Greetings. I am a new member here, and will soon start another attempt to learn NT Greek. I hope the following doesn't get me kicked off of the Forum before I can really take advantage of it...
I found this forum while looking for a frequency list of Greek NT words that counts and lists each different inflected form as a separate word for the purpose of frequency. Apparently, no such list exists in public form. It strikes me as misleading (at best) that some teachers and textbooks claim that there are only about 5,400 Greek words in the NT, and that by learning only the most frequent few hundred (a small fraction of the total), one can understand about 80% of the GNT words.
Of course this doesn't mention that many of these words are are counted as their lexical forms---in effect, lexemes---most of which have numerous morphological variants. IMNSHO, these are not individual words, they are, at best, stand-ins for word families, or groups of related words. If a word is spelled differently, pronounced differently, and has a different meaning from another word, how can it be considered the same word? are "be, am, is, and are" all one word? all the same word? Good luck on a spelling test. This misleads would-be students and greatly understates the complexity of learning Greek. At best, it misleads. At worst, perhaps, it could actually be considered fraudulent.
So does anyone know where I could find a count of how many unique words (including all the different word forms/inflected forms/morphological variants of those lexical forms, excluding only capitalized instances) there are in the GNT? And perhaps an accurate count of how many of these one must learn in order to understand, for example, 80% of the words in the GNT? Would that not be a MUCH higher number than a few hundred? Thanks!
Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?
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Re: Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?
Welcome to B-Greek!
How many words are in your post? I think there are three answers:
1. The post contains 312 words.
2. It contains 164 distinct inflected forms - the definition you seem to be using.
3. It contains about 148 headwords (this is approximate)
So how many words are there in the Greek New Testament? Depending on your edition and the way it is analyzed, this is roughly true (I haven't checked carefully enough to be certain, but these are close to being correct).
1. The GNT contains 137,741 words.
2. It contains 18645 distinct inflected forms.
3. It contains 5501 lemmas. I think this is what you say Greek teaching is based on.
I think Greek teaching, like English teaching, is actually based on all three. You can learn a word like "swim", then learn forms like "swam" and "swum", but we don't normally consider these to be different words. As you say, you do need to learn to recognize all forms of the word.
To learn 80% of the inflected forms, you need to learn 2141 distinct inflected forms. Probably best to learn them together with their dictionary form.
Does that help?
How many words are in your post? I think there are three answers:
1. The post contains 312 words.
2. It contains 164 distinct inflected forms - the definition you seem to be using.
3. It contains about 148 headwords (this is approximate)
So how many words are there in the Greek New Testament? Depending on your edition and the way it is analyzed, this is roughly true (I haven't checked carefully enough to be certain, but these are close to being correct).
1. The GNT contains 137,741 words.
2. It contains 18645 distinct inflected forms.
3. It contains 5501 lemmas. I think this is what you say Greek teaching is based on.
I think Greek teaching, like English teaching, is actually based on all three. You can learn a word like "swim", then learn forms like "swam" and "swum", but we don't normally consider these to be different words. As you say, you do need to learn to recognize all forms of the word.
To learn 80% of the inflected forms, you need to learn 2141 distinct inflected forms. Probably best to learn them together with their dictionary form.
Does that help?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
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Re: Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?
If you suspected you might be kicked out, why did you use that one word which has very strong and even aggressive meaning? Did you really consider as real possibility that all Ancient Greek teachers are liars? Otherwise your post is good and I can understand why someone may feel being "mislead".At best, it misleads. At worst, perhaps, it could actually be considered fraudulent.
My personal opinion is that you have been in a confusing situation because you haven't been exposed to other languages or to thinking about how languages in general work. There's nothing special in learning Greek, and as a native Finnish speaker I happen to know a language which is, like Greek, based heavily on inflection (declension and conjugation etc.). Taken all combinations together, one Finnish word (noun, verb) may have hundreds of forms. But nobody says a learner must actually learn hundreds of words instead of one. Learning the forms is part of learning grammar, not part of learning vocabulary.
When (hopefully "when", not "if") you are learning Greek, you will notice that Greek lexicons (just like English dictionaries) don't have many inflected forms as headwords (lemmas), and that's how you count them. You will learn to find a lemma of an inflected word when you see an unknown word in a text. It's not always easy, but that's a basic task. Most 1st year Greek courses walk through morphology and morphological semantics and if you are conscientious in your studies you will internalize the rules so that it won't feel like learning separate words.
One characteristic feature of Ancient Greek is tense forms of verbs: you may actually need to learn different "words" for one verb, a bit like in English you need to learn irregular verbs, and in Greek those forms are sometimes seemingly very far apart and in fact may originally have been different words. In those cases the forms are also usually separate headwords in lexicons, although they then point to the main lemma. So, this is not black'n'white, but nothing in natural languages is.