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- "Εγώ είμαι μία γυναίκα."
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Being a native italian, at the first sight it looked like "I am my woman"
In what situations would you use "μιά" instead of "ένα" ? For example "ένα κορίτσι"...... still female if you get my drift?
κορίτσι refers to a female human ("girl") but is grammatically neuter.
Grammatical gender and natural gender do not always match up.
Similarly, αγόρι is grammatically neuter but refers to a male human ("boy").
You use μια/μία when the word is grammatically feminine, regardless of whether the concept behind the word is a female human.
So you have μια εκλογή "a choice", for example -- choices are neither male nor female, but the word is feminine.
Fortunately in Greek, you can usually tell the gender of a word by looking at its ending:
- masculine: -ος -ας -ης
- feminine: -α -η
- neuter: -ο -ι -μα
But it's not 100% certain (especially -ος which can be any gender but is most often masculine), so it's best to learn the gender together with the word.
Isn't it enoguh just to look at the article? For example, η τράπεζα (the bank), is clearly feminine, whilst του πολίτου (the citizen) should either be masculine or neutral... Might be confusibg when it comes to genitive plural as it's των των των from what I remember...
γυναίκα is related to the root of gynecology: From French gynécologie, from Ancient Greek γυνή (gunḗ, “woman”) + -logie (“-logy”). Replaced earlier gyniatrics.
Hey guys! Just a Greek girl passing by to see if anyone would like personal help with Greek!
In some translators, it gave me "i am a single woman". Is this correct also ? And on this context, would it be "single" as in "one/singular" or "not married" ?
In other discussion someone said μια =a μία=one now mizinamo say it'is a problem of gender,it is not clear for me...
"Μία" is feminine, like "una" in Italian, or "une" in French. It means both "a" (for feminine nouns) and "one" (again for feminine nouns). As a native speaker, I would argue that "μία" and "μια" can be used interchangeably. However, I'm not aware of any grammar rules that corroborate this; I'm only speaking from experience.
871
Good way to think of it is that it'll often "rhyme" with the other word, like many other languages in which words change case by their ending, like Russian.
έχω means "I have"
εγώ means "I"
You can also say εγώ έχω for "I have", but you don't have to -- the verb ending already shows that it's "I have" and not "he has" or "we have".
I've come across an exercise where you could omit "a" in Greek (sorry the grammatical term escapes me). For example, "εγώ είμαι άντρας". And I read that you can omit it. But here, with the feminine "μία γυναίκα", it's present. Can you choose to omit it too?
Yes, that's right. You can generally omit the indefinite article (that's the term) when there can't be more than one of the noun it describes. You can't be more than one man or more than one woman so you can omit the ένας or μία.
Pronounciation of εγώ είμαι μία γυναίκα: Is it like ego immeemiajinneeka or ego immamiajinneeka? Other places I think I hear είμαι pronounced with an ee- sound in the end, but here I think she says είμαι with an a-sound, am I correct?
It's your first example: "ego immeemiajinneeka".
Both αι and αί produce the same sound as ε, notice it is present in γυναίκα too. However in άι the α and ι are independent again e.g. γάιδαρος
For listening examples, the Greek TTS in Google Translate is generally pretty good. If you click the speaker button it will play the audio at normal speed, click it twice and it will play again slowly, and a third time will be at normal speed again. To slow it down further you could put a full stop after each word like this:
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=el&tl=en&text=%CE%B5%CE%B3%CF%8E.%20%CE%B5%CE%AF%CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%B9.%20%CE%BC%CE%AF%CE%B1.%20%CE%B3%CF%85%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%AF%CE%BA%CE%B1.
You might also like Forvo, where people upload audio recordings of themselves saying various words and phrases (just be sure not to get the Ancient Greek and Modern Greek recordings mixed up):
https://forvo.com/word/%CE%B5%CE%AF%CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%B9/#el
Είμαι Is first person = I am. Είναι is third person=He/she/it is.
Εγώ=I (used for emphasis) είμαι=I am (you could omit the pronoun εγώ, as είμαι already includes the person).
He's reading a sentence. This isn't a performance with actors playing parts it is just people reading sentences. And it's not even real people but a computer program that sounds like a man.
I have been studying some Greek in school and I rememver the verb "to be" being: ειμί εί εστί(ν) εσμέν εστέ εισί(ν)
Why?
Yes, that is Ancient Greek which is not in use. On Duolingo we teach Modern Greek which is very different.
Understood. I thought it would be the same thing but I guess it isn't, haha.
Is modern greek like english where the word order matter. Biblical greek isnt like that at all is it different in that way
The word order is not at all strict like in English, but changing the word order often changes the meaning slightly, puts the emphasis elsewhere, etc.
And now we use the article, while the just last phrase says: εγό είμαι γυναίκα without an article. Can you please adopt a one single rule.
The verb is είμαι.
That form is only used for "I am" (not for "you are" or "he is", for example), so you can tell just from that word that it's "I am".
But you can still add the "I" explicitly before it. εγώ is the word that means "I". It doesn't mean "I am" by itself.
Why would the app count "A woman am I" as wrong? English word order is flexible. Seems to me that this poor app still needs major fixes to its translation AI.
It’s not an AI. All the accepted alternatives have to be entered by hand by volunteers.
Therefore, I recommend that you stick to the obvious or most natural translation, which shows that you have understood the Greek sentence, even if it does not showcase how erudite you are or how flexible your language is.
I try to do that. My normal native English (from Washington State) the game rejects about once per every other lesson. I have to actively remember to think about what weird-to-me English satisfies the app, which I can easily forget due the Greek or Spanish taking up the majority of my attention.
Oh, sorry if this free of charge app doesn't meet all your expectations. The volunteers who built a Greek course for you to use freely should be ashamed!
