Amy Pistone
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  • Home
    • Curriculum Vitae
  • Teaching Portfolio
    • Teaching Philosophy
    • Syllabi
    • Student Evaluations
    • Reflections on Student Evaluations
  • Workshops
    • 2019 SCS Workshop, Centering the Margins: Creating Inclusive Syllabi
    • Digital Pedagogies Lightning Talks and Workshop
    • Teaching Classics with Technological Tools: A Workshop
    • Digital Media Pedagogy Workshops
  • Other Projects
    • Engaged Pedagogy Initiative (EPI)
    • Blogs and Other Writing on Teaching
    • Digital Media Projects
  • Blogs!

Trimming down Greek Vocab

July 17, 2019

Inspired by discussion around this tweet from the FIEC conference, I wanted to share a few vocab-prioritizing tools I’ve used, since I think there’s a real market for them!

Why did no one ever share this with me when I was learning #Ancient #Greek? The 65 words which, according to Nick Lowe ⁦@RoyalHolloway⁩, constitute the 50% most commonly occurring words. Magical. ⁦@Hellenic_Soc⁩ ⁦@Fieca2019⁩ #FIECCA2019 ⁦@Classical_Assoc⁩ pic.twitter.com/J6UxkwsyU5

— Dr Arlene H-H (@DrArleneHH) July 6, 2019

#1: Rachael Clark, The 80% Rule: Greek Vocabulary In Popular Textbooks

I love this article. It’s been incredibly useful for me when trying to prioritize vocab for students in a textbook. Clark goes through Wilfred Major’s “It’s Not the Size, It’s the Frequency: The Value of Using a Core Vocabulary in Beginning and Intermediate Greek,” which includes a list of the words that make up 80% of the Greek database in the Perseus Project. Major’s list is already a super useful tool, but what Clark does is go through popular textbooks and include which chapters introduce which words. It’s not perfect (there are some words that are duplicated) but it’s an amazing resource that can save teachers (and students!) a lot of time. Clark goes through From Alpha to Omega and Athenaze, and provides a list of the top 50% and 80% of vocab. Highly recommend if you’re using either of these textbooks!

#2: The Bridge from Haverford

Oh man, I just learned about this on Twitter and it’s great! As noted here, the Bridge is magic! You can generate lists based on all sorts of texts (including and excluding things) and I am very excited to use it going forward!

#3: The Dickinson College Commentary (DCC) Greek Core Vocabulary database

This resource (which I think is the good work of Christopher Francese, though I’m not sure if others have been contributing too) isn’t paired with textbooks, but this is a really great database that you can use to sort by parts of speech and topic. PLUS, you can export it to an Excel file, and sort by different things, which can sometimes be a real help in compiling targeted vocab lists for students.

#4: Perseus Weighted Frequency Lists

If you’re looking at a text (or a portion of it) in Perseus, you can click on the “Vocabulary Tool” link on the right and it will give you a list of words but then you can click on the “Study all vocabulary in this passage” link and it will open out into a more elaborate vocab page.

Here’s an example from Herodotus Book 1 — you can refine your search by all kinds of parameters, and then you can export the words into a file that you can use to format and sort and give to students!

The downside here is that this only works for texts that are in Perseus, which means that the more common texts are here, but if you’re reading a more obscure text, you’re probably out of luck.

#5: Logeion Frequency and Textbook list

This excellent vocabulary tool provides frequency lists and references to a range of popular textbooks, so students and teachers can see where a word is first introduced!

In the right sidebar, you can see these cool tools!

#6: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) Vocab Tools

I linked to the PDF of instructions about the TLG vocab tools, because access to TLG tools is going to vary depending on what sort of institutional access you have. If you don’t have institutional access, you still have access to a limited amount of the TLG (an abridged canon), but there will be texts you can’t access. If you do have full access though, the real perk of the TLG is that you can get stats and things for any text, not just the ones that exist in Perseus!

Full disclosure, if you haven’t used the TLG before, it can be a bit overwhelming. But it’s an incredibly useful tool and worth the time to learn how to navigate it.

And more!

Several people recommended Malcolm Campbell’s Classical Greek Prose: A Basic Vocabulary

Plus principal parts!

Regular dictionaries and lexica (LSJ, for example) don’t give you a nice, handy list of principal parts. If you’ve ever tried to wade through a lexicon entry to find the 6th principal part of a verb, you know there really needs to be a better way. You can hope it’s in your Greek textbook, but if not, ugh.

  • Logeion is generally the best spot for principal parts. Definitely my first stop!
  • I stumbled on this resource (Die Stammfomen der griechischen Verben) by Dr. Gottwein which is really helpful and exhaustive, AND the definitions are in German, so you can practice your German at the same time! Or just snag the principal parts you need.
  • Also, here’s an online and fairly exhaustive list from Donald Mastronarde.
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