Splitting Compound Verbs?

Alan Bunning
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Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis

Post by Alan Bunning »

While I am still on the topic, here is an interesting tidbit I discovered today. Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis (05) has a unique characteristic among manuscripts where lines always break on word boundaries (with only a few exceptions). While this is 5th century, I thought I would take a look at it anyway and see what it did with prepositional prefixes. Surprisingly, in several cases it puts in a line break after the preposition, presumably indicating that they are separate words.

Luke 1:1 ανα/ταξασθαι, Luke 6:1 δια/πορευεσθαι, Luke 6:38 αντι/μετρηθησεται, Luke 7:6 εισ/ελθησ, Luke 7:20 προσ/δοκωμεν, Luke 8:16 εισ/πορευομενοι, Luke 10:35 προσ/δαπανησεισ, Luke 22:10 εισ/πορευετε

The prepositional prefixes are not divided like this for any compound nouns or any other compound words, but only for these compound verbs. Notice also that this only occurs in Luke for some reason (perhaps the scribe was having a bad day?) Another wonderful topic for someone to publish a paper on someday!

P99 had pretty much settled the matter for me that compound verbs were treated as a single word by the 4th/5th century, and now I find this. Is there anything special about those words? Maybe for just certain kinds of verbs? Maybe they are attached, but only loosely attached? It is things like this that make we wonder if we really have the full picture.
Stephen Hughes
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Re: Towards defensibility of your ideas

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Alan Bunning wrote:I have no such needs and there is nothing here I am looking to publish.
I mean the collation of manuscripts.
I can’t seem to get across that I am not wanting to do any work here. I have merely made some observations about the language and would just like some explanations as to why doing such a thing would be invalid. Apparently, playing the devil’s advocate here, means you are the devil!
Not splitting senteces or even paragraph could be argued as being the most valid. The grooming that you have already done, in fact, is an alteration / simplification of the evidence to conform to the standards of mediaeval (Byzantine) scholarship. You have become part of the process of manuscript transmission, redoing / replying the same standards / conventions to uncial manuscript's, as Byzantine scribes did when they first copied uncial to miniscule.

Even now, modern standard Chinese is still written without spaces, without the accents marked, and with no (or inadequate) indication of pronunciation. The people who that doesn't worry are the people who know the language well. Kindergarten texts and those prepared foreign learners have extra things added on the paper ti make reading possible. Analogously, you are catering in your presentation for users with varying degrees of illiteracy.

The person making the suggestion to split verbs, and the person bringing the suggestion to the forum are one and the same. There has been nothing particularly curt, trite or ad homogeneous about this thread. Both you and your ideas have been addressed with respect and dignity. Personally, I almost exclusively use and quote one or other form of the Byzantine text, but have extended the courtesy to help you explore your other text types. Others have made adjustments from their usually positions to answer your specifically issues.

The volume of replies you have received is an indication of the willingness and ability of people to engage with your idea(s).
As I pointed out, I have had these nagging questions for 14 years ... if there is any merit for why words should be divided differently, I would like to know that now. For once I add parsings to all of those texts (which I plan to do this summer), it would be a monumental mess to have to change later.
Byzantine scholarship changed the text written for speakers if their own language (uncial), to a text layout suitable for Greek speakers (with little education) who spoke a form if the language that had evolved by almost a millennium. Correct and fluent public reading were probably the difficulties faced / aims to be achieved.

The situation that we have now with New Testament readers, is a majority of users, who are not Greek speakers at all. The textual layout needs will of course be different. If what you are proposing were done well and inconspicuously it could be of benefit.

Physically altering the text to the extent that you are proposing is probably too radical. Of course speakers needed to be able to "guess" the meaning of newly encountered words based on both elements and context. A small dot between constituent elements is probably adequate.

But the point remains that you need to present according to a standard, or to formulate a new standard and preface your work with it.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Stephen Hughes
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Re: Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Alan Bunning wrote:While I am still on the topic, here is an interesting tidbit I discovered today. Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis (05) has a unique characteristic among manuscripts where lines always break on word boundaries (with only a few exceptions). While this is 5th century, I thought I would take a look at it anyway and see what it did with prepositional prefixes. Surprisingly, in several cases it puts in a line break after the preposition, presumably indicating that they are separate words.

Luke 1:1 ανα/ταξασθαι, Luke 6:1 δια/πορευεσθαι, Luke 6:38 αντι/μετρηθησεται, Luke 7:6 εισ/ελθησ, Luke 7:20 προσ/δοκωμεν, Luke 8:16 εισ/πορευομενοι, Luke 10:35 προσ/δαπανησεισ, Luke 22:10 εισ/πορευετε

The prepositional prefixes are not divided like this for any compound nouns or any other compound words, but only for these compound verbs. Notice also that this only occurs in Luke for some reason (perhaps the scribe was having a bad day?) Another wonderful topic for someone to publish a paper on someday!

P99 had pretty much settled the matter for me that compound verbs were treated as a single word by the 4th/5th century, and now I find this. Is there anything special about those words? Maybe for just certain kinds of verbs? Maybe they are attached, but only loosely attached? It is things like this that make we wonder if we really have the full picture.
Are there diacritical marks elsewhere in the manuscript that could now be interpreted as marking divisions?
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Alan Bunning
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Re: Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis

Post by Alan Bunning »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
Alan Bunning wrote:While I am still on the topic, here is an interesting tidbit I discovered today. Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis (05) has a unique characteristic among manuscripts where lines always break on word boundaries (with only a few exceptions). While this is 5th century, I thought I would take a look at it anyway and see what it did with prepositional prefixes. Surprisingly, in several cases it puts in a line break after the preposition, presumably indicating that they are separate words.

Luke 1:1 ανα/ταξασθαι, Luke 6:1 δια/πορευεσθαι, Luke 6:38 αντι/μετρηθησεται, Luke 7:6 εισ/ελθησ, Luke 7:20 προσ/δοκωμεν, Luke 8:16 εισ/πορευομενοι, Luke 10:35 προσ/δαπανησεισ, Luke 22:10 εισ/πορευετε

The prepositional prefixes are not divided like this for any compound nouns or any other compound words, but only for these compound verbs. Notice also that this only occurs in Luke for some reason (perhaps the scribe was having a bad day?) Another wonderful topic for someone to publish a paper on someday!

P99 had pretty much settled the matter for me that compound verbs were treated as a single word by the 4th/5th century, and now I find this. Is there anything special about those words? Maybe for just certain kinds of verbs? Maybe they are attached, but only loosely attached? It is things like this that make we wonder if we really have the full picture.
Are there diacritical marks elsewhere in the manuscript that could now be interpreted as marking divisions?
There are a few points scattered here and there, marking some clauses and ends of sentences, but mostly just diaeresis. Unfortunately, there is not much that I can see there that would be useful for determining word breaks.
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Splitting Compound Verbs?

Post by Stephen Carlson »

From D. C. Parker's study of Codex Bezae:
Parker, p. 78 wrote:Line division in Luke contains almost every possible violation of the principles of transcribing a text στιχηδον. We find separation of conjunction and its following phrase; separation of a noun or participle from adjective, pronoun, or demonstrative; separation of verb and adverb; separation of two related nouns, and so forth. Division of words in half is also more common in Luke.
Parker goes on to speculate that the scribe altered his practice in this portion of the codex to save room for the full text.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Alan Bunning
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Re: Splitting Compound Verbs?

Post by Alan Bunning »

Stephen Carlson wrote:From D. C. Parker's study of Codex Bezae:
Parker, p. 78 wrote:Line division in Luke contains almost every possible violation of the principles of transcribing a text στιχηδον. We find separation of conjunction and its following phrase; separation of a noun or participle from adjective, pronoun, or demonstrative; separation of verb and adverb; separation of two related nouns, and so forth. Division of words in half is also more common in Luke.
Parker goes on to speculate that the scribe altered his practice in this portion of the codex to save room for the full text.
The Parker quote kind of makes it sound like there were a lot of them, so I went back and checked and here are all of the rest of them that I could find where a line break divided a word:

Matt. 20:34 αυ/τω, Mark 6:51 ε/αυτοισ, Luke 5:19 αποσ/τεγασαντεσ, Luke 6:9 αγαθο/ποιησαι, Luke 7:29 τελω/ναι, Luke 21:36 καταξιω/θητε, Luke 23:18 παν/πληθει, Acts 3:26 απο/στρεφειν

So half of them involved splitting the verb at the preposition, but it is possible that could just be a coincidence and have nothing to do with identifying them as separate words. Clearly, there was something going on with Luke, so Parker’s theory is probably as good as any.
RandallButh
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Re: Splitting Compound Verbs?

Post by RandallButh »

Actually, it's better than you suppose. Luke 5.19 αποστεγασαντες breaks between σ and τ and has nothing to do with prepositional adverbs being separate words.

Likewise, if you look at Lu 6.9 αγαθο-ποιησαι shows that it was not two separate words. the form αγαθο is not an independent word.
I suspect that you would find more if you needed to look for more. For example, I looked through Luke 6 and found 6.48 τεθεμε-λιωτο. This is obviously a break in the middle of a single verb.

What you can trust and rely on is the development of Greek itself. The speakers did not put δε or ουν between the prefixes and the main stems of verbs, so they unconsciously internalized and created single words during the history of the language. That is a true fact. Does that mean that a lot of neologisms got created during the history of the language or that it was easy to create such neologisms? Yes. But that is Greek and that is what the Greek speakers did.
We need to learn to live with that. δεῖ ἡμᾶς συναρμόσασθαι τοῦτῳ.
Stephen Hughes
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Evidence of how to pronounce consonant clusters?

Post by Stephen Hughes »

RandallButh wrote:Luke 5.19 αποστεγασαντες breaks between σ and τ and has nothing to do with prepositional adverbs being separate words.
But that is Greek and that is what the Greek speakers did.
Is that the natural (phonetic not etymological) to say the word?
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
MAubrey
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Re: Splitting Compound Verbs?

Post by MAubrey »

Stephen Hughes wrote:Is that the natural (phonetic not etymological) to say the word?
In English, the phoneme /s/ functions independently of the sonority sequencing principle (a very strong phonological universal), which then allows for syllabus structures where /s/ appears before plosives like /t/ before the syllable's nucleus. Greek does not do this. If you're going to have a pre-nucleus consonant cluster within a syllable, then the first consonant needs to have lower sonority than the second (e.g πνεύμα). So when word internal clusters seem to appear like with αποστεγασαντες, there is a phonological requirement for having a break there. English, while not alone in what it does, is still a bit of a linguistic outlier in its syllable structure.

Edit: Greek consonant clusters at the beginning and the end of words are exceptional.
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
Stephen Hughes
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Sonority sequencing principle

Post by Stephen Hughes »

I have a few questions about syllabification, so I've started a new discussion on that.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
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