The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek

Book Preface

Conception and Development

Readers picking up this hefty tome may be surprised to learn that the first C of CGCG (as we like to call it) once stood for Concise. The syntax part of that Concise Grammar of Classical Greek began, as so many grammar books no doubt have, as lecture handouts – to be precise, as EvEB’s handouts used in first-year Greek syntax classes at the University of Oxford. The work grew from a dissatisfaction with existing teaching materials in English: the main concern was that those materials did not reflect decades’ worth of advances in the linguistic description of Ancient Greek, inspired by the incorporation of insights from various areas of general linguistics. The last good full-scale reference grammar in English, Smyth’s Greek Grammar, for all its excellence, stemmed from a time long before such advances had even been possible, and more recent grammar books had done nothing to bridge the gap. The truth was that no book existed that represented the current state of knowledge on the Greek language. There were other problems, too: Smyth was often perceived by undergraduates as daunting and dense, but alternatives were typically too limited in their coverage; examples used in existing grammars were not always representative, and based on antiquated text editions; terminology was confusing and outmoded; and so forth.
The lecture handouts began to look more like a book when EvEB was joined by AR in revising the material and producing additional chapters. LH, who had also been teaching at Oxford and who had run into similar difficulties with existing materials, then joined, and he and EvEB wrote the first version of the section on textual coherence – a particular desideratum in view of the advances in linguistics mentioned above.

Late in 2009, at the instigation of Juliane Kerkhecker, Grocyn Lecturer at Oxford, the material was sent, in the state that it had now attained (still without a morphology), to Cambridge University Press – not so much as a full-fledged book proposal (in the minds of the authors, at least: without the morphology the work could not yet lay full claim to its first G), but as an opening gambit. To our delight, the Press took the submission very seriously, and engaged a large number of readers to judge the work. This led to a contract, and a change of title to Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek.
A very great deal of labour, however, was still to be done at this point. Over the next few years – with many delays as the result of other obligations – we drafted the phonology and morphology chapters, and overhauled the existing parts to take into account the readers’ reports ( which had been gratifyingly favourable and detailed). It is in this period that MdB, former Grocyn Lecturer at Oxford, who had himself been planning a similar effort, joined the writing team.
The revised work, which had grown considerably due to addition of the pho­nology/morphology and further additions requested by our readers, was resub­mitted to the Press in the final months of 2013, and another full set of readers’ reports on the complete text followed in the subsequent year. These reports were once again very helpful and detailed, eliciting not only a final round of revision, but also a complete overhaul of the numbering system used for our sections. These changes were completed early in 2015; this was followed by a lengthy and complex production process (in our Bibliography, we have not systematically added refer­ences to works from 2016 or later).
The end product is in every way the result of a joint effort: although individual authors wrote first drafts of particular chapters, or took the initiative in revising chapters or sections, we discussed every page of the book as a group, and all four of us have reflected extensively on the entire work. Each of us is happy to share responsibility for the whole.

Target Audience and Scope

Our particular hope is that university students (at all levels) and teachers will profit from CGCG. Professional scholars whose main area of expertise is not Greek linguis­tics may also benefit from our presentation, particularly where it concerns areas which are less often covered in traditional grammars (word order is a prime example), but also more generally because of the manner in which we have tried to reflect current thinking in the field ( on such issues as verbal aspect, the use of tenses, voice, the representation of reported discourse, complement constructions, particles, etc.).
CGCG’s coverage is such, we suggest, that it could be used in the context of undergraduate and graduate language courses, and that a commentary on a classical text geared primarily to a student audience could refer to it for most grammatical features, except those so rare that they deserve fuller discussion anyway. Still, there are many subjects about which we might have said much more, and some about which we have said almost nothing at all (syllable structure, the interjections, and forms of address spring to mind here). Other expansions, such as a section on metre and/or prose rhythm, or the kind of stylistic glossary often found in grammars, were never seriously considered: to our mind, readers are much better served on these issues by specialized resources.

On the point of coverage, a few words must also be said about the second C and G of our title. There was a temptation (and a desire among a minority of our readers) to increase the diachronic and dialectological scope of the work to cover Homer, archaic lyric, the Koine, etc.; we also would have loved to say more about the Greek of inscriptions. However, as any such move would have drastically increased the size and complexity of the book (and accordingly decreased its accessibility), we decided to limit our purview to classical Greek. Again, such omissions seemed all the more feasible given the availability of specialized resources on the dialects, Homeric grammar, etc. Since Herodotus and the dra­matists fall clearly under the heading of classical Greek, we did include a chapter on Ionic prose and some dialectal features of drama (particularly the ‘Doric’ alpha).