JACT Vocabulary Help

This program contains the vocabulary to be learned for the first 19 lessons of Reading Greek, Second Edition, by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers (JACT), Cambridge University Press. Students can use it to help study the vocabulary and to print flashcards; the teacher devising exams or other instruments of torture will find helpful its features of showing what lesson each word was learned in, sorting by lesson, and marking all words learned up to a certain lesson.

Note: During the construction of this vocabulary list I have had before me the third printing (2009) of the second edition of Reading Greek. That edition’s treatment of the vocabulary is disturbingly confused and inconsistent: it often departs from alphabetical order, words listed in the text volume are sometimes omitted from the corresponding learning vocabulary in the grammar volume, and so on. Accordingly, I have had to make some decisions, and I hope these decisions will prove to be for the best.

Some of my conventions differ from those the JACT. Lesson letters are minuscule, e.g. 9f (not 9F). A vocabulary item learned only in the grammar is listed with a capital G (for “grammar”) after the letter of the last lesson to which that grammar section corresponds; thus, for example, 9gG means the grammar vocabulary summarizing 9g and before, i.e. in this case 9f–g. I have not always included case information, and I have not included declension classifications, stems, and principal parts that the student is expected to learn. Macrons are not shown

Arrow buttons navigate among words. You can mark some words using the Mark menu or the checkbox, and then you can hold the Option key and use the arrow buttons to navigate among marked words only.

You can jump to a new section, lesson, or part of speech by clicking on that information. Shift-click to jump backwards. Naturally, this works most helpfully if you have already sorted on that category.

Use the Hide/Show Translation button (keyboard shortcut: Command-T) to toggle display of the English translation. Students can use this feature to test themselves on vocabulary memorization.

Use the Sort and Mark menus to sort and/or mark the cards so you can conveniently navigate amongst the ones you want. Also, use marking of cards to get ready to print. Marking cards does not unmark what is marked already; use Unmark All for that. The Default sort (used at startup) is by lesson, subsorted by section, subsorted alphabetically — basically, the order of the Text and Vocabulary volume. Applying another sort order (Alphabetically, By Part of Speech, and By Lesson) keeps the existing sort as a subsort; to avoid that behavior, choose Unsort first.

You can print marked words either as a list or as flashcards for offline study.

Greek on the Screen

Mac OS X text is Unicode, so the codes for Ancient Greek characters are well defined and no special font is required. Characters may come from any font that contains them, such as Lucida Grande and Times which are present on the computer. Nonetheless, a font can portray a character poorly, especially on the screen. For Ancient Greek, this particularly affects characters involving diacritical marks. Times, for example, which looks very good in print, draws a rough breathing combined with an acute in a way that’s hard to see on the screen.

I’ve ranked some fonts for how clearly they display diacritical marks on the screen, and this ranking is obeyed by JACTVocab. Thus, if you have the first of these fonts installed, JACTVocab will use it; otherwise, if you have the second, JACTVocab will use it; and so on:

To use one of these fonts if you don’t have it, download it, put it in your ~/Library/Fonts folder, restart your computer, and start up JACTVocab. JACTVocab will see the font and use it.

This program is based on my JACT Vocabulary HyperCard stack, whose origins go back to 1991. It was then ported to a Mac OS X-native application (matching the first edition of the JACT; that version of the program is still available). The present version has been rewritten to match the 2nd edition of the JACT; it requires Leopard (and looks best on Snow Leopard). This program is free for all. Share and enjoy. Comments and questions to the author, Matt Neuburg, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/.