[B-Greek] on "gloss"

Harold Holmyard hholmyard at ont.com
Wed Sep 6 19:06:09 EDT 2006


Curtis Hinson wrote:

>The word in it's technical sense refers, I think, to actual marginal 
>notes about the use of a word in situ.  The word "gloss" is used here 
>generally to refer to a word's usage in the context of a specific verse, 
>as far as I know.
>
>A "definition" is a broad general description of the word's meaning 
>which may attempt to give the semantic range of the word by giving 
>several meanings it can have.
>
>I remember in one of my Greek reading classes with the NT some of us had 
>Kubo, which is a reader's lexicon.  So we thought of Kubo as giving 
>glosses for each word in the context of the verse.  The professor 
>pointed out that actually Kubo doesn't gloss, it merely pulls the major 
>definition out of BAGD or some such thing and plops it down.  The 
>knowledge that we were looking at definitions instead of glosses turned 
>us off to it so much that most of us stopped using it entirely.  BDAG is 
>good because it actually gives a bunch of glosses instead of only giving 
>a general definition.  That's why it's a must-have.  Now if I just had 
>BDAG on my PDA since I can't very well lug a hard copy of BDAG around...
>  
>

HH: The word "gloss" is pretty flexible according to Encarta Dictionary:

gloss: noun  (plural gloss·es)
Definition:
 
1. explanatory phrase: a short definition, explanation, or translation 
of a word or phrase that may be unfamiliar to the reader, often located 
in a margin or collected in an appendix or glossary

2. interpretation: an interpretation or explanation of something
Her account provides an interesting gloss on the theme of widowhood

HH: Note that a translation of a word counts as a gloss, as does a short 
definition or explanation.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard





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