Greek: An Essential Grammar of the Modern Language (review)

David Holton, Peter Mackridge, and Irene Philippaki-Warburton offer a concise description of Greek focusing mainly on the spoken language but also discussing written usages of the language. The authors not only pay attention to the declensional and conjugational patterns, as authors of other grammar books do, but they also extend the discussion to syntactic phenomena. An important aspect of the book is its clarification of points that cause problems for English-speaking learners. The authors present a wide range of appropriate examples that contribute to an understanding of contrasts and comparisons between Greek and English. The value of this book is also seen in the authors’ shift away from some of the traditional terminology, which is no longer meaningful in certain cases (although still used in other reference grammar books), as well as in their introduction of linguistic terms that are well explained and clearly illustrated with examples.

In Ch. 1 (1–13), the authors introduce the Greek alphabet and aspects of pronunciation, stress, and intonation. Ch. 2 (14–18) explores accent, diacritics (diaeresis, apostrophe), and the use of capital and lowercase letters. In Ch. 3, the longest in the book (19–86), the articles, nouns, adjectives, and the noun phrase are discussed in great detail, with attention to gender, number, case, and comparison of adjectives, and their use in noun/adjective phrases. Pronouns, determiners, and quantifiers are presented in Ch. 4 (87–104), and numerals are the topic of Ch. 5 (105–111).

The second longest chapter (Ch. 6, 112–68) discusses verbs and the verb phrase; person, number, aspect, voice, tense and mood features, the augment, subjunctives, and a useful list of irregular verbs are all introduced in a straightforward and accessible way. The authors look at adverbs and the adverbial phrase in Ch. 7 (169–80) and explore prepositions and the prepositional phrase in Ch. 8 (181–92). Ch. 9 (193–202) looks at conjunctions and particles.

The remainder of the book is mainly of a syntactic nature. In Ch. 10 (203–40), the authors discuss main and subordinate clauses as well as a number of syntactic phenomena, including word order, topicalization, reflexives, and reciprocal expressions. The final two chapters examine word formation. Suffixation, prefixation, and compounding are discussed in Ch. 11 (241–47) and conversational features including politeness and familiarity, greetings, and wishes are covered in Ch. 12 (248–57).

The book concludes with two appendices (258–62) on the correspondence between pronouns, determiners, and adverbs and a list of abbreviations commonly used. A glossary of grammatical terms (263–70), a list of recommended books for further study (271–73), and two indices, one of the grammatical categories and concepts (274–77) and the other of Greek words (278–79), are also provided.

As a whole, the book is well organized, coherent, and user-friendly. The material is presented in small sections, which helps make it accessible and useful for beginners up to advanced-level learners, although students unfamiliar with linguistic terminology may find it hard to follow at first. Clearly, this does not, and should not, diminish its value.