Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?
Posted: August 7th, 2025, 6:35 pm
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!
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!