Ancient Greek, mostly Hellenistic
I’ve decided to make my online Hellenistic Greek Grammar available to the public even though it is still in progress of development. Fifteen lessons are up and running with interactive exercises.
The grammar is totally free. No fees. No ads. Just read, play, and enjoy!
http://greek-language.com/grammar
A couple of months ago, I radically redesigned Greek-Language.com. I reorganized and expanded the material and gave the site a much sleeker feel.
My aim was not simply to make the site prettier, but to make it more user-friendly and open up the possibility for serious expansion in the near future. The site already receives close to 2000 unique visits each day, and I would like to make it more useful to those who already visit it while also offering services for students of Hellenistic Greek who do not currently use the site.
Let me know what you think of the new look and what you would like to see added.
Introductory Greek grammars have been available on the web for some time now, but several are simply web versions of what is available in print, or are the notes of a Greek teacher presenting his or her favorite sequence and wording of what is already available in print.
What should be different about a web based grammar? What would you like to see in a web based grammar that you do not already find in a printed textbook?
I ask these questions for a concrete reason. I would like to add an introductory Greek course to Greek-Language.com. I want to make it a truly native web experience, containing interactive exercises, reading passages, etc. What features would you like to see it include?
I would like to thank Michael Aubrey for his comments on the the lack of usefulness of the category VP (Verb Phrase) for describing Ancient Greek. In particular, he challenged some comments that I made in Levels of Constituent Structure for New Testament Greek (1995).
This is, of course, the way to advance the field. As we each examine the claims of our colleagues and submit them to scrutiny, we move the discussion forward.
The comments I made about the Greek VP in 1995 were part of a larger argument for the existence of phrase-level categories in general. While I am still firmly committed to the usefulness of the syntactic category Phrase in general, I have never been particularly committed to the usefulness of VP in particular for addressing the phrase structure of Ancient Greek.
In the years since 1995 I have come increasingly to view the syntax of Ancient Greek as determined by the argument structure of verbs—verbs and the phrases demanded by their lexico-semantic properties. This view does not necessarily require the category Verb Phrase, though postulating the existence of such phrases may eventually prove useful.
As for Aubrey’s objection that the subject appearing between the verb and one of its subsequent arguments (specifically a PP in the examples he cites), the objection works only if you discount the possibility of verb movement. He is probably right, but it’s not as obvious as it might seem.
Thank you, Michael, for your thoughts and research on this issue. I look forward to reading more.