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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Useful in some areas, but not the best for your money., December 24, 2001
This is not the grammar one should first reach for in most areas. Daniel Wallace's grammars hold pride of place out of those that are most current. When one compares this grammar to those, there are reasons why this should not be preferred over Wallace.1) Young has an interesting, and odd, tendency to list only the English translation of passages that aremeant as a Greek grammatical example. thus one has to find the passage to see if his usage is accurate. 2) He changes terminology from that which is commonly used by other scholars. thus one has to get used to his own (idiosyncratic) usages and then compare them against the "normal" usages. 3) He often included exegetically debated texts as his prooftexts for particular usages, and then does not say that they are debatable. All of these devalue the usage of this grammar. Also he follows speech act theory very closely. which means he not only sees the aorist as not having a time aspect, but rarely sees time aspect mattering in tense at all. However, one should consider the fact that an author in any language can use a verb in an alternate tense to make it more vivid or to bring about a point. This does not invalidate a rule, because one has to know the normal usage to expect the abnormal one. Where this grammar is most useful is in preposition and conjunction usages. His compiled lists of common usages for conjunctions and prepositions save frequent trips to the lexicon. They also represent the one area of clear superiority over even Wallace's "Beyond the Basics."
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