PART I: PHONOLOGY and MORPHOLOGY
Contents
Phonetic Details 11
Stops 11
Fricatives 12
Resonants 12
Geminates 13
Letters Representing Two Consonants 13
Elision, ‘Movable’ Consonants, Crasis, Hiatus 14
Elision 14
‘Movable’ Consonants 14
Crasis 15
Hiatus 16
Historical Developments: Introduction 16
Historical Developments: Ablaut (Vowel Gradation) 18
Introduction; Qualitative and Quantitative Ablaut 18
Some Typical Greek Ablaut Patterns 19
Historical Developments: Vowels 20
Attic-Ionic 20
Contraction of Vowels 21
Contraction of a, η, ω, ο and ω 21
Diphthongs 22
Summary Table of Contractions 22
Further Particulars and Exceptions 23
Long and Short: the Augment, Stem Formation, Compensatory Lengthening 24
Compensatory Lengthening 24
Summary Table 25
Shortening: Osthoff’s Law 25
Quantitative Metathesis 27
Historical Developments: Consonants 27
Consonants at Word End 27
The Disappearance of ϝ, ϝ͂ and ο 28
Sound Changes Involving τ/ϝ 28
Sound Changes Involving τ/π 29
Sound Changes Involving θ 30
Other Consonant Clusters: Vocalization of Resonants, Assimilation, Loss of Consonants 30
Vocalization of Syllabic Resonants 30
Assimilation in Consonant Clusters 31
Loss of Consonants 33
Loss of Aspiration: Grassmann’s Law 34
2 Introduction to Nominal Forms 35
Basic Categories 35
Building Blocks: Stems and Endings 35
Declensions and Endings 36
Declensions 36
Table of Endings 38
3 The Article 39
4 Nouns 40
First-Declension Nouns 40
Stems, Types and Gender of First-Declension Nouns 40
Feminine Nouns in -η, -α or -ᾱ 40
Masculine Nouns in -ης or -ας 42
Further Notes and Exceptions 43
Second-Declension Nouns 43
Stems, Types and Gender of Second-Declension Nouns 43
Masculine (and Feminine) Nouns in -ος or -ους 44
Neuter Nouns in -ον or -ου 45
Further Notes and Exceptions 45
Third-Declension Nouns 46
Stems, Types and Gender of Third-Declension Nouns 46
Stems in a Labial Stop (π, β, φ) or Velar Stop (κ, γ, χ) 48
Stems in a Dental Stop (τ, δ, θ, except ντ) 49
Stems in ντ 50
Stems in ν 51
Stems in a Liquid (λ or ρ) 52
Stems in (ε)ρ, with Three Ablaut Grades (Type πατήρ, μήτηρ) 53
Stems in ο (Neuter Nouns in -ος, Names in -ης) 54
Stems in ι/ε(ϝ) (Type πόλις) 56
Stems in υ (Type ἰχθύς) or in υ/ε(ϝ) (Type βασιλεύς) 57
Stems in νυ/ν(ϝ) (Type γραῦς) 58
Ζεύς, ναῦς, βοῦς 59
Further Notes and Exceptions 60
Conspectus of Noun Types 61
5 Adjectives and Participles 63
First-and-Second-Declension Adjectives and Participles 63
Of Three Endings (-ος, -η/-ᾱ, -ον) 63
Adjectives 63
Participles 64
Of Three Endings, with Contraction (-οῦς, -ῆ/-ᾶ, -οῦν) 64
Of Two Endings (-ος, -ον or -ους, -ουν) 65
Further Particulars 67
Mixed-Declension Adjectives 68
First-and-Third-Declension Adjectives and Participles 69
Of Three Endings, Stems in ντ (-ων, -ουσα, -ον and μέλας, μέλαινα, μέλαν) 69
Adjectives 69
Participles 70
Of Three Endings, Perfect Active Participles in -ως, -υια, -ος 72
6 Pronouns 73
The Personal Pronouns 73
The Reflexive Pronouns 75
αὐτός 77
The Demonstrative Pronouns οὗτος, ἐκεῖνος 83
Further Particulars 89
Comparison of Adjectives and Adverbs 92
Of Three Endings (-ης, -εσσα, -εν) 93
Of Two Endings (-ων, -ον) 94
Other Demonstratives 95
Deictic Iota 95
Relative Pronouns 96
ὅς and ὅστις 96
Other Relative Pronouns 96
Interrogative and Indefinite Pronouns 97
τίς, τι; τις, τι 97
Other Interrogative Pronouns 97
Seemingly Similar Forms: αὐτός, ὁ αὐτός, ἐκεῖνος, οὗτος 98
8 Correlative Pronouns and Adverbs 99
The System of Correlative Pronouns and Adjectives 99
The System of Correlative Adverbs 100
9 Numerals 101
List of Numerals 101
Declension of Numerals 102
Further Particulars 103
10 The Dual: Nominal Forms 105
Endings 105
Forms 105
The Article 105
Nouns and Adjectives/Participles 106
Pronouns 106
Preface
On Cs and Gs: History and Aims of the Book
Conception and Development
Readers picking up this hefty tome may be surprised to learn that the first C of CGCG (as we like to call it) once stood for Concise. The syntax part of that Concise Grammar of Classical Greek began, as so many grammar books no doubt have, as lecture handouts – to be precise, as EVEB’s handouts used in first-year Greek lecture classes at Oxford, and the material was not yet even representative of the full state of existing grammars and teaching materials; the terminology was often confusing too. The handouts did not deal with many areas of syntax (still represented in textbooks as antiquated), and the material often reflected outmoded work in general linguistics. The next years saw a large deal of work at Oxford to bridge the gap. EVEB had then been joined, in 2009, by LH, who took the instigation by the authors to look seriously at revising the lecture materials into a first book proposal for a full-fledged grammar of Classical Greek. The material was drafted in English: a daunting gambit. A similar proposal was sent to the University of Cambridge Press (and the University of Oxford, for that matter), and in the view of many readers at Oxford, a full-scale grammar worthy of the name was a desideratum. As truth would have it, there was a temptation to take the last decades’ advances in linguistic knowledge into account, but the existing work was limited. The proposal grew into chapters. The existing morphology was antiquated and confusing; the authors took on the task of revising and overhauling it, and the examples were often textual materials mentioned without good judgment. The book that resulted was very much inspired by the grammar of Smyth: a great labour, but the advances in linguistics did not always represent alternatives.
At this point, the material was representative enough for submission, so when the book was sent, the readers’ reports were detailed and gratifyingly favourable. It is in this period that MdB, former Grocyn Lecturer at Oxford, who had himself been planning a similar effort, joined the writing team.
The revised work, which had grown considerably due to addition of the phonology/morphology and further additions requested by our readers, was resubmitted to the Press in the final months of 2013, and another full set of readers’ reports on the complete text followed in the subsequent year. These reports were once again very helpful and detailed, eliciting not only a final round of revision, but also a complete overhaul of the numbering system used for our sections. These changes were completed early in 2015; this was followed by a lengthy and complex production process (in our Bibliography, we have not systematically added references to works from 2016 or later).
The end product is in every way the result of a joint effort: although individual authors wrote first drafts of particular chapters, or took the initiative in revising chapters or sections, we discussed every page of the book as a group, and all four of us have reflected extensively on the entire work. Each of us is happy to share responsibility for the whole.
Target Audience and Scope
Our particular hope is that university students (at all levels) and teachers will profit from CGCG. Professional scholars whose main area of expertise is not Greek linguistics may also benefit from our presentation, particularly where it concerns areas which are less often covered in traditional grammars (word order is a prime example), but also more generally because of the manner in which we have tried to reflect current thinking in the field (on such issues as verbal aspect, the use of tenses, voice, the representation of reported discourse, complement constructions, particles, etc.).
CGCG’s coverage is such, we suggest, that it could be used in the context of undergraduate and graduate language courses, and that a commentary on a classical text geared primarily to a student audience could refer to it for most grammatical features, except those so rare that they deserve fuller discussion anyway. Still, there are many subjects about which we might have said much more, and some about which we have said almost nothing at all (syllable structure, the interjections, and forms of address spring to mind here). Other expansions, such as a section on metre and/or prose rhythm, or the kind of stylistic glossary often found in grammars, were never seriously considered: to our mind, readers are much better served on these issues by specialized resources.
On the point of coverage, a few words must also be said about the second C and G of our title. There was a temptation (and a desire among a minority of our readers) to increase the diachronic and dialectological scope of the work to cover Homer, archaic lyric, the Koine, etc.; we also would have loved to say more about the Greek of inscriptions. However, as any such move would have drastically increased the size and complexity of the book (and accordingly decreased its accessibility), we decided to limit our purview to classical Greek. Again, such omissions seemed all the more feasible given the availability of specialized resources on the dialects, Homeric grammar, etc. Since Herodotus and the dramatists fall clearly under the heading of classical Greek, we did include a chapter on Ionic prose and some dialectal features of drama (particularly the ‘Doric’ alpha).
Some Principles of Presentation
Although we abandoned Concise for our first C early on, we have still strived for concision and accessibility in our presentation. Implicated in this is our decision not to clutter the book’s pages with bibliographical references or extensive discussion of diverging views. We do provide a brief, thematically organized bibliography at the end of the book, and trust that the resources listed there will allow interested readers to follow up particular subjects. We are well aware, of course, that at some points our presentation is open to genuine debate or uncertainty. Where we have elided such discussions, it is not from dogmatism but from a desire for consistency and clarity.
Another way in which we have attempted to keep the book accessible is by making it theory-light and by taking a considered approach towards our terminological apparatus. Whether or not we have succeeded in this must be judged by our users: we provide some further discussion of our choices in terminology at pp. xl–xlii.
Keeping the book approachable also meant forgoing radical departures from ‘normal’ ways of organizing a grammar. Our syntax chapters follow a traditional pattern, moving from the constructions of simple sentences (including basic nominal syntax and verbal categories such as tense, aspect and mood), to various kinds of subordinate constructions, gathered under such headings as ‘causal clauses’, ‘purpose clauses’, ‘the participle’, etc., which are strongly correlated to form. Another approach—one more attuned to the fact that language is not merely a system of forms, but a medium used by speakers and writers to accomplish certain goals and effects—might have been to give much more prominence to function, for instance by discussing all ways of expressing ‘cause’ or ‘purpose’ under one heading. This is not, in the end, the course we took, but gestures towards such an approach may be found throughout the book, and some chapters (e.g. the chapter on wishes, directives, etc.) more expressly align with such organizing principles.
We have put considerable effort into the selection of our Greek examples: some, of course, were found in our predecessors and recommissioned, but most were newly culled from a wide range of texts. Our aim has been to find, in varied sources, examples that are clear and actually representative of the phenomenon they are meant to exemplify. Digital search corpora such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and Perseus under PhiloLogic were of great help in finding suitable material. We also decided to dispense almost entirely with fabricated sentences, from a conviction that working with real Greek examples is the best way of learning how to deal with real Greek texts (and from what we consider a healthy mistrust of our own ability to produce Greek that would have sounded true to an ancient hearer).
In the phonology/morphology part, too, our presentation of forms is often based on a fresh examination of the corpus. Some exceptional forms that are often listed in grammars but do not actually occur in classical Greek have been left out. This is particularly relevant in the case of our list of principal parts, where we have generally avoided giving forms which are non-existent (or nearly so) in classical Greek.
While on the topic of the phonology/morphology: we have in those chapters provided rather more historical information than is now usual in university-level grammars. Much of what is ‘irregular’ in Greek forms and paradigms can be explained by historical processes, and our aim in providing such background is didactic: students can greatly benefit from using this information in analysing the language and recognizing regular patterns where the traditional grammar finds little consistency. Few users will wonder about reconstructed forms (no indication of labiovelars?), but the background is helpful.
We also have attempted, in the morphology, to replicate the guidance of a suitable grammar in explaining explicitly the difference between the first and second declension endings. Our product is built with consistency, so that the student is encouraged in analysing continuous forms, reading vowel quantities, looking at the inflectional endings. Points of reference such as the aorist participle-suffix -ντ-, the masc. acc. pl. ending -ας, or telling the difference between sigmatic and thematic aorist formations, are prevalent. Students should find the strong analytical indications helpful, for instance in the form τροιζένοντα/τροιζένοαντας, or in toaisdeuo / *cey-, *seg’-. We have strived to stimulate proper use of dictionaries and reference works: our indications (e.g. vowel quantities, stress) are provided throughout the morphology but are not meant to replace full lexical entries. Our approach is didactic, not an excuse for experts; it aims to help users in the consistent analysis of forms.