Parasing Information:Κάλλιστον κόσμος, ποίημα γαρ θεού.
“The Universe is most beautiful for it is the work of God (Ο Θαλής ο Μιλήσιος / Thales of Miletus))
Κάλλιστον is the neuter form of the superlative adjective “κάλλιστος” (kállistos), which means “most beautiful” or “best.”
κόσμος is a Greek noun that means “world” or “universe” in English. Grammatically, it is masculine in gender and can take different forms depending on its role in a sentence, such as nominative, accusative, genitive, etc.
ποίημα is a Greek noun that means “workmanship”, “creation”, or “poem” in English. It is neuter in gender.
γαρ is a Greek particle used in ancient Greek and Koine Greek. It’s commonly translated as “for” or “indeed” in English. Grammatically, it serves as a conjunction or a particle that connects clauses, providing an explanation, justification, or reason for what was said before. It doesn’t inflect like nouns or verbs, so it doesn’t have different forms.
θεού is a Greek noun that means “of God” in English. Grammatically, it is in the genitive case, which typically indicates possession or relationship. In this form, it shows possession or association with the noun it modifies. In this case, “θεού” indicates possession by or association with God.
Translation is subjective, awesome probably works better than translating “most beautiful or wonderful” since awesome connotes fear, more so than beauty or wonder would, yet still I feel like I would be inserting my own bias by using awesome and would do so based on context
Thank you very much for taking the time to write!
I had only heard awesome is context were it had a positive meaning so I had not considered that is also means ‘fear’.
In that case awesome is clearly the wrong word.
Thank you!