A Leviathon of a reference book.
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I should be surprised were someone to learn the Greek language from scratch using only this book as their grammar tutorial. It is simply too detailed for this purpose.
In conjunction with a smaller, more user-friendly grammar, however, it shines. Once you've learned the basics of a subject, you can use this to supplement and increase your efficacy in the chosen subject. For example, pages 313 to 337 detail the various uses of the genitive case, including possession, partitive, quality, explanation, cause and crime & accountability.
Smyth provides a hefty amount of accidence, although the cases follow Nom, Gen, Dat, Acc, Voc rather than the N V A G D that I would normally expect to encounter. The dual is explicitly catered for, instead of the passing footnotes many of the modern text books seem to espouse.
In summary, I should not recommend buying this book first. Invest in a smaller grammar and familiarise yourself with it before obtaining this weighty tome.
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When in doubt, I ask myself 'What would Smyth do?'
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Not particularly user-friendly, but contains the answer to every possible question on Greek grammar - and with the aid of the index it's fairly easy to track down the information you need. Possibly a bit daunting for beginners, but invaluable for improvers.
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exhaustive if slightly old-fashioned Greek grammar
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Smyth's Greek Grammar is the standard handbook of Greek Grammar. It was first published in 1918 and can seem slightly old-fashioned, but it is easy to use and has sections on every phenomenon found in the Greek: declensions, verbs, cases, syntax, clauses, morphology etc.etc. Moreover, there is a useful section with figures of speech, lists of verbs, and, of course, numerous examples drawn from Classical writers.
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