Hi all,
Just curious, is anyone here using the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (CGCG) for personal or instructional learning of ancient Greek? I’ve been using it now for almost a year, I read through it once quickly and am now slowly plodding through it more carefully. Would be interested if those who have been using it could share their thoughts about its strengths, weaknesses, insights they’ve learned from it, etc.
Thanks!
It’s my go-to grammar book and I really like it. I think it does a good job of including up-to-date terminology while remaining easy to use for those (most of us, I think) who learned in more old-school fashion (‘strong aorists’ and the like). Generally speaking I find the explanations clear and the examples to be well chosen. One particularly good section in my view is the one on historical sound changes, because the authors do a great job of explaining how apparent irregularities in morphology got there. Another is the section on word order, because it actually gives a framework for understanding why the words might be ordered as they are, rather than the vague ‘for emphasis’ explanation I’ve come across elsewhere.
With that said, there are some areas for improvement. The one that is hardest for me to understand, is the authors’ decision not to consistently mark the length of the vowels α υ and ι. When they do choose to mark it, I find myself having to squint to see whether it’s supposed to be the macron or the short symbol. Very irritating, and entirely avoidable.
I also find some of their explanations to be just a bit too terse, and that an extra sentence or two could have clarified things. Maybe this is normal style in Dutch.
An example is their treatment of δεῖ - in one chapter we are told that it’s a ‘quasi-impersonal’ verb that takes an (accusative and) infinitive construction as its subject; elsewhere, they say it’s a modal verb which takes an infinitive as its ‘complement’. Is there any difference, or are these just two ways of interpreting the same thing? They don’t say, as far as I can tell.
In the pronunciation section, I don’t see why they put ει and ου under diphthongs if they think they were pronounced [e:] and [o:]. Also, their ‘approximations’ are quite misleading sometimes. To take the same examples, they say ει had the sound of ‘made’, and earlier ‘eight’… but these are the same vowel sounds. And ου was apparently like ‘mode’, but earlier like ‘low’… again, the same vowel sounds.
@bedwere - Thanks. I’ve already seen that old thread. But now that CGCG has been out for a while, I wanted to harvest the impressions of those who have been using it for several years, either as learners or for instructing others.
@MattK - Thanks Matt. My impressions are similar. After completing a refresher course in NT Greek, I started looking for an intermediate grammar that could take me futher. My choices came down to Smyth or CGCG, and I decided to make the leap by choosing CGCG because I think learning Attic/Ionic will help me understand Koine more broadly. And because I don’t want get left behind with regard to contemporary scholarship.
And I’m very glad I decided on CGCG as my nextstep grammar, because the first chapter on phonology has (after re-reading portions of it many times) opened the doors of perception for me as far as ancient Greek morphology is concerned! Instead of having to memorize dozens of big tables of endings for different declensions and types of nouns and of different tenses, voices and moods of verbs, I now only need to memorize the small table of endings for nominal forms found in section 2.4 and the small tables of endings for verb forms found in sections 11.20-34. Then I just add to that the (several dozen) sound change laws explained in chapter 1 and you then have probably 98% of all nominal/verbal morphology nailed down for Classical Greek. (The other 2% is mostly the morphological differences in Ionic.)
My only other observation concerningCGCG is that it’s not a textbook in the traditional sense of having a series of progressive lessons building upon one another with each chapter having learning objectives, review summaries, practice exercises etc. Instead it’s a grammar that explores different aspects of Classical Greek in depth, but in a well-rganized fashion. So it’s definitely not suited to learners who want to be led by handholding in learning the subject. You have to be really commimted to dig deeply into it, jump around, review previous sections you’ve read (hooray for the multitude of cross references in CGCG!) and ask questions of those more knowledgable when you get stuck (thank you Professor Boas for responding to my inquiries!) if you want to get the most out of CGCG. Unless of course you’ve already learned Classical Greek by working through old-school grammars like Smyth’s, which is probably where you’re coming from, right? 
it is of course an amazing resource, but only Smyth will give you Homeric and Herodotitic (?) forms of irregular μι verbs in a handy reference in the same section.
Hi Dante,
Thanks for that, I’ll keep it in mind if the time ever comes when I want to get Herodotisized 
I’m going to get on it soon. I’ve also read 1600 pages of the Cambridge Grammar of the English language and have a database built to prove it, so the 800 Cambridge Grammar of Greek should be a piece of cake. I love grammar books, but at the same time, I’m a little bit wiser about grammar books nowadays. I divide grammar into two sections. 15% of the rules are used 85% of the time, 85% of the rules are used 15% of the time. So I learn the first 15% of the rules first, and I saw the other 85% for later.