Customer Reviews

All The Greek Verbs (Greek Language)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I'm not sure some of the other reviewers have really understood the point of this book. If you come across a verbal form you can't recognise, you can look it up in this book and it will tell you what form of the verb it is (i.e. 3 person singular, future tense), as well as the present form of the verb. In other words, it takes out all the difficulty in identifying verbs because you don't have to re-form the present tense in your head - you just look the verb up straight! If you still don't know the verb, then you look it up in a lexicon which will take less than 5 seconds because you already have the present form. Easy!

I don't know what on Earth kept Mr. Marinone going, but you must pay tribute to him for publishing an essential book that takes much of the heartache out of translation. A must if you are embarking on Thucydides / Xenophon etc.

Pointless? I don't think so at all. This is not a lexicon or dictionary and it never pretends to be. This book helps the classical student identify tricky verb forms and it does an excellent job at that.

In Italian, yes. But keep in mind that this book is basically just a long list of verb forms. I don't speak a word of Italian and I can easily understand the abbreviations. The only thing I can't read is the book's brief preface.

An excellent book for any Ancient Greek reader who needs help with verb forms.

An excellent reference for students of Classical Greek that has never been equalled. A word of warning -- it was published in Italy, and the parts of speech are given with Italian abbreviations. Example: "optative" is given the abbreviation "ott" presumably for "ottativo." It shouldn't slow you down once you get used to it.

As an undergraduate in Classical Greek, I bought N. Marinone's ALL THE GREEK VERBS several months ago thinking that it would be an indispensible resource for my studies. It has done little but gather dust for much of the time, but when a verb form was the only thing standing in the way of completing a translation and wasdriving me to madness, the book proved indispensable.

ALL THE GREEK VERBS is a English-language cover around Marinone's Italian-language work "Tutti i verbi graeci." It listens over 13,000 forms alphabetically along with their tense, mood, and person, and their dictionary form. There are also several pages of tables which show the regular endings of -o, -ao, -eo, and the few types of -mi verbs.

Greek doesn't have so many verbs that one would be turning to such a guide very often, but there are several tricky forms which I never tend to remember. Resources like Perseus wordlinks are faster to use and have greater coverage, but require an Internet connection and are hard on one's eyes. I don't often reach a point where I will absolutely need a work like ALL THE GREEK VERBS (I also bought Lidell & Scott's GREEK LEXICON and find it overkill for undergrads), but when I do it's a lifesaver. A vital work for classicists.

This book is basically an alphabetical list of all the common verbs, in all their forms. So if you find, say, a conjugated second aorist and have not the faintest idea what it is in the active you can just look it up and it will tell you that lambda-alpha-beta-omicron-nu is tha second aorist nominative singular participle of lambda-alpha-mu-beta-alpha-nu-omega (sorry, wanted to avoid transliteration confusion).

For a beginning student like myself, such a thing is very helpful.

The famous "tutti-frutti" is the only book that does the job of conjugating all the Attic verbs. If the second aorist drives you crazy, if you can't remember infinitives except for the present and future tense, if you're wearing out Groton's Alpha and Omega, paging around trying to find the conjugations, this book is well worth the money.

As a classics professor, I always recommend that my Greek students buy this book, once they've progressed past the elementary grammar-stage and are actually trying to translate literature (or Scripture). In other words, this book is NOT for the student in the first, or even second, year of college-level Greek, but rather for the folks who are starting to read the unsimplified, original ancient texts. Initially, they usually find it of little use, but that's because they're still trying to figure out verb forms which Marinone has concluded that you should already know. (As a frustrated student once asked me very politely, "So when exactly does this book begin to be helpul?") But after a while, those students who are still plugging away at Greek begin to appreciate its usefulness. When you come across a mystery-verb and you absolutely, positively canNOT figure out what the heck it is, or even what verb it comes from, that's when you turn to this book. Those obscure forms of -mi verbs, the bizarre aorist infinitives, the maddening augmented forms of verbs which ALREADY start with a vowel, these are the instances where this book is a lifesaver. I've been teaching Greek for over ten years and do not hesitate to admit to my students that I can't live without it myself.

In spite of Professor Johnson's advice below, as an ageing student of pre-WWII vintage, I will never reach the stage when I won't need the crutch of Mr Marinone. I have found it very useful over the past few years. Principal parts are gradually learned as they are used, but for me memorisation of many of them (perhaps most?) will never happen. As one who has to keep re-learning even the basic verbs in omega and mi, books like this one will be often picked up as long as I am able to keep going with Greek.

On rare occasions I have not been able to find what I was looking for in the book, but lack of perfection does not spoil its usefulness.

Sadly, the quality of the printed copy is so poor it almost looks mimeographed. This is a very crucial fault, especially for students reading Greek characters with accents etc. Perhaps a used earlier edition would be a better use of funds than spending on this low quality throw away knock off.

This book is a listing of those forms of the Classical Greek verb which students are likely to meet in reading the texts of the Greek canon. When I was an undergraduate (in the 1960's) I was rather severely scolded by my Latin professor for possessing a copy, and for years I was ashamed of myself. His reasoning was this: the student should have memorized the principal parts of the verb by the time s/he was at university. Alas, I was not so learned at the time. Now, as a professor of Classics, I can be smug about not needing Marinone's listing anymore. However, I encourage my undergrads to use it. It saves a huge amount of time; the student otherwise is scrambling through assorted verb-lists and lexica. Marinone is a crutch, however, and let's be frank about it. Know, o undergrads, that eventually you will have to swallow and incarnate all of his verbs if you intend to read Greek with ease and comprehension!