21st Century Classical Greek -- review 3

Believe it or not, counting reviews, I’ve posted 100 articles on this subject. It’s a terribly long time since I did a review, but here are some important points.

On conditionals, we’ve destroyed what Goodwin wrote. His categories and “future more/less vivid” are copied from Latin studies. They don’t reflect what really happens in Classical Greek and our aspect and modality definitions work far better.

On reported speech, the grammarians’ claims – that it uses the same verb forms as the original speech – work only when you talk about the aspect of verbs, not when you talk about the tense of verbs.

On purpose clauses, we’ve destroyed the distinction between object and final clauses, particularly pointing out that “final” is a meaningless label because such clauses aren’t necessarily at the end of a sentence.

We’ve identified a structure none of the grammarians talk about, the ergative, and the three values of transitivity in Classical Greek:

a)         intransitive passive;

b)         intransitive executive with the i.i.g that is the ergative;

c)         transitive using executive or base voice.

We discussed negation showing the gaps in the old grammars.

We’ve shown that there really is a “due and owing” quasi-imperative use of the impersonal gerundive, and that it tracks with a similar use in Biblical Hebrew.

And I showed how the “boss of Balliol College” was a lousy translator and didn’t understand what Thucydides was saying. His negations are in the wrong place; he moves things around destroying perfectly valid structures. I have gotten to Book III of Thucydides. Jowett does even worse there than he does in Book I, including moving text from one chapter to another. It’s so bad that on Perseus, they won’t give you Jowett on a subsection basis, only on a chapter basis, and in the case I just mentioned, Jowett screws that up. So it’s a good thing we’re learning to understand Thucydides and not Jowett, isn’t it.

Pretty good for only two years of work.