[B-Greek] Reference Grammars

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Fri Jan 29 16:37:38 EST 2010


On Jan 29, 2010, at 4:06 PM, Stephen Kirkman wrote:
> 
> I'm wondering if there are any references grammars analogous to Smyth available koine Greek?  I've seen Blass-Debrunner-Funk mentioned in several places, but are there any other "good ones"?  


You will expect to see/hear a variety of opinions on this matter, and not necessarily much consensus.

In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing comparable to Smyth for Koine Greek.

Blass-Debrunner-Funk is a volume which I think one who is serious about Koine grammar cannot fail to consult, but it is most useful to one who is reasonably well-grounded in Classical Attic grammar, not nearly so useful to one who has only studied Koine.

Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: there are some who swear by it, others who swear at it. It is worth consulting along with BDF or others. My chief complaint against it is what many consider a virtue: it seems more concerned with explaining how to turn a Biblical Greek construction into English than in understanding how the Greek construction itself works. It discusses constructions in terms of the kind of contexts in which they appear and on the basis of these contexts, Wallace has subcategorized the constructions into slots such as "subjective", "objective", "plenary" genitives (along with quite a few other subcategories of adnominal genitive (including an "aporetic" genitive -- which is what you call the construction when it won't fit into an otherwise recognizable subcategory).

A. T. Robertsons big grammar is dated; it is of questionable value as a reference to check upon a specific Biblical text with which you want help, but it is worth reading, as you have time, chapter by chapter to glean what you can from a scholar who knew Greek, in all likelihood, better than any man alive today.

There's Stanley Porter's _Idioms of the Greek NT_, an idiosyncratic work but one intended, I think, as an intermediate grammar; you can learn from it what he has to say about "tenseless" verbal aspect, among other things.

And there are others; I won't try to be exhaustive.

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






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