Why a section on English grammar?

The aim of this textbook is to help you learn Greek, not English. You already know English perfectly well and are already using English grammar all the time. However, many readers will be using English grammar implicitly, without realising it, because many people today learn English without any focus on formal grammar. Whether this matters or not is a moot point and not an argument to be gone into here. However, it can be unfortunate when you start to learn a foreign language, particularly a language like Greek whose structure and grammar are actually very similar to English. Often Greek grammar is best explained by reference to English. For example, Greek sentences have subjects and objects just as English does. If you already understand what a subject and an object is (from English), then all you need to learn about Greek is that the subject is put in the nominative case and the object in the accusative case. This explanation does not work, though, if you have never met the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ before. In these situations it can be helpful first to understand what ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are in English, and then to learn how they are pressed in Greek. This is why there is a section on English grammar in a Greek textbook.

When I was approached by Cambridge University Press and asked if I would be interested in writing a revision of my late father's The Elements of New Testament Greek, I was grateful for the invitation, but I declined. I am someone who uses Greek in my work, but I have not taught beginners' Greek very much at all. My father's book came out of practical classroom teaching, and any effective revision would have to be done by a teacher.

Dr Jeremy Duff is such a teacher, and a very effective one. When he began teaching Greek at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, what is often an unpopular subject suddenly started to go down very well. Students actually enjoyed Greek! So it occurred to me that Jeremy would be a worthy reviser of the Elements. I was very glad that Cambridge University Press, having been put in touch with Jeremy, agreed that he should be given the task of revising the book.

In fact what has come out is much more than a revision. It is in almost all respects a brand new book, though arising out ofWenham. There is an excellent precedent for such a revision, because my father's work was a similarly radical revision of H.P.V. Nunn's earlier book.

My pleasure in writing this foreword is twofold. First, Jeremy is a friend and a colleague of mine at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford; he is someone who has brought energy and interest to the college, and not just to the teaching of Greek.

THE LETTERS OF THE GREEK ALPHABET

The first task in learning Greek is to learn the alphabet, which consists of twenty-four letters. Many are similar to English ones, and you may already be familiar with some others (for example, pi π and theta θ from mathematics). Learning the alphabet has three parts.

Learning how to write each of the Greek letters

In Greek, just as in English, different people will have different styles of handwriting. Also, printed Greek often looks a little different from handwritten Greek. That is fine – the aim is not to win prizes for the artistic quality of your lettering.What matters is for the different letters to be clearly distinguished from each other. In practice, you will probably copy the style of your teacher.

Learning which sounds the different Greek letters make

Greek has been spoken for over three thousand years, and in many different dialects. This means that there is no single right way to pronounce Greek.What matters is to make each letter have its own distinctive sound. It is also useful if your pronunciation is similar to that of other biblical scholars (and your teacher and classmates) so you can understand each other.

You may wonder why pronouncing the letters is important at all, since your desire is to read Greek, not speak it.

Students are the ones who matter. Students, and more generally all those wishing to learn, are the only reason for teachers and academic books to exist. For ninety years those wishing to learn to read the New Testament in Greek have been ably served by The Elements of New Testament Greek published by Cambridge University Press. First, in the book of that name by H.P.V. Nunn published in 1914, and then in its 1965 replacement by J.W. Wenham. So successful was John Wenham's book that for much of its forty-year history it has been the standard first-year Greek course not only in the UK but across large parts of the English-speaking world. For generations of students, ‘Wenham’ was synonymous with Greek.

Wenham's success was that he cared about students and did everything possible to make learning ‘the elements’ of New Testament Greek as simple and painless as possible. The most striking example of this was his handling of Greek accents. The scholarly tradition behind the use of accents went back many centuries, though not, as Wenham was keen to point out, back to the time of the New Testament itself. Nevertheless Wenham dispensed with accents. Or at least he dispensed with most of them – keeping only the few cases where they were useful to the student in distinguishing between otherwise identical words. Even today many scholars and teachers find this regrettable, if not even scandalous. I have never met a student, though, who shares that opinion.

In the preceding chapter, we focused on the form of sentences – whether the words are in the right order, whether any parts are missing, whether the right pronoun is used, and so on. But that's only half the story, at best. We also need to think about how sentences convey meaning.

We'll begin by looking at children's early one-word and two-word utterances to see what types of meanings they express and what they tell us about children's early linguistic abilities. We'll then move on to consider a series of more advanced constructions, each of which provides valuable clues about children's emerging abilities to understand and to communicate.

What a word can do

From the day they say their first word, children are amazingly good at finding ways to express themselves and at interpreting what adults say to them. Children's first utterances usually consist of just a single word, but it's often used to express a sentence-like meaning.

A child who points to her father and excitedly says “Dada, Dada!” is doing more than naming the person who just entered the room – she's trying to express the meaning “Here's Daddy.” And a child who looks at her mother's gloves and says “Mama” is not confusing the gloves with her mother – she's trying to say something like “Those are Mommy's gloves.”

Single-word utterances are often called holophrases (literally “whole sentences”).