Category: Online Grammar

Discussion of my online Hellenistic Greek grammar. Criticisms and suggestions for improvement are welcomed. This is where I post notices of updates to the grammar.

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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.

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A Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek

Image of book

A reprinted edition of Robert Funk’s A Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek was published in July of 2013. While a lot has happened in Linguistics and the study of Ancient Greek since this grammar was originally published in 1973, I welcome this reprint. In 1973 this book (at that time in three volumes) was revolutionary, and it is still very useful. The book focusses on sentence types, and the bulk of linguistic theory has moved beyond that discussion now, but for students learning the language, Funk’s approach works very will.

UPDATE July 9, 2014:

Most of the content of Funk’s Beginning-Intermediate Grammar is available online at no charge via ibiblio.org. You can access it here:

Funk’s Online Grammar

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Updates to lessons 22 and 23

I have updated lessons 22 and 23 (Present and Imperfect Middle/Passive). The changes to lesson 22 are very minor—just a few wording changes. The main change to lesson 23, though, is the deletion of the discussion on transitivity. I will introduce that topic in a later lesson with much better examples. This change helps unnecessary complication, tightening the focus on the issue of voice.

I also made a few changes to the course lexicon (cumulative vocabulary list) to improve entries for some of the verbs presented in these lessons.

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Lesson 23 Temporarily Disabled

I have temporarily disabled lesson 23 (Imperfect Middle and Passive) pending revisions. Thanks to Carl Conrad for pointing out to me by email some clear ways to improve the lesson. I hope it will serve users of the grammar much better after a few key changes.