Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics

[cwconrad]

Wallace makes no reference to this passage in his discussion of the Partitive Genitive (page 84), which he seems to prefer to call the "Wholative Genitive".

That tends to be my problem with Wallace: often the passages I have a question about are not discussed in the grammar, even though many other less controversial ones are. BDF tends to have better coverage of the less straightforward cases.

That's like the problem I have with commentators -- idiosyncrasy: they more often discuss matters that don't seem problematic to me but fail to discuss what I find problematic. Which simply goes to show, of course, that different ἀπορίαι disturb different readers. I often wonder why the choice of texts illustrative of a construction seems so eclectic; some of them probably arose in the classroom or in student queries. I also wonder about terms like "Wholative": it's not, he claims, a "genitive of the part" but a "genitive of the whole." I understand the idea, but the coinage seems weird to me -- constructed from an English noun-stem and a Latinate suffix.

[Stephen Carlson]

That's like the problem I have with commentators -- idiosyncrasy: they more often discuss matters that don't seem problematic to me but fail to discuss what I find problematic. Which simply goes to show, of course, that different ἀπορίαι disturb different readers. I often wonder why the choice of texts illustrative of a construction seems so eclectic; some of them probably arose in the classroom or in student queries. I also wonder about terms like "Wholative": it's not, he claims, a "genitive of the part" but a "genitive of the whole." I understand the idea, but the coinage seems weird to me -- constructed from an English noun-stem and a Latinate suffix.

If I recall correctly, that is indeed the origin of Wallace's grammar: an expanded set of teaching materials.

[Shirley Rollinson]

On the more serious side, I find far too often that people are studying grammars such as Wallace rather than spending the time reading the Greek text, and then using the grammars as reference tools. As I mentioned on the Greek Club, if you spend a lot of time reading grammars, you get good at reading grammars. If you spend a lot of time reading Greek...

Preach it Bro'
Shirley Rollinson