Complete Lexicon

Clwinbery at aol.com Clwinbery at aol.com
Sun May 6 11:08:27 EDT 2001


Carl Conrad replied to Randall Buth

>>>>>>>>>>>>At 7:23 AM -0400 5/4/01, Randall Buth wrote:

>EGRAYEN Jamie Macleod

>>"AGALLIAW”,"I exult","Verb","11"<

>

>On artificial words,

>I'm not sure I know, or want to know, a Greek word "AGALLIAW"

>

>AGALLIH~SAI


>AGALLIA~N

>AGALLIW~

>These I know.

>For that matter, I'm not so sure I know "exult"

>as in "He exulted yesterday and drove downtown." ?

>

>Just some thoughts on some directions for lexicography.

>Forthcoming in an article for the Fred Danker volume.


Randall, I think I'd agree with you that the proper lexical form for this

verb ought to be AGALLIW, but surely the lexical entry ought to inform the

user that this is an alpha-contract verb. The real question here is what

traditional conventions of lexicography and grammar ought to be scrapped

and which ought to be preserved. Sometimes I like to think it would be nice

to have something comparable to the Academie Francaise to settle lexical


and grammatical questions like this for classical Attic and Koine Greek,

but I doubt such a body could ever reach any consensus. I'd like to see

your review article when it's ready.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

CLW
The question is, "What do you want the lexicon to do for you?" 
My answer is that I want the lexicon to help me with morphology where it can 
do so with a minimum entry. eg. in listing nouns I want the genitive form as 
well. When I see PROFHTHS, OU, I know that this is a first declension 
masculine noun and that the dative will be PROFHTHi and the nom. pl. will be 
PROFHTAI not PROFHTOI. Now you could require all to memorize all this with 
only the nom. form of the word, but it is much more helpful to be able to 
check it in the dictionary to see in the same way that we check an English 
dictionary to see how nouns form their plurals. Hence, I want the dictionary 
to give me AGALLIAW so that I can know not only that the second singular 
present form is AGALLIA=S as well as know that the first person is AGALLIW=. 
Whereas KALEW tells me that the second sing. is KALEI=S and that the first 
person is KALW=. Again what do you want the lexicon to tell you? I also like 
for the lexicon to tell me what the principal parts of irregular verbs such 
as ERCOMAI are even though I must memorize most of them in order to pick up 
speed in translation. It is nice to be able to check when the memory begins 
to fail.

Carlton Winbery
Louisiana College

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