Re: EKAQEUDEN: Is Perseus wrong?

David L. Moore (dvdmoore@ix.netcom.com)
Sat, 11 Jan 1997 14:50:23 -0500

At 02:06 PM 1/11/97 -0500, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>When the storm hit, Jonah went down into the ship, KAI EKAQUEDEN KAI
>ERREGXEN (Jonah 1:5). I didn't recognize EKAQEUDEN, so I ran it through the
>Perseus morphological parser, and Perseus told me this:
>
> ekatheuden, imperf ind act 3rd sg, nu_movable root_preverb
>
>Nu-movable root-preverb? I clicked on the LSJ entry, and it told me that
>this was made up of two words:
>
> Preverb: KATA
> Dictionary entry: KAQEUDW
>
>Call me blind, but I don't see a trace of KATA in EKAQUEDEN. To me, this
>looks like an imperfect form of KAQEUDW, without any nu-movable
>root-preverb, and I'd guess that Jonah went to his cabin, lay down, and
>balled his eyes out (snorting like a horse).
>
>Am I missing something here? How reliable is the morphological parser for
>Perseus? Does anybody know how it works?

I think a more likely translation would be "lay down to sleep and
began to snore." Probably the "nu-movable" refers to the nu at the end of
EKAQEUDEN which also may be written EKAQEUDE. I'll leave the matter of the
preverb of KAQEUDW to those who have specialized in morphology, although
I'll observe that the theta may substitute for the tau in varying
pronunciations and spellings of some words.

Oh, BTW, you mean "bawled," not "balled," don't you. :-)

Regards,
David Moore

David L. Moore Director
Miami, Florida, USA Department of Education
dvdmoore@ix.netcom.com Southeastern Spanish District
http://members.aol.com/dvdmoore of the Assemblies of God