Greek Language and Linguistics
Ancient Greek, mostly Hellenistic
Well… After a very long wait, I’ve finally uploaded my lesson on the Aorist Middle. As I have done with a few other lessons, I’ve uploaded it without the automated practice exercises. I hope to finish those over the next few days. For now, I’d love to have your reaction to the discussion and the particular examples I’ve chosen.
Feel free to criticize, suggest revisions, etc.
Have any of you read Scott Grimm’s 2007 article, “Case Attraction in Ancient Greek”? (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007, Volume 4363/2007, 139-153.)
The abstract looks very interesting. You can purchase online access for $25, but I’m not sure what a hard copy costs.
I’ll be out of reach of computers tomorrow (Saturday, October 2), but I’ll be back on Sunday.
I’ve made major headway on the lesson on the Aorist Middle. I hope to have that up and running in a few more days. I’m working on the exercises now.
This is off the topic of language, but well worth the attention of anyone interested in the ancient greco-roman world. Take a look at what Google’s “Street View” is doing in Rome.
I’ve updated the homepage of Greek-Language.com to reflect the new location of the blog and give it a more attractive feel. I also made a few alterations to a number of other pages (general housekeeping issues that I do from time to time to update information).
I hope you like the new look.
Home.
I spent the day today in a training seminar on teaching English to speakers of other languages. I’ll be back to working on Greek tomorrow.
I spent Monday working on the next lesson for the online grammar, dealing with the middle voice. I hope to finish it in the next few days.
Cheryl A. Black and Stephen A. Marlett’s 1996 paper, “On Generating the Greek Noun Phrase,” for Working Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics is now available as a PDF download from http://eric.ed.gov.
If you’re interested in the way a knowledge of linguistics can impact teaching Greek, see the following post by Mike Aubrey. I have had many similar experiences. It’s good to see him enjoy the fruits of his studies.
Do you have stories of how a basic knowledge of linguistics has impacted your teaching or your study of Ancient Greek (Biblical Greek, Hellenistic Greek more broadly, or Classical Greek)?
via ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ
I’ve uploaded a slightly revised version of Lesson 19: Semantic Roles and Voice: the Aorist Passive.
The changes are designed to make it clear that what has traditionally been called the Aorist Passive is a set of forms that, while they often suggest a passive interpretation, are not exclusively (or even primarily) passive.
The middle voice will be introduced later, and at that point I will have more to say about Greek voice, and I’ll introduce the notion of transitivity. My goals for this lesson are simply to introduce the notion of the semantic roles AGENT and PATIENT—establishing their independence from specific morphological Case forms—and to introduce the forms traditionally called aorist passive.
I would love to hear from readers about how well you think I have accomplished these goals and about how clearly (or unclearly) I have handled the issue of insuring that students do not equate these forms exclusively with passive voice interpretations.
Well… It’s been a long time since I’ve made any substantive changes to my online grammar. In part this has been because responsibilities at work have taken too much of my time. Another reason, though is that I’ve been struggling with what to do with the issue of voice.
My original intention was simply to convert to a form suitable for the web the old grammar that I wrote in the early ’90s. I intended to do very little editing. Shortly after I posted the lesson on passive voice, though, I realized that this is not a workable option. My views on voice have changed too much to simply post what I wrote back then. So… I have delayed further progress on the grammar till I can see how revising this part will affect the remainder of the lessons.
In the mean time, I hope to post here a few thoughts on particular verbs, especially ones that have middle voice lexical forms (present tense/aspect), but active voice forms for other principal parts. Take ἔρχομαι, for example. While it’s meaning fits nicely with the semantic value of the middle voice, and it consistently has middle voice forms in the present, its aorist forms are typically active voice (ἦλθον, etc.). If we dispense with the notion of “deponent” (as I think we should), how do we account for this variation of voice forms between tenses/aspects without going into too much detail for an introductory grammar?