[B-Greek] Lemmatization (was "Inaccurate electronic versions")

Jonathan Robie jwrobie at mindspring.com
Thu Jan 25 10:59:12 EST 2007


Carl W. Conrad wrote:
> It's customary, for instance, to list contract verbs in the  
> uncontracted form of the present indicative 1 sg. -- despite the fact  
> that one doesn't ever see the uncontracted forms (outside of old  
> Ionic). The rationale for this is that knowing the stem vowel is -A-,  
> -E-, or -O- assists one consulting the lexicon to recognize  
> contracted forms of the verb (provided that one really knows the  
> contractions, of course).
> Two changes in standard lemmatization of verbs have been suggested:
> (1) Infinitives, rather than 1 sg. indicative forms, might better  
> characterize the verb, e.g. LEGEIN instead of LEGW, POIEIN instead of  
> POIEW. POREUESQAI instead of POREUOMAI.
> (2) Randall Buth (and perhaps some others) has suggested that the  
> aorist-tense form should be used as a lemma instead of a present- 
> tense form, in which case we'd have ELEXA (or better LEXAI,  
> especially since the infinitive is unaugmented) for LEGW, EPOIHSA (or  
> POIHSAI) for POIEW, EPOREUSAMHN (or better POREUSAI) for POREUOMAI. I  
> personally think that using the aorist infinitive instead of the  
> present-tense indicative 1st sg. would be a more useful lemmatization.
>   

What are the advantages of this? I'm completely naive here, why isn't 
this mostly an arbitrary choice?

Jonathan



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