Spirited/Reasoning: The 80% Rule

I wanted to make sure that I covered the verbs that would come up most often. Egnatius pointed me to this article from CPL Online to add to the list of the most important verbs in Greek. According to the article,

"Core vocabulary tends to cluster at two levels, 50% and 80%. The percentage refers to the proportion of a text made up by a certain amount of vocabulary. Half of most English texts, for example, consist of the same one hundred or so lemmas1 repeated as the situation demands. Words like “the” “to” and “is,” for example, generate a fair amount of text by themselves. In these statistics, linguists count lemmas, so different forms of a word (“is” and “was”; “camel” and “camels”) count as a single lemma, not separate vocabulary items. Despite some irregular words (“go” and “went”) and vocabulary items of considerable flexibility (“do”), these are words absolutely fundamental to any communication and comprehension of English. The Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu) provides an invaluable database, and its vocabulary tool (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/vocab?lang=greek) has allowed scholars to generate similar analyses for Greek. Whereas an English 50% list consists of more than a hundred lemmas, which is normal enough for languages, a comparable Greek list contains about 65 (the exact number can vary depending on whether some items are grouped together as a single lemma or separated as distinct lemmas). The list itself, with further discussion, follows later in this article, but the key points now are that Greek has a much smaller list at this level and that these are unquestionably vocabulary items a student of Greek will need to be comfortable with" (Major 2).

It seems only reasonable to make the verbs of this frequency a priority. I will start working on this right away.

One think I've bee having a little bit of trouble with is the categorization of verbs. There is some conflicting depictions of verbs in terms of whether they fall under active or deponent.

Spirited/Reasoning: Verbs

I haven't been getting much of my Greek and Latin review done lately. In fact, I haven't been getting much of anything at all done. However, I decided to finish up inputting all of the verbs from Hansen and Quinn into my list of verbs. At the moment I have the approximately 100 verbs from there as well as around 50 verbs from Eleanor Dickey's unpublished prose composition manual. More to come.

Reasoning: Introducing Classical Greek Principal Parts

No where that I have found is there a definitive list of principal parts in Greek. Many textbooks, including Ἀθηναζε the textbook from which I learned Greek, does not have a full list of principal parts and expects students to intuit some of principle parts. While there are paradigms for certain types of verbs, even when completing these paradigms a student (like myself) sometimes runs into trouble. For that reason, I thought I would make my own list. I am planning on starting a page on my blog that will work as a list of principle parts. I will put it up in the next few days, although it will probably be under major construction for quite a while.

The page, now up on the website (see left-hand column) looks something like the following:

Please note: I am a student of Greek myself and do not have an authoritative view of Greek at all. If I am wrong, which is certainly possible (especially factoring in typos), please comment with a correction (and if possible a source for the correction) and I will fix it.

My goal is as follows: as I am finish my prose composition class, I am planning on adding the verbs from Eleanor Dickey's unpublished prose composition book (which is what we are using so this will be part of the studying for my final). After that, I will add the verbs from Malcom Campbell's Classical Greek Prose: A Basic Vocabulary, as this is a standard text book for prose composition classes and verbs I should know.

As a key: "---" means that the principal part does not exist for this verb. "-" in front of a form means it is usually paired with a prefix of some sort.

ἀγγέλλω	ἀγγελῶ	ἤγγειλα	ἤγγελκα	ἤγγελμαι	ἠγγέλθην	(to) announce
ἀγείρω	----	ἤγειρα	----	----	----	(to) gather, collect
ἀγω	ἄξω	ἤγαγον	ἦχα	ἦγμαι	ἦχθην	(to)drive, go
ᾄδω	ᾄσομαι	ᾖσα	----	ᾖσμαι	ᾔσθην	(to) sing

 etc...

Works Referenced

Dickey, Eleanor. Greek Prose Composition (draft). Completed at the Columbia University Classics Department, 2003. Unpublished.

Reasoning: Thoughts on Vocabularies

I have been reading a lot of Homer lately (although I have been having trouble concentrating so I have been reading it more slowly than I might wish). One of the books Propertius II recommended to aid me was Owen's Homeric Vocabularies and I checked it out from the library. The books lists words in the order of the frequency with which they appear in the Homeric texts. At first I found the book rather useless, but the more I read I realize how often Homer repeats his words and that it is significantly easier to look words up in the little paperback than my Homeric dictionary. I am also trying to add those words which I look up most frequently to my flashcard list.

I have also been recommended a similar vocabulary for Greek prose. I wonder if it will be useful.