[B-Greek] Funk's Beginning-Intermediate grammar

Perry L. Stepp plstepp at kcc.edu
Thu May 27 15:19:32 EDT 2004


Add my voice to those clamoring for the availability of Funk's (notorious)
B.I.G.  

Several years ago, as an assignment for a Ph.D. seminar at Baylor, I
reviewed several beginning Greek grammars, Funk among them.  Since that
time, I have thought that Funk's B.I.G. was incredibly innovative and fresh,
and PROBABLY--I haven't yet taught with it--effective.

Perry L. Stepp, Ph.D.
 
Associate Professor of Biblical Studies
Kentucky Christian College 
 
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." 
                                                            --Faulkner 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Carl W. Conrad
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 2:06 PM
To: pennerkm at mcmaster.ca
Cc: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Funk's Beginning-Intermediate grammar

At 12:14 PM -0400 5/27/04, Ken Penner wrote:
>It appears that many of us are agreed that Robert Funk's
>_Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek_ is too good to remain
>out-of-print (and in that ugly Courier font).
>
>My understanding (please correct any misinformation) is that:
>
>Copyright is held by Westar Institute (that is, Bob Funk himself, not SBL).
>Polebridge Press (part of Westar Institute, contact Charlene Matejovsky) is
>willing to make the grammar freely accessible online in digitized (Unicode)
>form.
>Digitizing the text is too large an effort for any one organization or
>individual to take on (SBL and Westar do not have the resources to commit
at
>this point).
>
>If this understanding is correct (who can confirm it? Carl?), it seems that
>what we need is a volunteer team to scan and OCR and proofread and mark up
>the 3 volumes (plus the workbook), and provide the resulting HTML to
>Polebridge.

That's exactly right. I had some volunteers offer back in December for
scanning or for typing directly into a new document. What the people at
Westar want is a scan and conversion with a good OCR program into a Unicode
font that they will supply.

>Is any effort already underway in this regard? If so, whom can we contact
to
>volunteer? I have a copy and a scanner with OCR.
>
>If not, it appears that we would need someone to coordinate the effort, and
>find out who is willing to volunteer their resources for at least one of:
>Scanning the grammar,
>OCRing the scans,
>Proofreading the OCR output,
>(Bypassing scans and OCR) typing the text,
>Marking up the text for navigation with HTML.
>
>Then we could break up the effort and assign certain pages and tasks to the
>volunteers, appropriate to their resources.
>
>I'd love to see movement on this.

I would very much like to see this too (I've already seen the arrival of
BDAG; this is another thing I'd like to see happen in my lifetime; the
third is probably too much to hope for: the publication of a new and
definitive grammar of Hellenistic Greek to replace BDF.

Would you be willing to coordinate it too? Or would anyone else be willing
to undertake the oversight? I'd be glad to supply the correspondence I had
with the contact person for Bob Funk at Westar Institute but I don't think
I could coordinatae this task very well myself.

If need be I can supply the 3-volume textbook (coming apart with that
old-time cheap binding but all pages intact individually) but I don't have
a copy of the workbook. I suspect that the books would have to be
disassembled for careful scanning.

Wherever we go from here, thanks at least for raising it anew as a live
issue; I had come to think it more or less hopeless after what seemed a
good start last December.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
---
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