Introduction to Attic Greek

509 Pages·2013·3.88 MB·English

by  Mastronarde

Introduction to Attic Greek

Introduction to Attic Greek
Second Edition
Donald J. Mastronarde
University of California Press
Berkeley • Los Angeles • London
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mastronarde, Donald J.
Introduction to Attic Greek/ Donald J. Mastronarde. — Second edition.

p. cm.
Includes index.
isbn 978-0-520-27571-3 (pbk., alk. paper)
1. Attic Greek dialect. 2. Greek language—Grammar. I. Title.

PA522.M38 2013
480—dc23 2012034799

Manufactured in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO
Z39.48-1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Preface vii
How to Use This Book xi
introduction. The Ancient Greek Language and Attic Greek 1
unit one. The Alphabet; Pronunciation 7
unit two. Accentuation 17
unit three. O-Declension Nouns; Prepositions I 23
unit four. A-Declension Nouns I; The Article 34
unit five. Present Active Indicative of ω-Verbs 43
unit six. A-Declension Nouns II; Prepositions II 54
unit seven. Vowel-Declension Adjectives; Attribution and Predication 60
unit eight. Second Person Imperative; Prepositions III; Relative Pronoun and
Relative Clauses 69
unit nine. Present Infinitive; Two-Ending Adjectives 77
unit ten. Present of εἰμί; Some Uses of the Genitive and Dative 84
unit eleven. Present Middle/Passive Indicative 91
unit twelve. Adverbs; Conjunctions; Pronoun αὐτός; Pronominal Article;
Prepositions IV 98
unit thirteen. Contract Verbs in -έω; Demonstratives 107
unit fourteen. Consonant-Declension Nouns I 115
unit fifteen. Consonant-Declension Nouns II; Interrogative Pronoun 123
unit sixteen. Imperfect Indicative 130
vi Contents
unit seventeen. Indefinite τις; Uses of the Accusative 138
unit eighteen. Future Active and Middle Indicative 147
unit nineteen. Aorist Active and Middle Indicative and Imperative 154
unit twenty. Tense and Aspect; Indirect Discourse 163
unit twenty-one. Consonant-Declension Nouns III; Personal Pronouns 173
unit twenty-two. Consonant-Declension Adjectives 181
unit twenty-three. Present System of μι-Verbs 189
unit twenty-four. Athematic Aorists 198
unit twenty-five. Adjectives with Variant Stems; Numerals; Reflexive and
Reciprocal Pronouns; Result Constructions 205
unit twenty-six. Participles: Formation and Declension 215
unit twenty-seven. Uses of the Participle I 225
unit twenty-eight. Uses of the Participle II; οἶδα 234
unit twenty-nine. Aorist Passive and Future Passive 243
unit thirty. Contract Verbs in -άω and -όω; Further Uses of the Genitive and
Dative 253
unit thirty-one. Comparison of Adjectives and Adverbs 264
unit thirty-two. The Subjunctive 273
unit thirty-three. Formation of the Optative 284
unit thirty-four. Uses of the Optative; Indirect Discourse with ὅτι; Indirect
Questions and Indirect Interrogative 294
unit thirty-five. Conditional Constructions 306
unit thirty-six. Indicative with ἄν; Correlatives; More Particles 317
unit thirty-seven. Perfect System Active 326
unit thirty-eight. Perfect System Middle/Passive; A-Contract Nouns 336
unit thirty-nine. Third Person Imperatives; Object Clauses with Verbs of
Effort; Athematic Perfects 348
unit forty. O-Contract Nouns; Verbal Adjectives in -τός and -τέος; Subordinate
Clauses in Indirect Discourse; Meanings of Prepositional Prefixes 357
unit forty-one. Temporal Clauses with ἕως and the Like; πρίν; Attraction 367
unit forty-two. Contract Vowel-Declension Adjectives; Attic Declension;
Assimilation of Mood 377
appendix a. Table of Contractions 385
appendix b. Principal Parts 386
appendix c. Paradigms 405
Greek–English Glossary 451

English–Greek Glossary 468

Index 481
Preface
There is no one best way to teach elementary Greek or to learn it. Any successful
course will depend on a complex interaction among the classroom teacher, the text-
book, and the students, with their varying styles of learning and differing degrees of
dedication to a challenging project. The aim of this book is to provide to the mature
and well-motivated college student a reliable and relatively complete presentation of
ancient Attic Greek. With a foundation comprising sufficient coverage of morphol-
ogy and syntax, a substantial body of the central vocabulary (especially of verbs and
their principal parts), and preliminary exposure to the reading of authentic con-
nected passages, the student should be well prepared to face the transition to reading
a continuous text with commentary and dictionary. This book has been used suc-
cessfully in year-long courses, in one-semester courses, and even in a more intensive
workshop format. Many adults studying on their own who returned to Greek after
decades or took it up for the first time have reported how helpful they have found the
manner of presentation and level of detail of this book.
Students usually come to Greek late in their education and do not have the luxury
of years and years of gradual acquisition. My presentation is based on the belief that
college students who are trying to learn Greek deserve full exposure to the mor-
phology and grammar that they will encounter in real texts and full explanations
of what they are asked to learn. To expect the student to learn such things as if by
osmosis from annotated readings or to postpone a large portion of the more sophis-
ticated concepts and constructions does not, in most cases, serve the long-range
needs of the student. Nor can oral practice with short colloquial sentences prepare
vii
viii Preface
a student for the complexity and sophistication of most of the surviving texts. The
styles and vocabularies of these texts changed over time and varied greatly even in
the same period. It is much more efficient for those who will continue with Greek to
understand early how variable the language was but also how systematic patterns can
nevertheless be observed. Language is indeed a system, but it is also a human system,
which means that its rules are almost never without exception and that almost every
observable pattern breaks down at its limits (although there are also patterns, such as
analogy, that explain how some exceptions arise). I believe that at least some students
will find the conceptual or historical understanding of a linguistic phenomenon to
be an aid to the chore of memorization that is unavoidable in beginning to master
ancient Greek, and that the availability of such explanations need not be any obstacle
to other students. I retain (and explain) many traditional terms (which the student
will encounter anyway in commentaries and reference works), since provided that
the book and the instructor lay emphasis on the true nature of each phenomenon,
the traditional terminology will be harmless. It is, of course, up to each instruc-
tor to gauge the abilities and level of motivation of his or her class and to decide
accordingly such questions as how far and when to press for accuracy in the use of
accents, for which verbs the class must have the principal parts firmly committed
to memory, how much of the vocabulary the students will be responsible for on a
test, or how much emphasis to put on English-to-Greek exercises as compared to
Greek-to-English.
In preparing a second edition of this book after twenty years, I have had a number
of goals in mind. First, I have shifted the order of presentation in a few places to allow
the student (and the instructor) earlier access to sentences, and to sentences with
greater variety. For example, the present active indicative has moved up; the aorist
passive follows the aorist active more closely than before; and the most common
imperative forms are now presented much earlier. Particular words or topics have
also been advanced somewhat: among these are the article, basic conjunctions, some
prepositions, and the pronoun αὐτός; more nouns providing subjects for plausible
sentences have been given earlier in the book. I have added new sentences to the
exercises throughout the book, and as before, after a certain point, these sentences
are inspired by or are slight modifications of sentences in Attic prose writers from
Thucydides to Demosthenes. (The Answer Key refers to the sources.) Second, I have
revised and reformatted many of the explanatory paragraphs, often making use of
lists of key points. I hope this results in greater clarity and makes them easier for
students to study and review. Third, I have added some coverage of the most frequent
particles. Fourth, I have eliminated footnotes and transferred any needed informa-
tion in them to separate paragraphs at the end of the unit called Notes on Vocabulary
(or Notes on Idiom, or both) and Historical Notes. (The latter can be regarded as
Preface ix
optional by those who do not find them useful in their initial learning.) Fifth, I have
reorganized the advanced topics in the final units of the book, so that a class can
potentially end a first-year course anywhere after Unit 38 (or do only the readings
after Unit 38), and the students will still be adequately prepared for a first course in
reading prose.
Although this edition has expanded, partly because of addition of material and
partly because of changes in format, it has deliberately been kept to a relatively handy
size. There is thus still little room in it for the cultural and anecdotal material that
an experienced teacher of Greek brings to the classroom situation as an enrichment.
Many of the items of vocabulary and many of the sentences and readings will, I
hope, provide instructors with launching points for digressions on history, literature,
mythology, society, or culture.
Acknowledgments. Twenty years ago I recorded that many improvements had
been made during the development of the book thanks to the feedback from a num-
ber of colleagues, graduate student instructors, and students in my own and others’
classes. That process has continued since publication by the University of California
Press, and it is not possible to list the names of all those who spotted misprints,
errors, or incomplete or unclear statements, but I do want to thank here the read-
ers who commented on the proposal for a second edition, and also Helma Dik for
generously sharing sundry statistics and advice. I myself am of course responsible
for all the final decisions about changes that have been made in the content and any
errors that remain.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge here the meticulous care shown by my copy
editor, Paul Psoinos, who worked on this edition as well as the first one, and I am also
very grateful to the staff of the University of California Press. The first edition was
shepherded by Mary Lamprech, and I first discussed a possible revision with Laura
Cerruti. It is largely due to the enthusiasm and support of the current Classics Editor,
Eric Schmidt, that the revision has been more than minimal, a decision that required
a leap of faith on my side and on that of the press. I thank Senior Editor Cindy Fulton
for her important contributions to the production process.