Rod's short grammar of the verb

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MAubrey
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Rod's short grammar of the verb

Post by MAubrey »

I'm sure many of you are aware of Rod Decker's declining health. He is hospice care now and treatment has stopped. Nevertheless, he still posted this morning on his blog a 77 page grammar of the verb that he had been working on. I've skimmed it so far. There is much of interest in it. Of course, I still disagree with Rod on various points, but it is a work that continues his traditional of meticulous attention to detail and thoughtful discussion.

http://ntresources.com/blog/?p=3719
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
cwconrad
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Re: Rod's short grammar of the verb

Post by cwconrad »

Good to know they finally got the file uploaded (to Dropbox, actually); an hour ago the link wasn't working.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Rod's short grammar of the verb

Post by Stephen Carlson »

From the introduction:
The topics discussed here are necessarily selective. It is by no means an exhaustive grammar, even at the intermediate level, and certainly nowhere near the scope of a reference grammar. Users are encouraged to move beyond this grammar as their skill increases. The next step up the grammatical ladder is Wallace’s Greek Grammar (hopefully now or soon to be in a revised second edition), then on to the classic works of Robertson, Moulton, Blass-Debrunner-Funk, and Smyth. There is a great need for a new reference grammar, but thus far attempts to do so have come to naught, perhaps due to the immensity of that challenge, the sheer magnitude of data, and the mass of specialized studies. Few scholars have the ability to master the field, now much expanded from that accessible to scholars of earlier centuries. Even team attempts to revise and update an earlier work have proven unsuccessful thus far. Computerized tools for such study have made much of this study less tedious, but have also reduced our firsthand familiarity with the texts (something that is obvious when reading the older grammarians) as we peek at the text through narrow windows. Such tools have also increased the scope of data enormously (e.g., the TLG corpus) and multiplied the number of questions that need to be answered.
Good point about the use of computer tools. Sad to hear about the infeasibility of doing a new reference grammar.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
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