Trustees of Boston University

A New Greek GrammarAuthor(s): David Armstrong and Frederick Michael AhlSource: Arion, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 361-362Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162967 .

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A NEW GREEK GRAMMAR

David Armstrong and Frederick Michael Ahl

Louring the next academic year, we intend to compose a new introductory Greek text. Designed primarily for college courses, it will also be suitable to such a summer course as D. S. Carne-Ross describes in his "Modest

Proposal." Here are the principles we will follow: 1. It will be a reading grammar, directed toward the acquisition

of reading skills. It will contain none of the useless relics of

nineteenth-century teaching methods, aimed at proficiency in

composition, that still disfigure almost all the introductory texts available today. Instead, we mean to write our introduction for use with the teaching devices that have proven successful in

modern languages?tapes, teaching machines, etc.

2. The explanatory part of each lesson will be as full as possible, and, within the limits of necessary simplification, as accurate.

Nothing is more difficult for freshman students than to review

important grammatical points from their own notes instead of the text, and nothing more annoying to the instructor than to be

continually driven to Goodwin or Smythe to supplement some

Delphic remark about secondary tenses or Doric forms. Also,

grammatical terms will be explained fully with English examples before they are exemplified with reference to Greek.

3. The reading lessons will be drawn from real Greek, and will in every case be perfectly intelligible from what has gone before.

We intend absolutely to avoid the mistake made in Chase and

Phillips' New Introduction to Greek of continually anticipating the grammar of following lessons. As many of our selections as

possible will be drawn from the Apology and Grito, with a view to reading these two works (not Xenophon) at the end of the first year. Other texts will also be slipped for easy sentences and

passages suitable for beginning students. 4. The sentences to be translated from English into Greek will

be short. They will provide skeleton practice of grammar and

constructions, rather than practice of composition for its own sake.

5. The presentation of grammar will respect frequency of oc

currence, as well as difficulty. For example, why not give the middle forms of the omega-conjugation along with the active, or the present of eimi, during the first few lessons? Experience with texts that leave these forms to be presented in later lessons seems to show that the difficulty of waiting for them outweighs the diffi

culty of introducing them near the beginning.

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362 a new greek grammar

6. The lessons will be fairly brief; one fifty-minute session should suffice for each. A real attempt will be made to see that all lessons take the student about the same length of time to

master.

We hope to complete a multilithed version of our manuscript by September 1968, or earlier. Correspondence and inquiries from teachers of Greek who have ideas of their own about how such a grammar should be written will be welcomed. We would

particularly like to receive: complaints about existing textbooks

(with suggestions of how to avoid their mistakes), slips of easy and interesting passages from less-read authors, and teaching tricks that have proven successful in

explaining some

particular section of the grammar. Letters may be addressed to either of us,

c/o Arion, 2503 Main Building, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 78712.

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