Product Description

This is the first dedicated grammar of Classical Greek for students for almost a century. It provides exceptional clarity, helpfulness, and ease of use for GCSE and A level students, as well as anyone with an interest in Ancient Greek. Generous help with grammatical terms, pronunciation, and difficult idioms is provided. Practice exercises, example sentences, and helpful tips throughout make this the perfect study companion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42620 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 289 pages

About the Author
James Morwood, formerly Head of Classics at Harrow School in England, is now a Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford and Grocyn Lecturer for the Literae Humaniores Faculty.

Customer Reviews

An excellent grammar for students at all levels
As readers of the companion Latin grammar would expect, this work is practical,concise and well-ordered. Morwood assumes no previous knowledge of inflected languages; he explains basic concepts such as nouns and cases with the same clarity and lack of condescension that he brings to the more difficult features of verbs, such as mood and aspect. Technical grammatical terms are explained in the opening glossary. The emphasis thoughout is practical. Morwood boldly omits the rare future perfect tense. While he necessarily devotes space to accidence (concisely defined as "the area of grammar dealing with endings"), his object is to teach the student to understand and write Greek. Each construction is accompanied by several examples which enable the student to do the two-way translation exercises at the end of each chapter. He has useful lists of easily confused words and tips for students, a glossary of literary terms (very handy for those who cannot remember what metonymy means), an overview of Homeric dialect and New Testament Greek and a fascinating discussion of the pronunciation of Greek through the ages. We can look forward to Morwood replacing Abbott and Mansfield as the standard school and university grammar.

Good and handy grammar
This is a good all-round grammar, with a very user-friendly layout and a decent, but not comprehensive, list of irregular verbs and their forms. There is a English-Greek section at the back, which is a very helpful feature for the beginner. Be aware though, that this edition is not very well bound and has to be treated with great care, otherwise it will fall apart. 11 out of 15 students in my class last year suffered this. That aside, it is a very useful concise grammar.

An excellent course book
It does what it says on the title page. It isn't Ancient Greek for Dummies; it's a concise grammar of Athenian greek with some nods towards other (e.g. Homeric) dialects.
Reference is generally easy, thanks to decent indexes. Rather less than half the text is devoted to declensions and conjugations etc. and the other, bigger part to the various constructions. There is even a section on easily confused words.
Incidentally, it is the course grammar used by the Open University for one of its courses.
As a compact reference book to supplement a course, or just to look up tricky points when reading, it is very highly commended.