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Back to Greek tomorrow

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.

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New Home for this Blog

Welcome to the new home of the Greek Language and Linguistics Blog. On Saturday, September 25, 2010 I began migrating the blog to its new home at Greek-Language.com. Until now it had been hosted at WordPress.com. I will keep it active there until I can assure that the traffic currently going there has made its way to the new location.

If you have linked to the blog at WordPress, please update your links to http://greek-language.com/grklinguist.

I hope you enjoy the new look, and I look forward to integrating the blog more fully with the other resources available here at Greek-Language.com.

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Teaching Greek with Basic Linguistic Tools (via ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ)

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)?

Using a couple of basic methods borrowed from linguistics, I helped a friend whose just working through first year Greek understand how the verbal system works: Binary Features (from Phonology) Position Class Charts (from Generative Morphology) So simple; so basic, but today I received an e-mail from him saying, “[Y]ou’re a life saver, this stuff makes so much more sense now, THANKS!” These are the days I’m glad I studied linguistics. … Read More

via ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

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Lesson 19: Semantic Roles and Voice, The Aorist Passive

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.

Lesson 19: Semantic Roles and Voice: the Aorist Passive

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What's Next for the Online Grammar?

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?

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Absence

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything to this blog, but the end of the semester is coming soon, and I hope to be much more active in the Summer. I look forward to updating the grammar and lexicon and catching up with some of the interesting postings at a few of my favorite blogs that deal with Greek Linguistics.