I never asked this question before because I thought that it must be something I don’t need to really know. But now curiosity has made me ask this now.
In the declensions of nouns, there are the following (ᾶς, ἡ, ῆς) after particular words.
Are these suffixes to attach at the end of the word stem, or maybe prefixes too? If so, are the two letter suffixes the plural versions and the single letter suffix/prefix the singular version?
This is very puzzling. Can you say on which page you found these forms?
This seems to be an old fashioned textbook and I would recommend that you try either Athenaze or JACT reading Greek.
I did not mean to be discouraging in my earlier post. Learning Ancient Greek is not an easy task. You have to commit to doing it every day and if you can’t you have to accept that all the good work you do when you do manage to study will be undone when you don’t. It’s better to be realistic about how much time you can set aside and then just stick to it.
John W. White’s First Greek Book, published in 1896 and because there is an online quiz for it. The vocabulary parts of Lesson 3 and 4.
https://daedalus.umkc.edu/FirstGreekBook/JWW_FGB4.html
https://daedalus.umkc.edu/FirstGreekBook/JWW_FGB3.html
I think you meant to separate these. In vocabularies, nouns are followed by their genitive form and article. This helps you to identify the stem of the word and its gender. In the -α declension, there are several genitive endings: ης, ῆς,ᾶς, ᾱς, so for example, in vocabulary lists you will see:
γέφῡρα, ᾱς, ἡ bridge (where ᾱς is the genitive singular ending and ἡ is the feminine article)
θεά, ᾶς, ἡ goddess (where ᾶς is the genitive singular)
νίκη, ης, ἡ victory (where ης is the genitive singular)
σκηνή, ῆς, ἡ tent (where ῆς is the genitive singular)
You’ll notice that there is what’s called a macron over the α in γεφύρᾱς. This indicates it’s a long α as opposed to a short α.
Seneca’s right, though-you might find a more modern textbook easier to follow. JWW’s book assumes that the student has had some Latin prior to beginning Greek.
The problem is I don’t have money to buy a modern Attic Greek textbook, I don’t even have a debit card for online payment. So to the free online books I must turn whether I like it or not.
Edit:
I also chose this because of this Digital Tutorial that has quizzes.
Aetos has answered your question. I think that given you couldn’t follow the explanation given on p9 paragraph 40 of White then this underlines that perhaps this is not the textbook for you.
As Aetos says this book presupposes some understanding of Latin, like most books dating back to the 19th or first half of the 20th century. You would be much happier with Athenaze. It has longer texts to read and helpful grammatical explanations. It relies less on rote learning at the early stages. Unfortunately there is no avoiding a certain amount of memorisation. Athenaze is based on a story about a fictitious Athenian farmer against the background of the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. It also includes material from myth and the Persian Wars.