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A couple of things seem a little strange to me about Pharr's text (well, actually, there are a bunch of strange things, like why are there so many chapters where the exercises don't relate to the assigned bits of grammar and vice versa...)

Anyway, what's up with the "Optional:" section in every chapter? He says in a footnote "Sections to be assigned at the discretion of the instructor," but as far as I can tell he puts this in every single chapter as a numbered section but never, not in any of 77 chapters, does he ever actually put anything in there. The only exception is even more curious, where in Lesson VII the optional states "review all the optional sections studied thus far." [Wright does add a few optional in his revised version of Pharr, but these were written several decades later.]

Also, for sections 489-500 he has written "These sections, which are omitted from this book for the sake of brevity, refer to the standard Greek grammars."

What is he talking about? Omitted from where? I thought these were his sections in the first place. Do they exist somewhere else? Is there some larger version of this book, or is he basing his section numbers on some other, more established text?

My suspicion has always been that they padded out the section numbers so they could easily add new material in a future edition without have to reassign the section numbers for the rest of the book — a potentially expensive and error-prone task before electronic typesetting. Plus, it's a kindness to readers to keep the sectioning identical between editions, so citations to it elsewhere don't go stale. I'm sure most of us have seen older grammars which have a few pages devoted to matching up the sectioning of older editions to the current one.

But this is no more than a guess.

As for the optional material, it certainly comes from the use of the book in a classroom setting, where the instructor might add extra material, such vocabulary, more paragraphs to study, etc. This extra material surely had to be assigned with the review lessons.

A couple of things seem a little strange to me about Pharr's text (well, actually, there are a bunch of strange things, like why are there so many chapters where the exercises don't relate to the assigned bits of grammar and vice versa...)

it seems that someone needs editing leassons. in the beggining of the book there were notes, and these notes averted the studens from the dangers of the deep by pointing out the proper grammar section of things like usage of verbs, irregularities in the declension, and we saw that they were good. the author however, and later the editor, the laziest among animals didnt bother to do the same to the following chapters - and anyone can see that this is not good

hell! even if this is a book for classroom usage why in the world the references would not be provided - it is a book for learners afterall. not even a index a small index for one to find things in the grammar section the editor bothered to create.

It is relatively easy to bookmark the electronic pdf version to suit your own purpose.

but for this the acrobat suite, or whatever the name of the thing is, is necessary; nor i have it and it is expensive.

Tertius Robertus wrote:but for this the acrobat suite, or whatever the name of the thing is, is necessary; nor i have it and it is expensive.

Not at all. You can get Acrobat Reader for free. You don't need the whole program for what you want to do. Just Google Acrobat Reader + download and you'll see what I mean.

π

Certainly, Acrobat Reader is free. But if you want to bookmark and/or hyperlink parts of the text together, you will need Acrobat software, not the Reader.