[B-Greek] More on Funk's intro grammar

Trevor Peterson 06PETERSON at cua.edu
Thu Dec 11 09:25:26 EST 2003


>===== Original Message From "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> 
=====
>At 3:14 PM -0500 12/10/03, Trevor Peterson wrote:
Carl wrote:

>(1) Robert W. Funk's 3-volume paperback _A Beginning-Intermediate Grammar
>of Hellenistic Greek_; my "second, corrected edition" was published by
>Scholars Press in 1977; this is long since out of print and second-hand
>copies are difficult to come by. It's true that this textbook takes the
>Nominal and Verbal systems separately and in succession; it is evidently
>true also that Funk himself used it with a workbook of readings which, to
>my knowledge, has never been published but which would be essential for
>using it as a textbook.

Didn't someone recently publish a link to a listing on Amazon? Anyway, the CUA 
library has all three volumes and the workbook. I have it right here with me 
at the moment, so either I'm hallucinating or there is in fact a published 
workbook. It's also out of print, of course.

>If I were to teach with
>this textbook, I would certainly plan to use it in conjunction with
>readings.

But you apparently don't see a problem with the noun-then-verb configuration. 
Is there a reason that you don't object to it here but do have reservations 
about it in Mounce?

[snipped]
>
>(2) An altogether different matter is the preparation of a new grammar of
>Hellenistic Greek that was intended eventually to replace BDF. My
>understanding is that this was sponsored/promoted by Funk and the Westar
>Institute and that a committee to develop and produce it was initially
>headed by Darryl Schmidt;

This looks like deja vu. I'll call your attention to some earlier discussion:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/1999-August/006773.html
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/1999-August/006775.html

A couple of years later, there was a follow-up exchange, in which you seem to 
have forgotten the earlier remarks (or perhaps got more information in the 
interim?):

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2002-July/021858.html

It looks to me from the 1999 stuff like the matter was pretty well 
verified--something was in the works to revise both resources.

[snipped]
>
>I hope that provides some perspective on the questions raised by Trevor. If
>I were to be granted three wishes by some Fairy Godmother, I might spend
>two of them on the re-issuing of the Funk textbook and the completion of
>the Hellenistic Grammar project.

I'm curious--if the effort to revise the textbook is dead (or never existed in 
the first place), and if no publisher is interested in reprinting it, could we 
look at the possibility of making it available online? If we could get 
permission and find someone willing to host it, it would basically just be a 
matter of someone finding the time to scan the pages and throw together some 
tagging to get around in them. Over time, it might even be possible to 
reproduce the book in html and turn it into a truly Web-based resource. It 
does look like a good textbook, and it's a shame that it can't be made more 
widely available.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics




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