For the linguistically inclined, here are some slighly more technical comments on the Greek language.
Greek is an Indo-European language; however, it is not closely related to any other language (though many languages have borrowed words from Greek). It has changed less in the 2500 or so years since Ancient Greek than e.g. English has in 1000 years.
Greek has three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), similar to e.g. Russian and German; however, unlike those languages, Greek has all three genders distinct in the plural. Adjectives agree with the nouns they describe, whether they are used attributively or predicatively.
Greek has different verb forms for all three persons, in singular and plural.
Therefore, it is not necessary (as in English) to specify the personal pronoun
with a verb, except for emphasis: where English has to say "we
believe in God", Greek simply has "Πιστεύουμε στο Θεό" (which
translates literally as "believe in God", but the verb has an ending
identifying it as being first person, plural). I believe Spanish and Russian,
among others, also do this. The cross you see on the left you'll encounter a lot of times in the MTC; it represents the three persons (first=I/we, second=you, third=he/she/it/they) in singular and plural, and you'll come across it with verb endings and personal pronouns. |