I am looking for a good catalog of verbs with their principle parts. A professor said there may be a good one in German, but I do not know German so I am asking you all. There are not that many verbs in the language, so I am hoping to find a text with every single one, in a table preferably. Do you know of any such text?
You will never find a table of every last verb, but Morwood’s Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek has extensive lists of just about aa those you really need to know, along with allthe essential grammar, in a very reasonably priced package.
What about a list of every verb? There must surely be something like that. I once asked a professor and he said there is that sort of scholarship in German, but he could not remember an author. I do not know German so I cannot search out such a work, but I could make use of one.
Hi, the closest thing I can think of is Marinone’s All the Greek Verbs, but it’s not quite what you’re looking for: it skips verbs only attested in the present tense.
Your best bet would be to read a dictionary, and skip non-verb forms.
Cheers, Chad
Just to point out that you don’t mean the principle parts but the principal parts, i.e. the main parts, from which the other forms can be derived. I wouldn’t mention it but the error seems to be ever more pervasive and it irks me in its meaninglessness.
I’ve seen Greek grammars in English that list the irregular ones in an appendix. Doesn’t Smyth do something of the kind? —— I notice Hylander already mentioned Morwood. But you’d really do better to learn how different kinds of verb typically behave. Most verbs have fairly predictable principal parts. You shouldn’t need to look up each one individually. A little morphology goes a long way.
List of Verbs in A Greek Grammar for Colleges
by Herbert Weir Smyth
For anyone intent on memorizing principal parts, I think, Smyth provides too much information about alternative and dialect forms, and doesn’t provide the basic information in a convenient format. Otherwise, Smyth is very useful if not indispensable for Greek verb forms. And, as mwh notes, it’s useful to have a deeper understanding of Greek verbal morphology, which makes it easier to see order and regularities in the bewildering luxuriance of Greek verb forms, and which you can get from Smyth.
Echoing the various other posters, the right way of doing things is:
- learn the regular
- use Smyth for the irregular basics
- use Veitch for further info on irregulars.
Learn those thoroughly and your verbal morphology will be excellent.
As for reference books on “all the forms,” there is no book I know of that legitimately comes close, but you can supplement Marinone with the (more complete) “Index of Greek verb forms” by Bodoh.
Hi all, I agree with everything above, and would add (now that the conversation is shifting from where to find principal parts, to useful ways for learning them), I found Mastronarde’s grouping of principal parts into groups really helpful. This is covered on pgs 390–2 of the 2nd edition of Mastronarde, but there’s a useful handout on his website which covers the same thing in a slightly different layout:
http://atticgreek.org/downloads/allPPbytypes.pdf
The idea is that you first identify the group to which the verb belongs, and then memorise for each verb whether it follows the regular pattern for that group, or has some parts lacking, or is irregular. There is still a whole lot of memorisation involved, but it gives the exercise more structure than just memorising each verb’s principal parts.
Cheers, Chad