Modern Greek

by Brian D. Joseph, Irene Philippaki-Warburton

281 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Dr. Joseph is a Professor of Linguistics at The Ohio State University. His main areas of interest include historical linguistics, Greek linguistics, Balkan linguistics, and morphological theory. His secondary areas of interest include language and ethnicity, Sanskrit linguistics, and Indo-European linguistics in general.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a grammar of Modern Greek made not for a general audience but a very specific one: typologists comparing languages to determine universals. This was published as part of a series of descriptive grammars that were based on a questionnaire published in Lingua in 1977. Because that audience could not necessarily be expected to handle foreign scripts, Greek is presented solely in transliteration.

For those learning Greek and wanting a reference grammar, or linguists generally interested in Greek but not for such specific typological aims, this was soon superseded by Routledge’s Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language, which shares an author. This book remains, however, a curiosity in that it has, due to the original comparativist questionnaire, some sections one wouldn’t normally find in a reference grammar, such as cooking terminology and color terms.

For lovers of fine typesetting, this book is like a knife being stabbed into one’s eyeball: the top and bottom margins are weirdly massive. I had never come across this short-lived publisher Croon Helm before, but quality was clearly not a concern.