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I'm trying to build my vocabulary in koine using flashcards, and so far have had pretty good success attaining a decent level of reading fluency, e.g., I can get through the first couple of chapters of the gospel of Mark, with knowledge of their contents and preparation of some of the unusual vocabulary. However, there is a group of words in my stack that I'm having trouble making progress with, which seem to be expressions relating to time, place, and logic (including cause and effect). Most of these are short, generic-looking words with δ's and τ's in them. They're hard to memorize because they're abstract and all sort of look the same to me.

Can anyone point me to any materials that describe any of these categories of words in a systematic way, such as with tables of words?

By trial and error, and looking at dictionary entries, I've made a few generalizations:

-ὄτε may relate to time, as in ὄτε and πἀντοτε.

-τι may also relate to time, ἔτι, ἄρτι.

-ουτ- is an intensifier, as in ὅδε -> οὗτος, τοἷος -> τοιοῦτος.

παν- means every, as in πάντοτε, πανταχοῦ.

-τε seems to occur in words relating to cause and effect, or logical connectives: ὥστε, εἴτε, οὔτε

ὅ- seems to occur frequently in words like ὅτε, ὅδε, ὅθεν, ὅπου. I think this is ὅς used as a relative pronoun.

-θεν is a suffix meaning place-from-which

-δε is a postposition meaning "towards."

πο- means which, so πόθεν, whence? This seems to be the Greek equivalent of English "wh-," both coming from PIE stuff like kwis and kwos.

I think there is an idea of things being present here/now, where we can point to them, that is more specific than, say, "now, in the year 2020." Not sure if there is any specific way that this plays out morphologically.

It seems like I have some of the pieces figured out, but I'm reinventing the wheel. It would be great if anyone knew of a systematic presentation that would be helpful for learning.

2 Answers 2

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Wiktionary has a useful table of correlatives. There is also one in Mastronarde's textbook Attic Greek pp. 319-320.

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  • The wiktionary table is fantastic! Exactly what I was looking for. The google books link for Mastronarde doesn't work for me.
    – user3597
    Mar 11, 2021 at 16:25
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The wiktionary table linked to by b a's answer is exactly what I was looking for. Since it's off-site and is also kind of gigantic and hard to absorb, I thought I would summarize the patterns of some of its most regular and commonly used forms here as a self-answer.

interrogative some+X proximal demonstr. demonstr. rel. X+ever
enclitic accent on penult accent on penult
π->τ π->τ π,τ->h
-δε ος->ουτος ὁ-

Here are some of the most common words that follow this pattern most closely:

interrogative some+X proximal demonstr. demonstr. rel. X+ever
ποῦ που οὗ ὅπου
πότε ποτέ τότε ὅτε ὁπότε
πῶς πως ὧδε οὕτως ὡς ὅπως
ποῖος ποιός τοιόσδε τοιοῦτος οἷος ὁποῖος
πόσος ποσός τοσόσδε τοσοῦτος ὅσος ὁπόσος
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    The "some+X" forms aren't really accented on the ultima, exactly -- they're enclitics, so (though disyllabic enclitics are cited with final accent) they generally aren't accented at all.
    – TKR
    Mar 11, 2021 at 23:35

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