Helma Dik's Nifty Greek Handouts

Nifty Greek Handouts

Helma Dik

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

• the a and o declensions: nouns, adjectives, the definite article.
• the 'third' or consonant declension: nouns and adjectives (in -ης and -υς). This is two pages.
• the relative, interrogative, indefinite, and demonstrative pronouns.
• the personal pronouns, including reflexives and reciprocals.
• one, two, three, many, all: some quantifiers and comparatives

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 format, Euroformat, 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!

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