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.

Lesson 23: Imperfect Middle and Passive

I’ve uploaded lesson 23: “Imperfect Middle and Passive” to my online grammar. It has six vocabulary exercises, but is still missing a couple of practice exercises for recognizing imperfect middle/passive forms that I will add over the next few days.

The vocabulary exercises consist of a flashcard set, four brief drag and drop vocabulary games, and a practice vocabulary quiz.

Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you notice any typographical error or other problem.

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.

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?

Dr. Rod Decker's NT Resources Blog

I have added Dr. Rod Decker’s NT Resources Blog to the Blogs page at Greek-Language.com. In keeping with the focus of Greek-Language.com on Linguistics and Ancient Greek, I include on the blogs page only blogs that deal directly with Linguists or that fairly regularly discuss in detail Greek texts from the Hellenistic period. Dr. Decker’s blog fits the second category well.

Pay him a visit at NT Resources if you enjoy discussions of the Greek text of the New Testament.