Greek Gender (Morphology)

 

A friend once asked me about grammatical gender in Ancient Greek, so I'll make a few remarks here.

Cities in Greek are normally feminine gender if I remember correctly. Granted, some nouns in the language have masculine and feminine forms, but the differentiation of gender in these instances is normally marked by the article employed with the noun (e.g., ὁ λόγος is masculine, whereas ἡ νῆσος is feminine).

Louw-Nida Greek and English Lexicon points out that Βαβυλὼν is a feminine noun and so does BDAG. The article used in Revelation along with "Babylon" also points to the noun being feminine with respect to its grammatical gender: even when a nominal declines, unless the article indicates otherwise, we can conclude that its gender remains the same: λόγος is nom. sing. masc., but λόγοι is nom. pl. masc.

See
https://pressbooks.pub/ancientgreek/chapter/20/

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