And Bell’s Compendious Grammar does very little more than survey morphology the section on syntax is more interested in other issues (well, that and it was published in 1820). Moule’s Idiom Book was never intended to be a comprehensive volume nor was Zerwick’s Biblical Greek. Some of this is relatively understandable. Greek Grammar beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament.
Easley’s User-Friendly Greek: A Common Sense Approach to the Greek New Testament Gresham Machen’s New Testament Greek for Beginners
Moule’s Idiom Book of New Testament Greek Groton’s From Alpha to Omega: A Beginning Course in Classical Greek, 3rd edition. Of the 24 grammars I checked, some old and some new, 16 of them said nothing about τίς being used at the beginning of questions (i.e. If your sentence begins with one of these, it’s a safe bet it’s a question. They’re also the one that I was able to think of without going to a dictionary. There are a few more, of course, but these ones are pretty common. Here are some good question words to look for: If the sentence in question begins with a question word, it’s a question.
#GREEK QUESTION MARK USE HOW TO#
But there is likely no actual centralized discussion of how to form questions in Greek.Įven worse, your grammar probably misses the simplest, most important, and most obvious way of determining the whether or not a sentence is question. The best-case scenario is that you find some information sporadically scattered across multiple topics like mood, the function of οὐ & μη. Consider, for example, how rare guidance or comment is made in NT grammars for how to determine whether a sentence is a question. Introductory Greek grammars do a very poor job for topics that would otherwise be extremely prominent in the teaching grammars of modern languages. You need to be aware of them from the very beginning of learning the language to be able to write and understand the texts you read correctly.Stanley Porter’s recent article in BAGL “Where Have All the Greek Grammarians Gone? And Why Should Anyone Care?” has some idiosyncrasies, certainly, but his general point that Greek grammars are stuck in the past isn’t wrong. The ligature kai (ϗ) is sometimes used for the same function as the English ampersand (&).Īs you can see, there are a few key features that distinguish Greek punctuation.
The slash has the additional function of forming common abbreviations like α/φοί for αδελφοί 'brothers'. The hyphen, the brackets, the colon, the ellipsis, and the slash are also in use. The exclamation mark (Θαυμαστικό) is mostly used as in English. The ano teleia middot serves as the Greek semicolon but it is so uncommon that it has often been left off of Greek keyboards. One of the most striking differences is the Greek question mark ( ), which developed a shape so similar to the Latinate semicolon ( ).
#GREEK QUESTION MARK USE FULL#
The full stop serves as the thousands separator, and guillemets (εισαγωγικά) and em-length quotation dashes (παύλα) typically serve to indicate direct speech. The comma in Greek serves as the decimal point (and in this use is called the hypodiastole) and it also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι (ó,ti, "whatever") from ότι (óti, "that"). Let us take a look at them in this article. That said, there are a few differences and peculiarities that you should take into account. The symbols used are mostly the same as in English and other European languages, and the rules of using them are similar in some ways. Greek punctuation is also not as scary as it may seem.