Acquire Hellenistic Greek: Alpha with Angela



Today I added
FreeGreek.online to the Learn Ancient Greek page. The series of videos entitled Alpha with Angela, freely available through YouTube, provides a very competent example of teaching the language using a communicative approach. Of course, as with any video based course, it is not completely communicative given that the user cannot respond in real time, but the viewer is able to see and hear the language being taught to an online “student”.

This provides great support for developing receptive language (listening, reading), which is the focus of most Biblical Greek classes. Other resources will be needed to practice expressive language (speaking, writing).

The pronunciation system is the one used at the Polis Institute. While it does not accurately represent the Greek pronunciation of the hellenist period, it can be argued that it allows easy access to the spelling conventions of the time. Personally, I prefer the reconstructed pronunciation of the period used by Randall Buth and others, but this resource is free and very high quality.


With over 40 videos already posted, there’s plenty here to either get started on the path to acquire Hellenistic Greek or brush up on what you already know.

Review of Living Koiné (Part One)

LivingKoineImageKevin Madden has written a helpful review of Randall Buth’s Living KoinéPart One. His review even has a video of the first lesson.

If you are interested in learning Biblical Greek, and you want to know how it sounded at the time of Jesus, you will probably enjoy these materials tremendously. Using drawings and audio, Buth employs a method commonly found in books on modern languages. It’s a great way to internalize the language!

Greek Palaeography Bibliography

Thank you Wray Bryant, for pointing out the following bibliography of Greek Palaeography. While it does not apply a particular variety of Modern Linguistics to the study of Hellenistic Greek (the criteria for inclusion in the bibliography here at Greek-Language.com), it is certainly of value to anyone interested in the history of writing in Greek.

  • Greek Palaeography and Byzantine Book Culture: A Bibliographical Essay, by Stratis Papaioannou

The bibliography is available at Academia.edu. Log in (or sign up for a free account), then paste the following link into your browser:

https://www.academia.edu/14070939/Papaioannou_Greek_Palaeography_and_Byzantine_Book_Culture_A_Bibliographical_Essay_Version_3_Updated_and_Revised_June_2015_along_with_Descriptions_of_Minuscule_Hands

Enjoy.

Mike Aubrey's Masters Thesis

Mike Aubrey has uploaded his anxiously awaited thesis to Academia.edu:

The Greek perfect and the categorization of tense and aspect: Toward a descriptive apparatus for operators in Role and Reference Grammar

Click on the title to download a copy or read it online.

Mike has posted two reflections on his blog that you will find very helpful as you read his thesis. I’ve included links to those reflections below along with what he says about their value:

If you’re a Greek student/scholar. I would encourage you to read the two posts dedicated to discussing my thesis. This is because it’s not a work that’s oriented toward biblical scholars [or] to classicists. It’s a work by a linguist for linguists. The two posts I’ve put up […] on my blog are designed to provide some orientation for people whose primary interest is Greek rather than linguistics proper.

Part I: Challenges in language analysis: thesis prefatory material

Part II: Thesis Prefatory Material: A Narrative Account

Here’s the abstract that Mike included on Academia.edu:

This thesis attempts to expand the theoretical and methodological basis for operators within Role and Reference Grammar for purposes of language description, using the Greek perfect as a test case. This requires first examining the current theoretical and methodological approach to tense and aspect in RRG and its strengths and weaknesses. Here I demonstrate that while some areas of RRG have a well-developed and robust set of theoretical and descriptive tools for language description, operators such as tense and aspect are distinctly lacking in this regard. To that end, I propose a model for tense and aspect operators that attempts to fill in the gaps that exist in RRG while also maintaining the integrity and spirit of the linguistic theory. This involves three steps. I begin with a survey of the broader typological literature on tense and aspect in order to establish a set of morphosyntactic tests for the evaluation and categorization of operators. This is followed by an application of the proposed morphosyntactic tests to a particular grammatical problem: the Greek Perfect in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the tests. I then concluded with a synthetic model for tense and aspect operators that both satisfies the theoretical and typological claims of the broader literature and also validates the existing structure of the Role and Reference Grammar framework, thereby furthering the goals of RRG as a useful theoretical model for language description.

I encourage you to take the time to look at Mike’s work.