About this textbook

Organization

The textbook begins with a brief section of “Preliminaries” introducing the Greek alphabet and accent. This is followed by modules that we use as the basis for two to three weeks of our courses. We expect to cover modules 1-4 in the first semester of a two-semester, full-year course.

Each module has three sections:

language: introduction of new features of the Greek language
ancient Greek in action: reading or activites that ask students to relate content introducted in the language section of this module to some aspect of their life
reading: a minimally modified passage from the target text (in this edition, Lysias 1). This passage serves as the basis for assignments we include in the section of the “Practice” chapter for this module.

These chapters are followed by a chapter entitled “Practice,” with two groups of exercises for each module.

Mastery exercises (entitled “Mastering module X”)offer a selection of short practice exercises that could be used in class or assigned for practice outside of class time.
Portfolio exercises are a graduated trio of longer assignments for each module. The first assignment is a systematic test of content covered in the mastery exercises; the second assignment is an exercise reading and analyzing a passage of connected Greek; the third assignment is a guided composition in Greek.

After the “Practice” chapter, a “Language review” chapter summarizes the language section of each module. The summary includes paradigms, a list of vocabulary to memorize, and a list of technical terms new in this module. (Their first appearance in the text is highlighted like this.)

The final reference offers a more comprehensive set of paradigms, and two different English translations of Lysias 1.

The textbook has an accompanying youtube channel. The playlist here has short videos where students can listen while following the text of the reading selections for each module.

A note on vocabulary

The first modules of the course emphasize a small core vocabulary (fewer than 200 words). This vocabulary is characterized by its frequency across many corpora of Greek texts. The common practice of simply finding the most frequent terms in a composite list of Greek texts, however, effaces the differences in vocabulary from one corpus to another: common words in one corpus could be entirely absent from another corpus, but if one corpus is substantially larger than the other, its frequent terms could still appear to be “frequent” in a composite corpus. We therefore take instead the highest frequency lists of individual corpora, and look for for overlapping items.

The resulting lexemes include:

function words (prepositions, particles, conjunctions)
the article and pronouns
a small core of extremely common verbs, especially those which have a large number of compounds. In counting the frequency of a simplex verb like φέρω, we include occurrences of compounds such as ἐπιφέρω or ἐκφέρω.

Our “core vocabulary” list also includes a relatively small number of nouns, and fewer adjectives: these parts of speech vary more from one corpus to another.

As we get further into the course, we focus on a second tier of vocabulary: terms that are frequent in the target corpus and related or similar texts, but not necessarily in other Greek corpora. The goal is to have a large enough vocabulary to recognize 75-90% of the lexical items in the target text, excluding proper nouns and adjectives. For some target texts, a vocabulary of < 500 words may be adequate. This second vocabulary tier will include more verbs, a larger number of nouns, and some additional adjectives.

Versions and source

This text is work in progress built from the openly licensed markdown source in this github repository (https://github.com/hellenike/textbook).

You can also download a PDF of this version (https://github.com/hellenike/textbook/raw/main/pdf/hellenike.pdf).