In an earlier post I bemoaned the lack of a fully digitized school grammar of ancient Greek, and kvetched that the existing Greek grammars digitized at Perseus lack something important, namely, the English index to those works. The index is how most of us consult Greek grammars, and this lack, combined with an occasionally dodgy search capability in Smyth apud Perseus, made it seem desirable to fully digitize a good Greek grammar, including the index. We chose one that is I suspect much better for learners than Smyth, and now I am proud to say that it is done and up.
May I present to you Thomas Dwight Goodell, A School Grammar of Attic Greek (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1902). Goodell’s orientation is nicely seen in the dedication of the book:
The content, with its judicious selection of detail and clear explanations, shows the dedication of a gifted teacher.
The original scan came from the Internet Archive. Our version was created in 2013–2014 with support from the Roberts Fund for Classical Studies and the Mellon Fund for Digital Humanities at Dickinson College. Bruce Robertson of Mont Allison University performed the OCR using Rigaudon, the output of which is available on Lace. At Dickinson the OCR output was edited and the XML and HTML pages created by Christina Errico. Ryan Burke created the web interface, and Meagan Ayer edited and corrected the HTML pages. The content is freely available for re-use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
I hope you can find some use in it. Each section is given its own page, which results in widely different lengths of pages, and also sometimes some inconvenience when a single topic is covered over many chapters. On the other hand, we included page images at the foot of every page to allow you to look over several chapters at once, and also to check the accuracy of the transcription. The pages are also available as XML.
Page images are available as clickable thumbnails at the foot of the page, and there is a link to an XML version.
Navigation is via the English or Greek index, by chapter, or by full text search.
Various means of navigation and search
Megan Ayer made a few alterations to the original text. She corrected small typos, clarified abbreviations, and created tables in html with unobtrusive color coding to aid in readability.
Shading aids readability of tables.
Another nice feature is the verb list, a quite extensive list of principle parts, with hyper links to further discussion elsewhere in the book. The font, New Athena, was likewise chosen for readability. Normally we would have used Cardo, but the issue with the character “rho + rough breathing” in Cardo has still not been resolved.
Verb list with principle parts and links to further discussion
We made the decision not to put this content into Drupal, essentially for reasons of cost. I see the desirability of a Drupal-based Greek grammar, and someday we may be able to achieve it, but for now it is straight html.
Though the content has been carefully edited, there may be errors or infelicities, and I would be most grateful to be notified. Please comment here if you have suggestions, or shoot me an email.
