Writing Greek: An Introduction to Writing in the Language of Classical Athens

by Stephen Anderson, John Taylor

Planned as a companion volume to "Writing Latin" by Richard Ashdowne and James Morwood, this brand new guide to writing Greek will be useful both in the upper forms of schools and for those starting Greek prose composition at university. Part 1 deals with the constituent elements of the simple sentence, and in Part 2 all major constructions are covered, each with thorough explanations and clear examples. Each chapter has either two or three exercises of practice sentences, further supplemented throughout Part 2 by passages for continuous composition. 100 important irregular verbs with their principal parts are listed at the back of the book, and there is a complete vocabulary for all the exercises, a useful learning and revision resource in itself.

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2010

Reviews

[Christopher]

Writing Greek is a textbook for Classical Greek prose composition by Stephen Anderson and John Taylor. The authors note that few universities these days push Greek composition, and courses usually rely on North & Hillard's textbook that dates from over a century ago. They want to offer something new and motivate students back into flexing their Greek muscles through composition. Each of the 21 chapters focuses on a different aspect of grammar (e.g. relative clauses, purpose clauses, verbs of fearing, etc.), giving some brief pointers and example sentences before a couple of pages of sentences of English to translate. One of the first things that struck me about Anderson and Taylor's textbook is how modern the language is; students will be translated from today's colloquial English into Greek, instead of the somewhat antiquated English of most textbooks.

This book assumes that students have already spent at least a year learning to read Classical Greek. Furthermore, the student will need a reference grammar, as no paradigms are provided (except for a list of irregular principal parts of verbs). An English-Greek dictionary isn't strictly needed, as all vocabulary for the exercises is provided at the back of the book. The book does not include a key to the exercises, but it can be purchased separately (ISBN 185399717X).

While this book is adequate to learn Greek composition, and many readers may have no choice since it is assigned in a course, It is hard to recommend this textbook to autodidacts when North & Hillard is freely available on the web (as it has long since passed into the public domain). Sure, their English is rather stiff by today's standards, but hey, it's free. Furthermore, the typesetting of Anderson and Taylor's book is godawful – it really hurts to look at a page from this volume.