Many years ago, I took a course in New Testament Greek. During our revival at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church, I sensed the Greatest Teacher leading me to take more NT Greek. So, I’m taking a Greek course from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.
One of my challenges is memorizing pattern charts in which verbs are conjugated. For example, this week I’m memorizing the six-component paradigm of the present indicative mood of “eimai.” The six components are the first person, second person and third person singular, and the first-, second- and third-person plural.
This week I am also memorizing the paradigms for present active indicative for a verb that is translated “I am loosing” (loosing, not losing) in first person singular. I’m memorizing 12 different components with this verb, six in the present active indicative and six in the present middle/passive indicative.
Here’s something I noticed that will help me to list the components correctly. The present active indicative has the only conjugation with an ending that sounds like “omen.” The present active also has a conjugated verb that sounds like “Watusi” and it’s third person plural. Whatever helps mnemonically, right?
In the first person singular for the present middle/passive indicative, the conjugated verb in first person singular sounds like “may” and the verbs in its third person singular and plural have endings with the sound of “tay.”
[1.] The verb “eimai” takes a
A. direct object.
B. predicate nominative.
C. plural form.
D. None of the above
[2.] predicates (PRED-uh-cates):
A. authorizes
B. asserts/claims
C. projects
D. validates
Merkle and Plummer, the authors of our textbook, point out that because eimai is a copulative or equative verb, it does not take a direct object. No. 1 is B.
No. 2 is B.
3. What conjugation is to Greek verbs this word is to Greek nouns:
A. parsing
B. singularizing
C. declension
D. casing
4. The component parts of the various forms of conjugated verbs are
A. declensions.
B. mnemonics.
C. morphemes.
D. conjugations.
5. crasis (CRAY-sis)
A. sparse wording
B. misarticulation
C. an accent mark to indicate a soft tone on syllable
D. a merger of two words into one (e.g., the Greek words for “and” & “I”)
Let’s see how well you did on the final three questions in my little Greek quiz.
No. 3 is C. No. 4 is C. No. 5 is C.
Editor’s Note: Don Rodney Vaughan, Ph.D., teaches journalism, interpersonal communication and public speaking at East Mississippi Community College and is the pastor of Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in Webster County. Contact him at dvaughan@eastms.edu.
