21st Century Classical Greek -- syntax

This isn’t all the grammar in section 1 but I’ve thrown so much at you that I think it’s time for a breather. Let’s stop and think about why Thucydides structures his sentence the way he does.

English sentence structure is relatively straightforward. It has to be. There are almost no cases in English, aside from “whom” which too many people use incorrectly. The order of words in an English sentence, along with punctuation and context, determines meaning.

Languages with noun cases work differently. Since you know the case endings of the definite article, you know which words fall into which case and what the antecedent is, for most personal gerundives and adjectives. I’m going to use this fact to show you how Thucydides parsed out an expression.

I am going to discuss things in terms of what Thucydides does to communicate with his audience. That means I will often talk about oral communication because, remember, Thucydides probably read his work to friends or contributors. He had to do three things.

1.                    Make it comprehensible.

2.                    Make it memorable.

3.                    Get audience buy-in with a number of devices.

 

He uses three tools for comprehension.

1.                    Syntax particles to chunk things, and three different types of noun expressions.

2.                    Street-level grammar, including infrequent things like anti-passives.

3.                    Simple compared to poetry; nothing obscure or flowery.

 

For memorability, there is a separate set of tools.

1.                    References to previous material, sometimes with topic order sentences.

2.                    Parallelism and rounded periods.

3.                  Repetitions after sidebars. I’ll point these out when we get to them but Torah does the same thing and it is demonstrably suited to oral presentation.

 

For audience buy-in, Thucydides does three things.

1.                  Clearly marks the actions he finds important with conjugated verbs to avoid confusing them with too many things to focus on.

2.                    Uses grammar as well as specific words, to avoid seeming arrogant in stating his opinions.

3.                  Sticks to things they have personal knowledge of, unlike Herodotus who starts out by appealing to Persian history.

 

The old grammars don’t do much to help you understand what authors were trying to communicate, because they ignore context in favor of morphology. Goodwin didn’t even discuss the syntax particles. If you want a reference on sentence structure, use Herbert Smyth, the basis of Eleanor Dickey’s 2016 book which attempts to teach composition in Ancient Greek. We’ll ignore her. Smyth is in the old grammatical tradition, but we know how to translate that to our system.

https://archive.org/details/agreekgrammarfo02smytgoog/mode/2up

This version of Smyth is not locked. His section on syntax is on his page 255, section 900.

However, even Smyth does not understand some 21^st century concepts of syntax, and because of these gaps I will have to explain some terms to you.