Ancient Greek for Everyone:
A New Digital Resource for
Beginning Greek
2013 edition
Wilfred E. Major
wmajor@lsu.edu
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• This class
– You have learned the Greek alphabet and other
components of the Greek writing system.
– This slide show offers an overview of Ancient
Greek for Everyone (AGE), the digital textbook
resource for this class. It surveys:
– The organization of AGE by Part of Speech
– The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– The method and purpose of the readings.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The organization of AGE by Part of Speech
– The units of AGE are organized by Part of Speech.
– Greek has effectively the same parts of speech as
English:
– verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs,
conjunctions, prepositions, interjections
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The organization of AGE by Part of Speech
– The units of AGE are organized by Part of Speech.
– Each unit consists of:
– A survey of some feature of a Part of Speech
– A vocabulary list of items pertaining to this feature
– Reading passages which provide practice with this
feature and review of the Greek you have already
learned.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
– The organization of AGE by Part of Speech
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– Each unit includes two vocabulary lists: a Classical
Vocabulary list and a New Testament (NT) vocabulary list.
– Both lists are geared to the topic of the unit.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– Many words appear on both lists.
– The lists both consist of high-frequency Greek vocabulary,
and since the most frequent words in Classical writings and
the New Testament are often the same, the lists often
overlap. Because of differences in time and topic, there are
also some differences, of course.
– You are required to memorize vocabulary that is common
to both lists. Each unit includes a “Core” vocabulary list
that compiles this vocabulary.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– The Classical vocabulary list derives from the Core
Vocabulary list of the Dickinson College Commentaries
(DCC) series
– At this link, you can view the entire list and you can select
various subsets of the list by type or meaning:
http://dcc.dickinson.edu/greek-core-list .
– The DCC list consists of a little under 500 words.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– The DCC list consists of a little under 500 words. These
words make up an average of about 2/3 of Greek texts.
– This is because, like most languages, Greek in practice
repeats some words often and uses other words more rarely.
– In English, for example, words like “the” “a” and “is”
appear repeatedly, but a word like “paraclausithyron,”
sadly, is used very rarely.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– Scholars have studied word frequency in English and
learned that adult English speakers typically carry about
10,000 to 15,000 vocabulary items. They do not use them
all equally, however.
– In fact, about 100 words make up nearly half of speaking
and writing in English.
– Furthermore, about 2,400 words make up 80%. After that,
vocabulary becomes more specialized and less frequent.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– The 50% and 80% levels are common leveling points in
vocabulary usage and the numbers for these levels in
English are average compared to many other languages
(although the complete vocabulary of English is much
larger than for most languages).
– Greek, by contrast, uses a much small vocabulary.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– It takes only about 65 words to make up 50% of Classical
Greek texts.
– It takes fewer than 1,100 words to make up 80% of these
texts.
– The DCC list at a little less than 500 makes up somewhere
around two-thirds.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– The DCC list is designed to serve as the high frequency
core vocabulary list for all intermediate readers of Classical
Greek.
– As new readers are developed for the DCC and elsewhere,
they will provide running vocabulary for words, but assume
you already know the words in the Core.
– By the end of AGE, you will have the entire DCC Core
Greek vocabulary list. Thus, you should be ready for
intermediate-level reading at that point.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– The New Testament (NT) list works on similar principles.
– Each unit includes high-frequency vocabulary items from
the NT. By the end, it includes every vocabulary item that
occurs 30+ times in the NT.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– Two intermediate reading editions of the NT make use of
this same list:
– Richard J. Goodrich and Albert L. Lukaszewski, A Reader’s
Greek New Testament, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan, 2007), ISBN 978-0310-273783.
– Barclay M. Newman, The UBS Greek New Testament: A
Reader’s Edition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007),
ISBN 978-1598562859.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– Both include this list of words occurring 30+ times in the
back, and then provide running vocabulary for all other
words on each page.
– By the end of AGE, you will have the complete 30+
vocabulary list and thus be prepared to use either of these
readers.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– Note: The AGE vocabulary lists do not include the proper
names of people or places, even when, statistically, such
names are frequent enough for inclusion.
– Running vocabulary lists for the readings in AGE include
any words that have not appeared in the AGE vocabulary
lists up to that point. Vocabulary which is part of the Core
Vocabulary by that point will not be glossed.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
– The organization of AGE by Part of Speech
– The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– The method and purpose of the readings.
– Each unit of AGE includes three readings:
• readings from Classical Greek
• readings in Greek from Biblical texts.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
Classical Greek strictly speaking refers to writings from the city of
Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. These writings
include:
• Scripts of the world’s first plays, both comedies and tragedies (Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes).
• Some of the earliest writings about history (Thucydides, Xenophon).*
• The earliest complete writings of philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle).
• Important legal and political writings, as well as the earliest biographies,
essays, literary letters, and historical fiction (Xenophon, the canonical
orators).
The readings in this course in Classical Greek draw primarily from the
above writings.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
• Recall that Attic/Classical Greek became the basis for
koine Greek.
• The most famous writing in koine Greek is the New
Testament.
• The Hebrew Bible was translated into koine Greek in the
second century B.C., and this version of the Old Testament,
called the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX), was the one known
to early Christians.
• Other writings from this period related to the Bible were also
written in koine Greek.
• The Biblical readings in this course draw from New
Testament, the Septuagint, and related ancient writings.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
– The organization of AGE by Part of Speech
– The method and purpose of the vocabulary lists
– The method and purpose of the readings.
– The readings are chosen in part because they use the
grammatical topic of a particular unit, and because they are
famous or interesting.
– The readings from Classical and Biblical texts are
unchanged from standard scholarly editions.
– Vocabulary (as explained above) and grammatical notes are
added for material not covered yet in AGE by the time of
the reading.
Ancient Greek for Everyone
Ancient Greek for Everyone (AGE)
– At this point, AGE includes units only for Classical and
Biblical Greek.
– In coming years, the plan is to add units for Homeric/Ionic
Greek, post-Classical Greek, Medieval/Byzantine Greek and
Katherevousa/Demotic Greek.
– Even now, however, the lessons of AGE provide the core and
gateway for these others eras of Greek!