[B-Greek] Philo morphologically pointed

John VanRietschoten jvanriet1 at mts.net
Wed Sep 21 13:13:14 EDT 2005


John VanRietschoten BD Canadian Reformed Church at Carman Man. Can. jvanriet at mts.net

On Wed. 21 Sep 2005 Carl W. Conrad replied to posting by Wayne Leman:

Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 10:19:04 -0400
From: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at ioa.com>
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Philo
To: Biblical Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <38966CC5-D28C-4154-831F-A3D33B9DD0AF at ioa.com>
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On Sep 21, 2005, at 7:43 AM, Wayne Leman wrote:

> My son-in-law is a grad student at Hebrew Union College in  
> Cincinnati. His
> roughest class this semester is reading the Greek of Philo. (Koine  
> Greek is
> quite easy compared to Philo, he says.) He finds that L-S and  
> Perseus don't
> have all the forms in Philo. If anyone on the list has ideas for other
> lexical resources, please contact me. My wife and I are with our  
> son-in-law
> and daughter now. We helped them welcome the birth of their first  
> child, our
> #6 grandchild, last week.

Well, Wayne, a grandchild sounds considerably more exciting than  
Philo, although Philo's both difficult and fun.

I don't quite understand a difficulty in recognizing forms -- if  
we're talking morphology -- in Philo; there may be difficulty  
recognizing a root or verb-stem, and that is indeed a matter of  
lexicology. I assume that your son-in-law has already checked Torrey  
Seland's web-site with an exhaustive list of available web-resources  
(http://www.torreys.org/bible/philopag.html). I found personally that  
LSJ and BDAG --and yes, better add LEH for LXX stuff) pretty  
adequate; I know of one other resource that I have occasionally found  
useful for reading Hellenistic Greek, and that is Sophocles' Roman  
and Byzantine Lexicon (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/ 
1417947934/qid=1127312201/sr=8-1/ 
ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-4981604-5173719?v=glance&s=books&n=507846).

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/

Regarding morphology: In the Scholar's Library edition of Libronix (Logos) there is an English translation included of the works of Philo. Much more important though is a new electronic edition of the works of Philo in Greek morphologically tagged. I just purchased this edition on CD. Underneath each Greek word in the text you will find the root word and the letter coded information of gender etc. Highlighting this code will spell it out for you in words. This edtion originates from Norway and is authored by Peder Borgen Kåre Fuglseth Roald Skarsten. Hopefully this will prove helpful. 
John Vanrietschoten.


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