parT 1 - Yale University

1 L e a r n T o re adGr e e kpa rT 1andrew kellerCollegiate SchoolStephanie russellCollegiate Schoolnew Haven & LondonCopyright 2012 Yale UniversityLearn to Read Greek, Textbook, Part 1, ExcerptCopyright 2012 by Yale rights book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the University press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use.

2 For information, please e-mail ( office) or ( office).Publisher: Mary Jane pelusoEditorial Assistant: elise panzaProject Editor: timothy SheaProduction Controller: aldo Cupodesigned by James J. in arno roman type by Integrated Composition in the United States of of Congress Cataloging-in-publication datakeller, andrew, 1960 Learn to read Greek / andrew keller , Stephanie russell. p. cm. Text in english and Greek. Includes index. ISBn 978-0-300-11589-5 (part 1) ISBn 978-0-300-11590-1 (part 2) 1. Greek language Grammar.

3 2. Greek language Grammar problems, exercises, etc. 3. Greek language readers. I. russell, Stephanie, 1946 II. Title. 2011 '421 dc22 2011003149a catalogue record for this book is available from the British paper meets the requirements of anSI/nISo (permanence of paper).10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover illustration: rembrandt van rijn, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653. The Metropolitan Museum of art, new York. purchase, special contributions and funds given or bequeathed by friends of the Museum, 1961 ( ).

4 Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of 2012 Yale UniversityLearn to Read Greek, Textbook, Part 1, Excerptxvpr eFaCeLearn to Read Greek is closely modeled on Learn to Read Latin, our textbook published by Yale University press in 2003. LTRG is both an introductory grammar and a first reader for the attic dialect of ancient Greek. The book aims to help students acquire as quickly as possible an ability to read and appreciate the great works of ancient Greek literature. Learning the language of ancient Greece is a lifelong challenge and an abiding pleasure for the curious intellect.

5 Many factors combine to make ancient Greek a difficult lan-guage to master: a large, nuanced vocabulary (more than three times the number of words in extant Latin); extensive and inconstant morphology for nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and a wide variety of dialects offer-ing many variants in spelling, syntax, and word usage. In addition, various authors have their own spe-cially developed vocabularies, syntactic habits, and writing styles. one must, in effect, learn the Greek of Thucydides, the Greek of Sophocles, the Greek of Homer.

6 If the task is difficult, however, the rewards for the devoted effort of serious students are great: what is to be gained is nothing less than direct access to the words and thoughts of plato, euripides, aristophanes, and many others. LTRG differs from many other beginning Greek books in offering students interesting and rewarding samples of real Greek texts for reading practice from the third chapter on. These readings quickly become substantial and challenging, and, in our view, are a far better means for studying the language than fabri-cated stories in Greek such as often appear in other textbooks.

7 While LTRG is an attic Greek text, we include readings containing forms from other dialects (with appropriate explanatory notes) in order to expose students to a wider range of authors and to accustom them to non-attic forms that they will encounter in attic Greek texts. We also include readings from Greek writers of the roman period who wrote in attic Greek, which by then was recognized as an important literary language and used by a select number of educated writers. our Latin and Greek texts both drew inspiration from books written by our former colleagues at the Brooklyn College of CUnY Latin/Greek Institute: Latin: An Intensive Course, by Floyd L.

8 Moreland and rita M. Fleischer, and Greek: An Intensive Course, by Hardy Hansen and Gerald M. Quinn. Floyd Moreland, founder of the Latin/Greek Institute, provided us with our most important guiding principles for teaching Latin and Greek: first, if clearly and completely presented, no element of these languages is more difficult for students to learn than any other; and second, excessive simplification and omission are harmful, not helpful. Summer after summer at the LGI and for many years in our own teaching, these principles have been tested and vindicated, and we have used them to guide our decision making throughout the writing of LTRG.

9 We could not have produced LTRG in its present form without the aid of the digital version of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. This excellent online resource made it possible to choose vocabulary for each Copyright 2012 Yale UniversityLearn to Read Greek, Textbook, Part 1, Excerptchapter based on each word s frequency in a selected list of major authors and texts. In this way we could be sure that students using this textbook will learn words that they will encounter regularly when reading classical Greek.

10 Special effort was made to include in the early chapters the words that occur most often in attic Greek. Searching the TLG also helped us find for each chapter appropriate readings drawn from a wide range of prose and poetry. These are the authors that we used most frequently in our searches not only to find passages for inclusion but also to answer questions of meaning and usage:aeschines Isocratesaeschylus Lysiasaristophanes platodemosthenes Sophocleseuripides ThucydidesHerodotus XenophonTo resolve broader questions of usage, word frequency, or morphology, or to confirm impressions we had formed from our initial searches, we often searched the works of every TLG author from the eighth to the fourth centuries In some instances, particularly to confirm the rarity of Greek forms.