Paul-Nitz wrote:Alan Patterson wrote:Can the BIGHG be edited by the user/buyer if purchased in electronic form?
Or, can Carl write us a new chapter on voice?
Carl plays jazz, does he dabble with Funk, too?
Some answers, ὕστερον πρότερον:
No, I don't play jazz (except when I tune in to that channel on my radio.
I don't imagine that an electronic format of the Polebridge 3d edition is being contemplated, nor, would I suppose
that, since it's copyrighted material, any such edition would be editable by users. We've been told that we can keep our
electronic edition accessible on the web, but Polebridge's formatting will be better and much more accurate than
our own electronic version; Louis Sorenson has done much to correct errors in our own version, but the proofreading
for the Polebridge edition has been much more extensive in restoring the fruits of scanning and OCR toward Funk's
original text..
Louis and I have been cognizant of some items in the 1977 edition of BIGHG that deserve fresh formulaton, and the
treatment of voice morphology and usage is surely one of them. We were in agreement, however -- it was never
questioned -- that this was Bob Funk's work and that it should be made available to the public now after so many years
out of print, not something that we should attempt, particularly in our role as proofreaders, to "improve." We continue to
believe that this is the most intelligently-presented course in Hellenistic Greek grammar and a reference work well worth having in hand and on one's library shelf if one is serious about understanding the hows and whys of Hellenistic Greek. I don't doubt that Linguists can find fault with its treatment, but in my judgment (for what it's worth) this remains the most "linguisticallly-informed" presentation of Hellenistic Greek grammar of resources available to students and teachers.
I can and perhaps should endeavor to compose a fresh pedagogical formulation of my understanding of ancient Greek voice morphology and usage -- but I wouldn't conceive of this as a revision of what BIGHG offers on these matters. I'm well aware that the PDF files of my earlier efforts to explain ancient Greek voice as listed at
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/GrkVc.html are outdated. The outline on that page sets forth the elements of what I believe now about ancient Greek voice, but that outline really needs fleshing out. It's a project, but ἐάν τε καὶ ὅταν πληρωθῇ ταῦτα remain open questions.
I hope that's reasonably clear and doesn't leave unsaid anything that I should have said about the Polebridge Press publication of BIGHG.