Early in Thomas Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, published in 1896, the title character catches a glimpse of the great university city Christminster (which, in Hardy’s fictional world, corresponds to Oxford) and is consumed by the desire to become a scholar. Upon discovering that he will have to learn Greek and Latin to do so, Jude orders some textbooks for the classical languages and prepares to decipher them. Hardy tells the reader:

Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable sort of process that was involved...

When you ask why one should study Greek or Latin, you may be thinking that the only reason you are doing so is because you have to. If this is the case, then you should remember that the reason someone is making you study the language is because that someone is convinced that there is some purpose in learning it. Why, then, should one learn a “dead” language like Latin or Greek? When we ask this question, we should immediately recognize that, unlike many other ancient languages, Greek and Latin are not dead in the sense of having vanished from...

During one of my creative writing classes in college, the professor started a discussion with the question, “What do writers want?” After the surprised students fumbled around a bit, the professor answered her own question by stating, “They want to be read.” Indeed, at the most basic level, this is what communicators want: writers want people to read their works; speakers want people to listen to them. The reason for that desire, more often than not, is that the writers and speakers believe they have something to say that other people should want to read or hear. In other words,...

The previous chapter introduced the distinction between analytic and synthetic languages—that is, between languages that use word order and helping words to show how the main words are related, and languages that use changes in the forms of the words to convey those relations. English is a highly analytic language; it relies more heavily on word order and less on inflection (differences in forms) than any other modern European language. As we begin trying to grasp how an inflected language like Greek or Latin shows the relations between words, we need to introduce the idea of cases, and I...

In the previous chapter we saw that when a noun changes form (in the classical languages, it adds different suffixes or endings) to assume different cases, grammarians say that the noun is “declined.” In Greek and Latin, nouns are not the only words that decline. Pronouns assume different cases, as well (which should not be too surprising, since pronouns are the only words in English that still exhibit different case forms), and so do adjectives. Furthermore, in Greek the article (equivalent to “the” in English) assumes different cases, as well. (Latin does not have an article.) The fact that all...

My twelfth-grade English teacher was fond of telling her students that the strength of the English language lies in its verbs, and so great writing is built on the use of strong verbs, whereas poorer writing neglects its verbs and relies on piles of adjectives and adverbs to convey meaning and force. This is certainly true in English, but it is also true in any other Indo-European language. Verbs carry the weight when it comes to communicating; they drive the message that the sentence is trying to convey. If nouns formed the starting point for the grammatical part of this...

In the previous chapter, we considered five major questions that verbs answer about the event (action or state) that the clause or sentence describes. From these five questions, we eventually arrived at the grammatical categories of voice, person, number, mood, and tense.¹ Of these five, the ones that are most complicated, and the ones on which Latin and Greek diverge the most from English, are tense and mood. Accordingly, in this chapter I will examine these categories in some detail.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, “tense” is not a synonym for time. Rather it is a technical term...

By now it should be clear that Greek and Latin verbs present challenges to English speakers in several ways. First, it is a challenge to recognize the verb forms, since they are marked by changes within the word, rather than by the addition of helping verbs as in English. Second, it is a challenge to understand the time and aspect indicated by different Greek and Latin tenses, since these do not line up very closely with English verb tenses. Third, it is a challenge to recognize the uses of the subjunctive mood (and, in the case of Greek, the optative),...

Even if one is working in a highly inflected language such as Greek or Latin, sentences that express only a single thought are relatively simple. Once one learns the vocabulary words, the case endings, and the indicative verb forms, such sentences are not at all difficult to translate. The complexity comes when Greek or Latin authors combine multiple phrases and clauses, creating long sentences (often much longer than we would be allowed to use in English today) in which students often get quite lost. In this part of the book, I hope to give you some guidance as you develop...

This book has repeatedly proceeded from function to form, but as you learn Greek or Latin you will find that your book is probably arranged on the basis of the forms you have to learn. Of course, arranging textbooks in order of forms is perfectly logical, and one might argue that there is no other way to do it. Greek and Latin have a very large number of forms, many of which you have to be able to recognize in order to read those languages well. As I have mentioned at various points in this book, the fact that I...