Is there a web site giving accurate full conjugations of common ancient Greek verbs, especially the ones that display peculiarities of formation?
AFAIK there is no 500 ancient Greek verbs book.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/φέρω
https://logeion.uchicago.edu/morpho/φέρω
Wiktionary is the easiest to use. It shows both attested and unattested forms. U Chicago shows only attested forms, and if there are multiple possibilities it doesn’t sort them in any way.
I don’t think the concept of a 500 ancient Greek verbs book would really work as well as it does for a language like Spanish, where there is a single standardized modern dialect.
Test wiktionary this form, Bob, the third-person singular, optative active of ἒχω. It’s possible I’m not using the site correctly.
As I read Mastronarde it is σχοίη.
I spent two hours this morning trying to get a correct parse of this verb form which appears in Plato’s Apology of Socrates. I consulted wiktionary in my search.
Finally, by skimming Mastronarde’s chapter on the optative formation I found the answer.
How about these:
AtticGreek.org, http://atticgreek.org/paradigms/paradigmsVerbs1.html
Verbix, https://www.verbix.com/languages/ancient_greek
I’ve used Verbix a few times and it usually is helpful. Haven’t looked at the AtticGreek in detail, but appears promising.
I wish somebody would do such a book. Have used those for Spanish and German, very helpful.
AtticGreek.org is produced by Mastronarde, the author of a highly regarded ancient Greek textbook. I use it mainly for the drills on forms. I could not find there a paradigm for ἒχω.
Verbix did not have σχοίη for the third person singular, aorist optative active.
Perseus parsed σχοίη, but I couldn’t find a paradigm for ἒχω.
The great thing about these 500-verbs-books, is that the user while consulting them discovers his own weaknesses in verb forms, and at that point the user can drill himself with the paradigm right before him.
I should mention, perhaps, that there does exist a similar shorter book for Latin, 201 Latin Verbs. I have it and it is good. Oh, and I just saw this on Amazon: The Big Gold Book of Latin Verbs with 555 Latin verbs conjugated (Kindle ed. only, from an out of print book).
Has anybody here used the Latin one with 555 verbs conjugated?
Now if only those publishers would get busy and do a Greek one as well. 
I’m very skeptical that this would work. A good project for anyone who thinks it would work would be to write out the pages for a few randomly chosen verbs. I think they will find that the concept is quite difficult to carry out and/or requires a lot of design decisions to be made that will make the result not equally applicable for all users.
Here’s where Smyth starts in on the conjugation of λύω:
https://archive.org/details/agreekgrammarfo02smytgoog/page/112/mode/2up
It takes up 7 pages in his presentation. I’m sure that one could make different design decisions that would compress it to one page, but the question is what those design decisions would be. Maybe you’d leave out some of the less common forms. Maybe for some tense-mood-voice combinations you’d only present the first-person singular. Are you going to include the duals?
There’s also the question of what you’d do about the fact that basically no verb has every form. There would be complicated value judgments to make. For example, you could find that ἀνίστημι has no attestation of the second-person singular optative in a certain tense and voice, but ὑφίστημι has a similar form, so you go ahead and make one up by analogy. At the other extreme you have deponent verbs where it’s clearly just incorrect to present active forms. But then there will be every shade of gray in between. Similar editorial decisions have to be made about what version to present when even the same author uses more than one form of the verb in a certain slot.
And it can’t be “500 ancient Greek verbs.” It would have to be “500 Homeric verbs,” “500 Attic verbs,” or “500 koine verbs.”
I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s not at all analogous to a language like Spanish. I think what would probably be more useful would be a book like “50 Homeric verbs,” with the verbs chosen to be representative of various types and phonetic situations and also to include the most important highly irregular ones.
Very good points, Ben.
Since I started this thread, I have tested the word study tool in Perseus. It seems to work pretty well as a parser. Of course, it is nice to have a tabular presentation for memory work.
Have you tried wiktionary for that purpose?
No. Do you use wiktionary for memorizing?
If you’re looking for a table from which to construct a paradigm-chant, I would think wiktionary would be the place to go. I use it any time I’m not sure of an inflection. It basically is the equivalent of 500 Greek verbs, just online in a web-page format where you click to expand a certain section.
(Personally if I’m constructing a paradigm for the Homeric dialect I usually do it using my script that looks up forms in the Project Perseus database. That has the advantage of not leaving me in doubt about whether wiktionary is supplying an Attic form in place of a Homeric one, and it tells me when there are multiple possibilities, such as -οιο/-ου for genitives.)
Searching for σχοίη in Morpho at logeion brings up quite an extensive table of forms for ἔχω : https://logeion.uchicago.edu/morpho/σχοίη
I think memorisation of forms ( most things) is best done piecemeal. So making sure you know the endings plus augments and practising on λυω say would be a good thing to do. Coupled with learning the principal parts as listed in any grammar book would also be useful. The CGCG lists 191 verbs “with peculiarities” with brief notes on odd forms. Its a good point of reference.
The Eton College Greek Software Project is helpful https://www.etoncollege.com/eton-greek/index.html. It allows you to test your knowledge of a limited number of verbs and nouns etc.
As you have an iPad you might look at the Hoplite challenge a verb conjugation game. The app is based on Hansen and Quinn.
Rather than trying to memorise huge tables cutting the task down to manageable proportions seems a more promising start.
Hi Hugh,
I agree with Seneca that memorisation is best done in small chunks. Absolute first priority is to master the forms of λύω. You can then proceed from there to contract verbs, then φημί, οἶδα, long vowel aorists (Smyth 682-687), εἰμί, εἶμι, δέδοικα, μι-verbs, ἵημι, κεῖμαι, κάθημαι, δέω, χρή, 1st&2nd aorist and 2nd future passive of φαίνω (Smyth 402), and finally perfect/pluperfect middle/passive forms of consonant verbs. What I’ve just listed are all the verb forms that Eleanor Dickey (Introduction to the Composition and Analysis of Greek Prose) requires one to learn before doing the lessons containing those forms.
My method for accomplishing this is not very elegant. I take a small section at a time and drill myself by covering up the forms with an index card (or whatever I have to hand). I break down λύω into manageable chunks as follows:
- indicative forms - active
- indicative forms - middle/passive and aorist passive
- subjunctive - optative - imperative forms, active and middle/passive
- Participles and infinitives
Once I can consistently reproduce the correct forms of one set, I move on to the next.
One table that is well worth committing to memory is the table of personal endings (Smyth 462). This is the one table I’ve written out more than a few times. You can do the same for the table of Case Endings of Nouns (Smyth 210).
For vocabulary and principal parts of verbs, I use Anki decks. These take roughly 10 minutes to go through. Verb drills I allot 5-10 minutes for each chunk. N.B., these times are for maintaining proficiency, not initial learning. Anyway, that’s my “warm up” for the composition study and reading that I do at the beginning of every day. For Latin, I’ve been using Dickenson College Commentaries Core Vocabulary (1993 words) Anki Deck. At that point, I pick up Plautus and just have fun!
I don’t want to construct a paradigm chart. I want one vouched for by an expert. I’m a beginner.
Nice work Aetos. You have made it very specific, and that’s helpful.
-
small chunks: that’s the way I memorize.
-
master the forms of λύω: that’s my present memorizing project. I use Helma Dik’s table, and work about as you do.
-
contract verbs, et. al.: in a general way I have projected some of this, but I’m glad to see the detailed list and the authority of Eleanor Dickey. I’ve seen some of her presentations and read some of her writing.
Wiktionary has them already constructed for you.
Thanks Ben, I’ll give wiktionary another try when I’m reading at my computer.
Very good verb tables are on Lexigram. It is paid - but it costs only 5 euro per year. It also has an excellent parser, better than Perseus - it finds many more forms.
https://www.lexigram.gr/lex/arch/λύω
A book with tables of koine verbs is here:
https://www.biblicallanguagecenter.com/product/greek-morphology/
It contains 196 verbs, 113 nouns and 35 adjectives.
It is of course helpful and valuable for paveln to post information about options that cost money. But to me it seems weird that anyone would pay money to find out a verb conjugation when wiktionary is free and does an excellent job. These options that cost money also don’t seem to provide any useful way for a person to check them out and see whether they would be useful for their needs.
Perseus is a big and complicated project. It includes a treebank in which human experts have parsed and lemmatized verbs.
When I have an unknown verb form for which I’m having trouble guessing the lemma, I’ve always found U Chicago’s morpho to be fine.
It would be interesting to see any real-world example where the combination of wiktionary plus morpho doesn’t tell us what we want to know for free.
Of course some people might prefer a paper resource, or want it as an option when they’re not in front of a screen.
I agree that the 500 verbs must be classified or explained, otherwise it may be confusing