21st Century Classical Greek -- a new book

So.

It’s been three years and if you read the whole blog, you are probably saying “But then I have to start over again from the beginning.”

We all do.

Including the authors of a grammar published by Cambridge in 2019. These guys were teaching Greek and they looked at their stack of handouts and decided there was a book in there somewhere.

I’ve seen this before. A guy teaching about fallacies published his slides on Amazon. There’s a there there, as I know only too well from writing the Fact-Checking posts. But a) he cites to no sources and if you don’t know anything about the subject, it’s just one person’s opinion and b) there’s not enough there there.

The other example is a guy who got interested in the Samaritans after he moved to Israel to escape Hitler. He took lots of notes and turned out a five-volume set called Literary and Oral Traditions of the Samaritans. I found an English translation of volume 5 which is supposed to be about the grammar of Samaritan Pentateuch. The book reads like somebody walked into the author’s study, saw all his notebooks, leafed through them, and said, “you have a book in here somewhere.” The result is not impressive. I have about 13 pages of objections to his claims based on my own study of Bible, Aramaic, Assyrian and Arabic; they’re part of my book The Real Difference.

But I ordered the 2019 grammar published at Cambridge to see what they did with their departure from Smyth. Well.

The authors are trying to “ride Roman” with one foot in the tense world and one in the aspect world. Such acrobatics suggest that they don’t understand the test of Occam’s Razor but are trying to preserve old sources. That’s far too Aristotelian; we are living in a Galilean world now and we don’t teach crystal spheres or cosmic ether in physics classes any more.

I was able to read a couple of reviews of the book. They mostly discuss formatting and references like the indices. That’s damning with faint praise. About the content, most are non-specific; there’s no reason to prefer this work over Smyth just because some people say “it’s new and improved” like an ad for a TV dinner.

One showed that this “Roman riding” caused confusion. This doesn’t happen if you pass the test of Occam’s Razor. Nothing requires that an Indo-European language have tenses. Russian and Polish do very well without them. Appealing to Latin doesn’t convince me; there are too many differences. For one thing, Latin requires a conjugated verb, even in equational sentences. For another thing, Latin has only one imperative, like French or German; Greek has one for each aspect (and voice). Greek retained all the Anatolian gutturals that are eliminated from Latin (and Tocharian B with its yakwe equivalent to equus). That’s not an exhaustive list but it will do to go on with.

When I got the book, I looked at the index. There’s nothing on modality. The authors are not in the 21^st century yet as far as their linguistics go.

There’s also nothing on ergativity. You may think it’s a bee in my bonnet, but at least I don’t go on about “anti-causative” formations which are basically about things happening to inanimate objects without ascribing a cause.

But at last this book has sold me a clue about something I argued against before, and that’s for next week.