Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #263751 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-30
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Customer Reviews

GREEK WITH EFFICIENCY
Of all the Greek words extant on papyri, parchments, ceramic pots, ostraca, and the like, we can count a library of sorts of about two million words. They include Archimedes, Erastothenes, Plato, Homer, Herodotus, the New Testament, and playrights, to name a few. And this number grows as new Greek manuscripts are found by archeologists, usually slowly as the odd pot or scrap is found, sometimes in extraordinary bursts with great finds like the Oxyrhynchus treasure trove which shed so much light on the New Testament vocabulary as it revealed the everyday Greek language of the first century in ordinary letters, bills of sale, tax returns, and marriage certificates. But however we look at it, some words are very common indeed, and it pays to learn these first, some are very rare indeed and appear but once in the whole canon. Usually it is enough to look these words up in a lexicon as required. Jerry Toner's excellent book helpfully arranges words from most common ('the') to the two-thousandth most common ('mania'), in pages of twenty. A quick skim of the first ten pages shows you how many of these useful words you really know.

The many available Greek courses for beginners rarely pay attention to the frequency with which words appear in standard Greek texts. This has its advantages and disadvantages. The most obvious advantage is the choice of less common but well-behaved, regular, first, second, and third declension nouns for construction of practice sentences. The same goes for non-contracting verbs. The most obvious disadvantage is that these nouns, verbs, particles, and prepositions are learned but are of less use than might be expected as soon as the unwary beginner looks mind-boggled into a real page of Plato or the New Testament.

However, the beginner and the hard-pressed teacher need fear not. Jerry Toner's computer-collated vocabulary of 2,000 words covers a staggering 85% of the Greek lexicon. How is this possible? Well, the most common words occur so often that they make up the bulk of the whole - a phenomenon which is generally known as Pareto's Law - the commonest few causes account for most of the effects, 20% of the people have 80% of the wealth, etc.

This book covers the whole LSJ lexicon, and weights it towards the commonest study texts, including the New Testament. Unsurprisingly, the definite article bobs to the top, but surprisingly few nouns make it into the top one hundred - a mere ten (viz: city, man/aner, word, child, god, king, woman, ship, man/anthropos, and power). Note the irregulars and the rarity of the first declension! A considerable array of particles, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions take up the first few pages. So the teacher and learner alike can profit greatly by ticking off the words as learnt, and puzzle over much avoided but exceedingly common words not seen in the first two years of some courses (eg, the pronoun 'he', for 'himself/herself', and the meaning of 'lego', 'to lay', as opposed the ubiquitous 'to say/speak/mean/tell' variants. Both of which appear in the top forty words.) So a standard lexicon will also be required alongside this book.

The print is good, the paper acceptable, the binding good for a paperback of 130 pages. What a useful book, I wish I had found it in 2004 when it was published. OK, quick quiz, which of these words derives from the ancient Greek, and occurs in the top 2000 in this book? Ready?

History
Geography
Economics
Biology
Physics
Maths
Poetry
Theatre
Cinema
Politics

...all of them.