Irregular and deponent Verbs
Clwinbery at aol.com
Clwinbery at aol.com
Tue May 28 00:21:50 EDT 2002
In a message dated 5/27/02 2:36:36 PM Central Daylight Time,
tysbgreek at hotmail.com writes:
> Mounce's BBG includes 30 irregular verbs and their forms, if I remember
> correctly, and Trenchard's _Complete Vocabulary Guide_ includes a list of
> the nouns which decline with a gender that does not fit their form, I have
> found these lists very helpful. Does anyone know of a more comprehensive
> list of irregular verbs might be found? How about a list of deponent verbs
> which indicates which forms are deponent? While I am on the subject of
> Deponent verbs, I have found that different grammars classify deponent
verbs
> differently. Trenchard indicates that many of the verbs elsewhere called
> deponent are actually rather words used "in pass. in NT," he does not
> indicate weather that means that the words have passive meaning or are
found
> in passive form, is there any authoritative source on this? And my final
> question as I attempt to move beyond the intermediate level of vocabulary
is
> what resources are there on the case irregularities of nouns? Is there a
> guide to nouns which take a case other than the expected and what cases
they
> take?
>
> Thank you,
>
> --Ty Frost
Ty, there may be a different idea of what an irregular verb is in Greek. In
Brooks and Winbery, we list as class VI verbs those verbs that have taken
forms from more than one verb in the development of the language. Eg. ESQIW
has FAGOMAI for its future form. Originally these were two separate words
with similar meanings. We found only ten such irregular verbs in the NT and
if you count their compounds, there are 74. They are listed on pp. 172-173 of
Morphology of the Greek NT. We do not count verbs as irregular because they
have a different spellling of the stem in one or more principal parts,
especially when they take a 2nd (strong) aorist instead of a SA (weak)
aorist. There is no way to predict when a verb will take one or the other.
The basic stem even of a verb like DIDWMI in the first principal part is
DO/W. This is not irregular since the nature of these verbs is to reduplicate
with an Iota in the first principal part. They also tend to be non-thematic
in the Present. The same stem serves in the other forms; DW + SW for the
future, etc.
Concerning "deponent" verbs, you should consult the archives since that has
been a regular topic of discussion on the list. Carl Conrad has taught most
of us not to use that terminology any more.
Concerning the use of which cases are used "irregularly," I would not call
these irregularities. The guide I have always depended on is the BAG, BAGD,
and now BDAG. I have never thought of making a list of nouns that take, say a
genitive as a direct object, since these are not really irregularities but
habits of speech caused by similar meanings in the verbs with which they are
used. We call these genitives of root idea. A basic idea in the verb fits
better with a certain case and so it was used.
Hope this helps,
Carlton Winbery
Louisiana College
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