Using Morphophonology in Elementary Ancient Greek

Most elementary ancient Greek textbooks do not employ much in the way of linguistic theory or practice in the presentation of the Greek grammatical system. This is unfortunate because insights made by linguists can be pedagogically beneficial to classics students, particularly when it comes to understanding changes affecting stems in inflectional morphology. In this paper one particularly venerable analytic procedure is discussed, namely, morphophonemic analysis, a form of analysis that has been part of the arsenal of linguistic methodology since Hermann Grassmann's publication on aspirated consonants in Sanskrit and Greek in 1863. The paper also provides illustrative examples of ways in which this method of analysis can be profitably employed in the classroom as a tool for exploring the structure of Greek noun and verb paradigms.