[B-Greek] Best book/appendix for Comprehensive Chart of Forms?

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Thu Sep 24 15:56:13 EDT 2009


On Sep 24, 2009, at 11:20 AM, Louis Sorenson wrote:

>
> What are people's favorite chart/book to use for a COMPLETE list of  
> forms. I'm looking for something that includes full paradigms of all  
> the nouns, adjective, pronouns, numbers, verbs, irregular verbs,  
> etc.. It's for an intermediate class who really has had no "go to"  
> list of charts, just an incomplete and hard to read beginning  
> grammar appendices' "list of forms". Preferably, it has  side-by- 
> side comparisons of different moods for the verb, esp. the  
> indicative and subjunctive. I have not seen the out of print  
> "Enchiridion". Personally, I use Smyth, but that is overkill for  
> many. Mounce could be a good goto grammar but the indexes are so  
> poor and often when I have told intermediate students to find a form  
> in the back, it is missing. Preferably, the book is a standalone  
> list, available in print at a low cost.  It would also be great for  
> it to be the size of a USB GNT - I would not mind having a list  
> myself in the back of my GNT when I am stumped.

I have mixed feelings about the question raised here. On the one hand,  
I have always enjoyed perusing these morphological paradigm lists and  
once had a polychrome chart about 24" x 14" with as complete an outlay  
as I've seen (although, as others have noted, there's no way to get  
the whole array of the Greek verbal system in all its idiosyncracies  
into a neat chart; something will always be omitted or its variants  
ignored). On the other hand, I am inclined to doubt whether these  
charts are really all that useful in pedagogical terms. I'm not  
convinced that even memorization of these charts bears much fruit in  
terms of instant recognition of forms in a page of printed (previously  
unseen) Greek text.

As for what's currently available, I think anybody who's serious about  
ancient Greek should find Smyth useful. Maybe there is too much there,  
but I haven't found errors and I've always been able to find what I'm  
looking for somewhere in Smyth's morphological charts. Yes, there are  
some points where NT Koine morphology deviates from that of Classical  
Attic, but there aren't many.

Another extremely useful item in Smyth is the complete listing of  
irregular forms of all the major irregular verbs in ancient Greek:
http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.9:7:1.perseusmonographs
Many of those are not NT Koine verbs, but I think the NT Koine verbs  
are included. In my opinion, these lists are as well worth close study  
as are whole entries for major words in BDAG.

What I think is really needed is a thorough grasp of the principles of  
formation of verbs and noun -- chiefly verbs, because the nouns are  
not nearly so complex. One needs to know the principal parts of all  
the irregular verbs; one needs to know how prefixes and augments and  
tense-stems and connecting vowels (thematic vowel) combine with  
personal endings, infinitive endings, participial infixes, etc. One  
needs to know the basics of historical Greek phonology to understand  
how the underlying elements that combine with each other have  
transformed so that analogous forms are not immediately apparent (e.g.  
the third-plural ending OUSI is the phonological derivative from O- 
NTI). And ultimately, one needs to have those principles clearly  
understood so that one can analyze complex verb forms of unknown verbs  
in the course of reading and analyze them into their distinct  
formative elements so as to discern the verb root and the more likely  
lexical lemma of the verb.

Some materials that I used to use as class handouts for this purpose  
are accessible as PDF files on my page of "Course Materials from Years  
Past" at
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/current.html
They are in need of revision, but the materials of this sort that I  
put together in the 1990's include:
"Compendium of Greek Phonology" (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/CompPhon.pdf 
)
"An Overview of the Ancient Greek Verb" (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/AncientGreekVerb.pdf 
)
"Irregular Verbs GNT" (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/IrregularVerbsGNT.pdf 
)



Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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