[B-Greek] Lemmatization Using the Aorist in Danker Festschrift

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Oct 5 12:25:42 EDT 2004


At 12:00 PM -0400 10/5/04, Stephen C. Carlson wrote:
>At 02:16 PM 5/11/2004 -0400, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>>In a message sent under the subject-header, "Summary of the Danker vol." a
>>week ago Sunday (March 2, 2004), Rod Decker summarized the contents of the
>>volume as a whole and noted some of the items he deemed of particular
>>interest. Now that my copy has arrived and I've begun to assimilate this
>>rich collection, I thought I would comment in particular on the single
>>issue discussed there that is of most immediate interest to me: a
>>lexicographer's perspective on the question of deponency. The key
>>conclusions I have found particularly significant and with both of which I
>>quite heartily concur are: (1) the notion of "deponency" should be dropped
>>altogether with respect to Greek grammar; (2) Greek verbs should preferably
>>be lemmatized in lexicons with aorist-stem headwords (I sense this is also
>>Randall Buth's considered opinion, probably of several others as well).
>
>Sorry to dredge up a discussion back from May 11, but I found the
>second of Carl's points here on lemmatizing Greek verbs with aorist-
>stem headwords to be absolutely intriguing and I can't let go of it.
>Unfortunately, the subsequent discussion on B-Greek did not touch on
>this at all.
>
>What does this proposal mean?  How would it work?  At first, I thought
>it was ridiculous because almost every verb would start with epsilon E-,
>but then I realized that the aorist infinitive does not have the augment
>and gives a plausible looking lemma.  Can anyone explain this further?
>I've got the book on order, but one can read small extracts anywhere in
>the book using the "search inside the book" feature at amazon.com.
>Randy Buth's contribution to the Festschrift touches on this as well.

Randall will have something more to say about this, I'm sure. What I think
I'd do would be to take the aorist STEM as derived from analysis of the
traditional third principal part, e.g. LUSA-, STEILA- including the
first-aorist stem-vowel, IDE-, QANE- including the second-aorist thematic
vowel, GNW-, BH- (and of course there's also a first aorist BHSA-) and
"passives" (really third-aorists) FANH-, LHMFQH- using the long-vowel form
of these stems. But one could indeed just as well use the infinitives:
LUSAI, STEILAI, IDEIN, QANEIN, GNWNAI, BHNAI (BHSAI), FANHNAI,
LHMFQHNAI--and that might be more appropriate since that's actually a form
that appears in usage as an unaugmented stem does not.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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