21st Century Classical Greek -- Resources and general principles

This blog is about a description of the grammar of Classical Greek that does three things.

1)         Applies 21^st century concepts, replacing the old labels.

2)         Explains terminology objectively.

3)         Simplifies conjugations and eliminates clumsy terminology and faulty explanations.

As you may remember from last Thursday, I developed this description after realizing that the old one had all the confusing terminology and faulty grammatical explanations I had found in pre-21^st century grammars of Biblical Hebrew. If you want that material, here is the start of that blog.

Our text is going to be Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, a long prose work. The link goes to the first section of the first book. If you don’t already know Greek, don’t worry. Just use the Greek alphabet and sound out the words. Find a way to tag Mr. T so you can come back to him easily week after week.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0199%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D1

Perseus texts are live. You can click on any word and if it’s not a proper name, you will get an entry in the Perseus Word Tool. It links to several lexicons; we will be using “Middle Liddell” (Liddell and Scott abridged) and LSJ (Liddell Scott and Jones with links to examples, AKA “Big Liddell”).

The word tool will sometimes return several possibilities. Look for the one with a pink highlight. This will sometimes be appropriate to Thucydides’ context, but not always. I’ll tell you when it isn’t. As you get used to Greek, you’ll become able to figure it out for yourself.

The lexicon information is formatted based on morphology, not on meaning. Do not leap for the first translation when you use the lexicon. In my grammar, CONTEXT IS KING. When you compare Thucydides to the lexicon, you will often find that the best meaning for what T says, is at the end of the lexicon entry.

Word tool entries label verbs according to tense. We are going to translate all the tense labels to reflect aspect. There may be several sets of labels for a given spelling. Don’t sweat it; sometimes the same spelling in English has more than one use and Greek is the same way. I will explain to you how to figure out which one is correct. It will not always be the one that is highlighted. The “votes” were aggregated for all data on Perseus and Thucydides sometimes goes his own way.

Because CONTEXT IS KING, I will not ask you to memorize conjugational endings; that is morphology. I will ask you to memorize entire verbs that show up more than once in T, either stripped or with prefixes.

In the word tool, the word at the top left is the dictionary entry. To find entire verbs, you will copy the dictionary entry and paste it into Wiktionary. Sometimes you will have to remove a prefix. If you get part of the English, delete that. Wiktionary is not perfect, but it tries to distinguish between attested forms (in blue) and others (in red). I will not ask you to learn the philological information or every last translation. Remember, CONTEXT IS KING and the translation depends on the context.

I will often refer to two old grammars that are free online. See the Textkit website and bookmark or download John White’s First Greek Book and William Goodwin’s reference grammar. White’s declension paradigms are useful. As for Goodwin, you will find me arguing with him more often than agreeing with him, but that’s only because he is an example of old-think. You can’t bookmark pages in these books (☹) so I will give you page and section number of whatever I want you to look at.

I will go very slowly this first year, just a bit each week. I’ll pick up the pace after that; sometimes I won’t explain everything in a given section because you can use the word tool and Wiktionary to help you with it.

Next week I’ll tell you where to find declensions of the definite article and the week after that I will tell you something about Mr. T.