ENESTERNISMENOI (Was: De-Inflection Software?)
Richard A. Stauch
rstauch at charter.net
Sat Sep 21 12:51:28 EDT 2002
Hi Carl, George, et alii,
I thank you all for your replies, but I am afraid I did not make myself
clear enough. Only one person actually got what I am after, and the two
of us decided the beast does not exist.
Thank you Carl for the URL to Perseus. It may annoy you a little, but I
have that already, and much more, yet it does not answer my need at all.
What you gave me is another string search tool. It does not lemmatize
the word, or break out the various constituent parts. This is what I am
looking for, not another pointer to lexicons and texts.
George, and then Carl, remind me that I must learn Greek in order to
read it, and I agree. I appreciate the need to "instantly recognize" the
parts of words if I hope to ever be fully fluent, and I am moving in
that direction. This is not what I am getting at, at all.
I append below my off-list reply to another correspondent on this
thread, in the hope that my desire will be plainer.
*** Begin Paste ***
Thanks for the reply. That's not quite what I was trying to ask about,
though. I don't own a McPuter, so Accordance can't help me (I hear it
offers a version of the Apostolic Fathers: Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp,
etc.). I have BibleWorks 5, but it doesn't do what I am talking about,
either.
What I mean is to type in a new word, one not known in the database.
Software that will take a word (like ENESTERNISMENOI in 1 Clement 2:1)
and parse it for me. I don't want to have to look up the word and find
it isn't in the lexica, not even in the text of BDAG. BibleWorks offers
BDAG [for extra money], Louw-Nida, Liddle-Scott, Friberg, UBS, and
Thayer lexica. Together with the in-line or linear morphological
databases, my job is easy when the words are known. When they're not, I
have to study!
Someone else wrote to me saying we should be like "Smith-Barney": We do
Greek the old fashioned way, we learn it. Well, I never wanted to work
that hard. I prefer to work smarter. One picks up such habits in the
private sector, where results are expected.
Now, maybe it wouldn't take you long to look at the word above and see
the dative preposition EN with the dative, plural noun STERNOIS and a
participial, dative, plural suffix -MENOI (What is that, an imperfect
-E- before the noun segment, or an aorist? I still don't know.), but it
took me too long.
What I want is software that will take a word like that and tear it down
to its constituent parts and show me what they are, or are most likely
to be. Even if it can't figure out a word to its final conclusion with
certainty, it can at least give me some options. As I continue my work
building the morphological database and English translation for the
Apostolic Fathers, such software would come in quite handy.
Ever see anything like that?
*** End Paste ***
I hope that makes my need plain. I do want to learn to read the Greek
for pleasure and study, but I need something that can fill in for my
lack as I sit, now. If it does not already exist, I will begin the
project myself.
With all respect and admiration,
Richard Allan Stauch
Long Beach, CA
http://www.rstauch.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Carl W. Conrad [mailto:cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu]
> Sent: Saturday, September 21, 2002 8:50 AM
> To: Biblical Greek
> Subject: [b-greek] Re: De-Inflection Software?
>
> At 11:55 PM -0400 9/20/02, George Somsel <Polycarp66 at aol.com> wrote:
> >Forwarded for>:
> >
> >>In a message dated 9/20/2002 6:31:11 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> >>rstauch at charter.net writes:
> >>
> >>>I wonder if anyone has ever seen software written to take a word in
> >>>Greek and examine it for its constituent parts, prefix-stem-suffix?
Is
> >>>there any such software written? I don't remember ever seeing
anything
> >>>like that, but I might not be looking in the right places.
> >>>
> >>>I think it might be relatively easy to write such software. It
would be
> >>>a matter of determining what tables to include and how to modify
words
> >>>given to find the possibilities. Debugging might take a lot of
time,
> >>>though.
> >>>
> >>>Would there be much of a market for such software? It could go both
> >>>ways, and allow one to enter a stem, for which it would produce an
> >>>inflection table, or one could enter a word found in a certain text
and
> >>>it would tell you the part of speech, its inflectional form, and
other
> >>>facts (like, if it is a verb form of a noun, a compound word, and
all
> >>>that).
> >>>
> >>>I can imagine such software for other languages, too. It could use
the
> >>>same basic engine, but with different rules, tables and fonts.
> >>>
> >>>Frankly, I am tired of looking up words, not knowing if I have an
> adverb
> >>>or verb in hand, wasting time finding out it's not at all what I
> thought
> >>>it was. Of course, by the time I would be through writing such
> software,
> >>>I wouldn't have that problem any more. ;)
> >>>
> >>
> >>I'm reminded of an old TV add for Smith-Barney by John Houseman.
"We
> make
> >>money the old fashioned way. We earn it." I would suggest that the
> best
> >>way would be "We do Greek the old fashioned way. We learn it."
>
> I really have to agree with this; I think it would be relatively easy
to
> construct such a program, and in fact, there's just such a parsing
> instrument for Greek and Latin texts at the Perseus web-site:
>
> http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/PR/search.ann.html
>
> but (a) I cannot imagine why anyone should want to work through a
Greek
> narrative or expository or even poetic text using such a tool every
two or
> three or even every seven or eight words--lemmatize the word to
determine
> its endings and infixes, then look up the word in a lexicon; (b) one
never
> learns to read that way: what must ultimately be gotten is
instantaneous
> recognition of endings and infixes and their associated implicit
meanings;
> there are far too many out there even now who rely upon parsing guides
to
> piece out the elements of GNT sentences and haven't yet come to terms
with
> the basic recurrent syntactic structures and nuanced idiomatic usages
that
> are essential to the way a language communicates meaning.
> --
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
> Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
> cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
> WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
>
> ---
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