long words
B. Ward Powers
bwpowers at optusnet.com.au
Sun Sep 8 07:33:40 EDT 2002
Dear Dennis and Richard,
You are absolutely right, of course.
I should have worded my comments with more care.
Let me do so now.
At 07:49 AM 020906 -0700, Dennis Hukel wrote:
> >>>SUGKATA-KLHRONOMH-QH-S-O-NTAI: 6 morphs.<<<
>
>Dear Ward,
>
>I count EIGHT morphs SUG-KATA-KLHR-ONOM-QH-S-O-NTAI. I think what you
>meant to say is that this verb form fills 6 morphological slots in your
>grammar's verb analysis figure.
Yes, that is so.
>After finishing my study using your grammar, I was so impressed with the
>value of being able to morphologically analyze the Greek words, that I did
>a morphological analysis of all the nouns in the GNT. I learned a lot by
>going over dozens of etymological
>dictionaries, morphologies, and books having to do with Greek word buiding
>over a 5-year period. I found that some words were built by adding one
>suffix after another (suffix being a morphological element between the
>root and inflectional ending--
Yes, that is so. Sometimes, of course (as in the word you cite) it is
possible to get two roots combining into the one lexical morph for a given
word.
>this would not include the variable vowel).
Not sure I follow this. What are you calling the "variable vowel"? The
short vowel that lengthens in a verb root ending in a short vowel? E.g. the
epsilon in LALEW? I suppose that vowel would qualify as "variable".
>The longest string was 7 suffixes in one word.
I'm intrigued. Tell me more. Which word(s)?
>Dennis Hukel
And at 12:37 PM 020906 -0400, Richard Ghilardi wrote:
>Dear Ward and my fellow b-greekers,
>
>On Fri, 06 Sep 2002 22:45:46 +1000 "B. Ward Powers"
><bwpowers at optusnet.com.au> writes:
> > Hi, all.
> >
> > I find it intriguing to read the long words that people have found.
> >
> > And what particularly interests me is to see how many morphs
> > (meaning-bits)
> > we can find in the one word.
> >
> > SUGKATA-KLHRONOMH-QH-S-O-NTAI: 6 morphs.
> >
> > SUGKATA-TE-QEI-MEN-OS: 5 morphs.
> >
> > PRO-KE-CEIROTONH-MEN-OIS: 5 morphs.
> > DEISIDAIMON-ESTER-OUS: 3 morphs.
> >
> > My candidate for the word form in the New Testament with the most
> > morphs is
> > a variant reading in Mark 15:10: PAR-E-DE-DW-K-EI-SAN. Only 14
> > letters
> > (many fewer than some of the long words in this thread), but 7
> > morphs. I
> > think it is the only 7-morph word in the Greek NT (and then not
> > found in
> > this form in the critical text, which has PARADEDWKEISAN instead,
> > with 6
> > morphs).
> >
> > Have I missed any other 7-morph word?
> >
>
>Pardon me, Ward, but I would say that you have:
>
>SUG-KATA-KLHRO-NOMH-QH-S-O-NTAI: 8 morphs.
>
>Besides which...
>
>SUG-KATA-TE-QEI-MEN-OS: 6 morphs.
>
>PRO-KE-CEIRO-TONH-MEN-OIS: 6 morphs.
>
>DEISI-DAIMON-ESTER-OUS: 4 morphs.
>
>On the other hand, maybe you haven't missed any other words EXACTLY 7
>morphs long! ;-) None of the above is just that long.
>
>Or perhaps I have misunderstood the meaning of "morph."
No, not exactly. Rather, I wasn't precise enough in my original comments.
KLHRO and NOMH are different root morphs (i.e. "meaningful bits"), though
here these roots are combining together to give the lexical meaning of this
particular word in all its forms (as distinct from the grammatical meaning
of the particular form of the word). They do not alter with changes in
grammatical meaning. So in the framework of nine morph slots for a verb
form, the combination of the two roots together forms the lexical morph for
this word (and occupy Slot Four). Agreed, I could have been a bit more
precise in my earlier email.
Similarly, there can be two prepositions combine together in the
Preposition Slot in a verb (Slot One). Indeed, a great many verbs start
with a double-preposition (haven't counted how many). In verbs which do
this, the double-preposition remains unaltered in the various grammatical
forms of the word (apart from eliding a final vowel if there is a
contiguous following vowel unless the preposition is PRO or PERI).
Okay: so what I am really asking is whether anyone knows of any verb form
(in NT or LXX) which has seven of the nine morph slots filled. I only know
of the one, and (as I said) even that one is a variant reading, not ion the
critical text.
>Yours in His grace,
>
>Richard Ghilardi -- qodeshlayhvh at juno.com
>New Haven, CT USA
Right: hopefully my enquiry may be a tich clearer now.
Regards,
Ward
http://www.netspace.net.au/~bwpowers
Rev Dr B. Ward Powers Phone (International): 61-2-8714-7255
259A Trafalgar Street Phone (Australia): (02) 8714-7255
PETERSHAM NSW 2049 email: bwpowers at optusnet.com.au
AUSTRALIA. Director, Tyndale College
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