[baruz]

Not modern. Outsiders coming into the language (even for modern Greeks—the diglossia TFA mentions between spoken and written language in English existed for 1500+ years in Greek) find particles difficult to grasp, and the dictionary definitions do not really convey all the senses that the particles mean, like mathematics teaches from natural definitions of numbers progressing to Dedekind cuts. You know _Portuguese irregular verbs_, by Alexander McCall Smith, the comic novel where Dr. Professor von Igelfeld rests his reputation on a magisterial volume on the (strangely enough) Portuguese irregular verbs? Denniston’s _The Greek particles_ ultimately spans almost 700 pages after posthumous revisions (1960?). Page after page on individual particles. I think TFA satirizes that drive to squeeze every bit of meaning from the particles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewar_Denniston

[dash2]

Thank you. For future readers, here is the great opus itself.

https://archive.org/details/john-d.-denniston-the-greek-part...