[B-Greek] Buth's Epictetus and Morice's Stories in Attic Greek

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Apr 24 06:10:31 EDT 2006


Randall Buth's new Epictetus pamphlet with CD readings has been  
announced on this list over the weekend; I reviewed the booklet  
carefully while it was in production and I make no bones about my  
delight with Randall's method and the tools that he has made  
available to students of NT Greek. It's often asked what benefit  
students of the NT can reap from reading non-canonical Greek.  
Exposure to Greek texts that focus on the same issues in a vocabulary  
and style of the same era but that are not familiar and partially  
memorized texts, certainly. And there's the opportunity to hear Koine  
Greek read aloud at a good pace in the pronunciation that is  
appropriate to the era of composition of these texts and also to use  
grammatical aids that are themselves set forth in Koine Greek.

This morning I've just seen a review of another book
which, though it's classical Attic rather than NT Koine,
should be useful as a tool for developing rapid-reading
skills. The BMCR review may be accessed at:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2006/2006-04-26.html

I was particularly delighted to see in this review an admonition
which I have myself made more than once here on B-Greek:

"Specifically M. urges students and teachers to avoid
construing -- i.e. decoding a sentence into English after locating the
main verb. This valuable section includes suggestions for "Using the
Vocabulary," which provides clearly stated and useful reminders on
augments, reduplication, and compounds, and "Grammar for Reading,"
which advocates "reading Greek as it is written, by phrases, in the
normal Greek word order, rather than attempting to re-arrange it into
something approximating English" (p. 1). This section also includes
short notes on "Pesky Little Words," "Punctuation," and "Pronouns," and
longer entries on "Subjunctives and Optatives," and finally "The
Article," which contains a particularly useful summary of the topic. In
all, these "Hints" are clearly written and -- at only eight pages --
will be easily digestible to the beginning reader."


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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