So I went on with turning my notes into a handbook and I took the time to cross reference to Goodwin. Then I made a pass through and looked up his citations. And if you thought it was your fault that you had trouble learning Classical Greek, well, it's not.
This didn't take long. Goodwin only cites for about 1/3 of his claims. For the rest, he gives no examples or they are not cited to any author. That means we can't check 2/3 of his claims to see if any author actually writes like that. When you give no evidence or your evidence can't be fact-checked, your claims can't be accepted. It doesn't matter how many prior authors said the same thing, Goodwin doesn't tell us who they were so we can't go back and see if they made the same mistake. Academics must cite to sources or lose credibility. And besides, I've seen this before in ben Hayyim's work on Samaritan Hebrew. I have 13 pages of notes on how badly he messed up, so I was prepared for what I found in Goodwin.
Of the citations, only about 1/3 are the three authors I'm working with -- Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon. So that saved me some more time. The problem is, Goodwin reaches as far back as Homer and as far ahead as Aristotle for his citations. Homer wrote an antiquated Ionic dialect so how the Iliad and the Odyssey use grammar is not how my three amigos work, and still less how Plato and his student Aristotle used grammar in the 300s BCE. A 300-year difference means the use of words changes, and so can the use of grammar. It's the difference between "is gone" in Jane Austen and "has gone" in Mary Roberts Rinehart. By the time Aristotle died, Classical Greek was replaced by Alexander's koine, which works differently. Writers who wanted to claim they were using Classical Greek might have copied models, but they didn't grow up speaking the language and that's what led to the decay of Greek scholarship in the west until the Renaissance.
The citations I looked at were a) misquoted b) miscited c) didn't support Goodwin's claim or d) contradicted Goodwin's claim. If he did use the same citations his sources used, his sources become discredited. If Goodwin did his own homework, then he should never have written a Greek textbook because he didn't know what he was talking about. It's not unusual for people to get books published and then have them debunked. Every diet book ever published has been debunked. You have to be writing real science, with validated evidence and peer review, to avoid debunking. Goodwin was not writing science. He didn't even get within smelling distance of it.
I've gone on from there, starting with conditionals, to compare my "live" authors to Goodwin's claims. I've already found conditionals using "infinitives" (my impersonal gerundives) in ways Goodwin never discusses. I've found conditionals using "future tense" (my imperfective conceptual) and Goodwin claims this is a version of the "subjunctive" (my oblique). That's false. Future tense is an indicative. There is no crossover between indicative and other modalities in definition. Languages do not have multiple grammatical forms just so scholars can get tenure. Thucydides and the rest wrote to communicate. You can't do that if you don't know how to use your own language correctly, as every English teacher you've ever had told you.
There's a place in uses of the tenses where Goodwin knows perfectly well that his "future perfect" is a passive but, 200 pages later, he pretends that it really is a perfect tense. Whether those 200 pages represent how his sources worked, or whether they were an attempt to keep the student from realizing Goodwin had made a boneheaded mistake is irrelevant.
If you are a fan of Smyth, you owe it to yourself to fact-check him. His book was the source for the 2019 grammar published at Cambridge. Skip the phonology and paradigms in front, and the versification and rhetorical devices at the end, and see which citations Smyth uses. If they're all in Goodwin, then Smyth doesn't know what he's talking about, and the 2019 grammar is a waste of money.
Said it before, saying it again. People in liberal arts, especially classics, do not know their subject fields as well as they think. Peer review, if it fails to catch failures of the Test of Occam's Razor and fallacies, is worthless. They may believe they are engaging in academic freedom, but the truth is they're discrediting themselves, their departments, and their fields.
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