Nifty Greek Handouts

Here are several of the hand-outs I made for my Greek classes, in PDF format. Most fit (in landscape format) on a single (US letter) page.

First things first: Verbal morphology

  • λύω sheet: A complete overview of luw in all tenses.
  • contracts: Present of λύω, τιμάω, ποιέω, δηλόω (no more typos, I hope!).
  • mi-verbs, present: δίδωμι, τίθημι, ἵημι, ἵστημι, δείκνυμι.
  • mi-verbs, aorist: ἔδωκα, ἔθηκα, ἧκα, ἔστην, ἔγνων.
  • mi-verbs, irregular: εἰμί, εἶμι, φημί; now also has the dreaded οἶδα and εἶδον.
  • ἵστημι, overview: all tenses (but no perfect middle, because it wouldn't fit..).
  • the perfect: regular and irregular (οἶδα, τέθνηκα, etc.); active and middle-passive.
  • an overview of first and second/strong/thematic aorists (except for 'mi-aorists').
  • Ever been confused about βούλευσαι, βουλεῦσαι, and βουλεύσαι? This is for you.

Nouns, pronouns, the definite article

Wood versus forest in the verbal system

  • "Ultimate guide to verb endings and verb stems": some generalizations that do NOT pretend to historical accuracy or originality, but simply can be used as a guide to the vagaries of the individual paradigms when panic strikes or efficiency beckons.

Syntax handout

  • Uses of the subjunctive and optative, or... May And Might Are For Wimps. A 3-page overview of the uses of these moods. For the full picture, I recommend A. Rijksbaron (1994), The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek. An Introduction. These 3 pages offer nothing new.
  • Conditional sentences. Again, a non-original, one-page overview. Note to teachers of Greek:
    1. The future most vivid is not included here, since it's a figment of the grammarian's imagination. See again Rijksbaron (ref. above); it is to be subsumed under the Neutral (Simple) Conditional.
    2. No separate present and past contrary-to-fact are distinguished either. The difference between aorist and imperfect is aspectual not temporal.

    For a book-length treatment, see Wakker, G.C., Conditions and Conditionals. For some examples that might help you think about (1) and (2), look at this page of a recent APA handout.

Miscellaneous

  • what are those squiggles? a quick and dirty introduction to breathings and accents; answer sheet.
  • list of principal parts by unit, through unit 19, for Mastronarde's Introduction to Attic Greek [first three only, i.e., present, future, aorist]. 4 pages.
  • an experiment with Perseus' new vocabulary tool. A list of words that covers 90% of tokens in a collection of Attic prose texts from the Perseus corpus. In US formatEuroformat, and as an OpenOffice document. Read the caveats carefully!

These handouts contain some references to Hansen & Quinn's Greek: An Intensive Course and Mastronarde's Introduction to Attic Greek, but are mainly meant to provide one-page overviews of some important verbal paradigms -- satisfactory versions of (many of) which I have failed to find in English-language Greek textbooks. I expect that many teachers have by now produced their own - if not, these can be downloaded and printed. Please inform me of any typos (but note that consistent mis-accentuation and the like are probably due to incompatibility of our versions of Acrobat; these documents were created on an Apple Macintosh with Acrobat 4.0). For more web resources on Greek grammar, see now Marc Huys's comprehensive website greekgrammar.wikidot.com!

Return to Helma Dik's faculty page.