I will not be able to respond to email or comments on this blog this week (June 28—July 5, 2015). I’ll be back at work on the site on Monday, July 6.
Have a wonderful week.
Exercise for Lesson 23: Imperfect Middle and Passive
I have added two interactive exercises for lesson 23: Imperfect Middle and Passive.
You can try them out here:
Unicode Greek in the Online Grammar
After two very frustrating days of frantic coding, the Greek text in the online grammar is converted to unicode and displaying correctly. For a day and a half I was unable to get the revised files to show up after uploading them, but that problem is now resolved.
As I continue to update the HTML and CSS supporting the grammar some formatting may look odd for a day or two, and if you notice anything that doesn’t look right, please feel free to contact me using the contact link above.
For the next few weeks the topical index will have a great deal of problems. The HTML4 method for linking to specific paragraphs within a web page has been deprecated. The HTML5 method is seriously different, and it will take me some time to get everything converted to the new method.
Lesson 23 Vocabulary Flashcards
I have uploaded a flash card exercise for the vocabulary in Lesson 23: “Imperfect Middle and Passive. The card set includes review vocabulary from earlier lessons as well. when a review word is given, the earlier lesson or lessons in which it appeared are noted.
Another exercise for lesson two
I have not added this one to lesson two yet, but I’m considering it. It is not necessary to understand the text in order to complete the exercise. It’s only necessary to recognize the capital letters and know that the first word in a paragraph is capitalized even if it is not a proper name.
The text in this exercise is Luke 1:5-7. I selected that passage because it has a good concentration of proper names.
Find the Name! An exercise to practice recognizing Greek capital letters
I just uploaded this exercise to lesson two. It’s pretty basic, but I think it would be fun for a beginning student. What do you think? Any suggestions?
New Exercises for the online grammar
I have uploaded a recorded version of the first lesson of my online Greek grammar, including two flash card exercises to practice phonemic awareness. The open source software I used to write the old exercises is no longer updated and is not HTML5 compliant. I’m now using U5P, also open source, to write new and better exercises. The ones in this first lesson are pretty basic (flashcards) but more sophisticated exercises will be coming later in the summer.
Lesson 27: Pronouns for Direct Conversation (ἐγὼ and σύ)
A few minutes ago I uploaded lesson 27 of my online grammar. There are a couple of reasons this particular lesson is a little unusual.
First, I have not yet uploaded lessons 24-26, so this one is coming out of sequence. I’m doing that simply because this one is much closer to completion than the others, and except for a couple of words that will be unfamiliar, it is quite understandable without having read the three preceding lessons. I have still not added the interactive practice exercises, but I’ll get to that as soon as I can.
Second, those of you who have been using the grammar will notice some clear formatting changes. These are due to the increasing need to make the grammar readable on a smartphone! It’s a bit amazing to me how many people use it that way, but it looks like that’s the wave of the future.
In fact, the entirety of Greek-Language.com is getting a major face-lift this summer, and it’s not just because of smartphones. The basic coding behind much of what’s on the web is quickly becoming obsolete. The net is moving full steam ahead to HTML5 and some serious upgrades to CSS. (If those acronyms are meaningless to you, don’t worry, they are to most people.) Since I wrote the code behind much of what is on the site without the help of any automated web page software, I have serious rewriting to do as HTML4 becomes obsolete. It’s a steep learning curve, but I really enjoy it.
If you notice any mistakes in lesson 27, or if any part of it seems unclear to you, don’t hesitate to point that out as comments below. Challenges from my readers make the grammar better for everyone.
Euphorion and "a boar"
While reading fragments of Hellenistic poetry today, I ran across this bit from Εὐφόριον:
καὶ ταύτην τὴν Κορινθίαν Σαρωνίδα καλοῦσιν,
ὡς μὲν Εὐφορίον φησὴν,
ἐπειδὴ Σάρων τις κυνηγὸς ἐπιδιώκων <σῦν> ἐκεῖθεν κατεκρημνίσθη εἰς θάλασσαν, καὶ δία τοῦτο Σαρωνικὸν κληθῆναι τὸ πέλαγος.
Which I translate as:
And this Corinthian [sea] they call Saronic, as Euphorion says,
Since Saron, a certain hunter, chasing [something]
was flung down the cliff into the sea,
and therefore the sea came to be called Saronic.
Lightfoot (Hellenistic Collection) fills in the “something” with “a boar.” Do any of you know why? What about this texts could have suggested a boar?