Reported or Indirect Speech

 
Philip says: I love Greek..
Those are his actual words. That is direct speech.
No problem here, the Greeks do the very same thing and say:
ὁ δὲ Φίλιππος λέγει · φιλῶ τὴν ἑλληνικὴν φωνήν.

Now, if we want to tell somebody else what Philip is saying, we can either

  • use his actual words (as above) or
  • report his words this way:
    Philip says that he just loves Greek.
In this last case we are no longer directly repeating his actual words, but indirectly reporting what he said. That is reported or indirect speech. We have to change the sentence construction a little, so as to report his idea rather than his speech.

 
In itself this is not very difficult. We do it all the time.

Direct Speech     Indirect Speech
 Today Mary says:
I love Ricky. 		    Today Mary says
that she loves Ricky. 
 Last week Mary said:
I love Tommy. 		  Last week Mary said
that she loved Tommy.. 
 The President announced:
I'm going to cut taxes. 		  The President announced that
he was going to cut taxes. 
 The lazy boy said:
I shall work very hard tomorrow. 		  The lazy boy promised that
he would work very hard the next day. 
 People used to believe this:
The earth is flat. 		  People used to believe that
the earth was flat 

In Greek it is even easier, no need to change the verb tense in reported speech:
present does not change to past
future does not change to conditional

But the Greeks had other ways of making indirect speech more interesting, by using optatives or infinitives and participles instead of the standard "I think, hear, realize that......" forms.We are not quite ready for those finer points of Greek yet. Soon though..