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It's difficult for me to explain these differences if you don't understand the grammatical principles involved, but I'll do what I can.
In a language like Greek, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles change their form to indicate their grammatical function in a sentence. These changes usually occur in the word ending, although sometimes also within the word itself, and may be accompanied by changes in word stress. This process is known as "inflection" -- words are "inflected" to show their grammatical function. Nominative and accusative case are two of the various categories of inflection which such words undergo. In addition, there are also genitive, dative, and occasionally vocative caseforms in the Koine Greek of 2000 years ago.
The point of all this is that, depending on the grammatical function of a word in a sentence, it will change its form to indicate this function, as well as to indicate whether it's singular or plural in meaning. For a word such as χάρις, the other inflected forms in the singular are accusative χάριν (also χάριτα), genitive χάριτος, dative χάριτι. When the word is used as the subject of the sentence, nominative χάρις must be used. When used as the direct object of the verbal action or as the object of certain prepositions, it changes form to accusative χάριν (or χάριτα); when used as the object of certain other prepositions, it changes form to genitive χάριτος; when used as the indirect object of the verbal action or as the object of certain other prepositions it becomes dative χάριτι. The basic meaning always remains the same, the form of the word just changes according to its grammatical use.
This is exactly analogous to what happens with the English pronoun "I". When used as the subject of a sentence, we must use "I", but when used as the object of a verb or a preposition, "I" changes form to become "me", and when used to show possession becomes "mine": I went to the store. He hit me. [direct object of the verb "hit"] Don't look at me! [object of the preposition "at"] He gave me the book. [indirect object of the verb "give", where "book" is the direct object] The book is now mine. [possessive form of I] These are the caseforms of the pronoun "I" in English. The basic meaning remains the same, but the form of the word varies according to its use in a sentence.
Similarly in Greek with a noun such as χάρις.
Hope this helps, Greg Brush |