Greek is an inflected language, which means for the rest of us, that when a word is used for a particular purpose in a sentence it changes its ending. English is rather much simpler than this:

What should be noted in the sentences above is that English comprehension of these sentences above depends upon the word order, rather than anything else. Greek differs from English in this respect. Instead, words can be placed in varying sentence orders because of their endings or cases. Take these sentences in to example:

Here it is obvious that the meaning in these sentences is uncertain. Who did what to whom? This is because of the word order that either can be rendered 'John walked the dog' or 'the dog walked John' and understood as such. One certainly doesn't want to imagine a dog walking someone, though they frequently do anyway. So, in consequence with Greek, different cases would be used to make these sentences understandable.

There are five different cases in Greek, the nominative, the accusative, the dative, the genitive, and the vocative. Each has its own purpose:

nominative: the subject of the sentence. John walked the dog.

accusative: the direct object of the sentence. The dog walked John

dative: The indirect object of the sentence. She gave it to John

genitive: shows possession. John's dog walked him.

vocative: used to address someone. John, give it here.

Keeping these cases in mind, let us move onto our first noun declension However, before moving on, the matter of gender must be resolved. Just to complicate matters grammatical gender is also to be put into consideration. Every word has it, so just get used to it and memorize it. There are three genders: masculine feminine, and neuter. Perhaps this is the lost reason which as English has developed boats and the like are sometimes referred to as 'she's'.