[B-Greek] Lemmatization (was "Inaccurate electronic versions")
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Jan 25 11:35:50 EST 2007
On Jan 25, 2007, at 10:59 AM, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> 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?
I'm cc'ing this to Randall Buth, who was one of the first to suggest
it. I think he can offer fuller rationalization for moving in that
direction.
(1) The aorist is generally more frequently used than the present
tense for most verbs, certainly in narrative. I THINK that's true.
MANQANW appears 25x in the GNT: 18x in the aorist, 6x in the present,
1x in the perfect; ERCOMAI appears 632x in the GNT: 354x in the
aorist, 21x in the perfect, 7x in the pluperfect, 217x in the
present, etc. This really depends more on the particular verb (and
its Aktionsart, I believe).
(2) Even if we take contract verbs, the 1st sg. present indicative
active AGAPAW never appears, but the infinitive AGAPAN does or the
infinitive AGAPHSAI, so also POIEIN and POIHSAI.
(3) The aorist more commonly displays the simple root of a verb,
whereas a present-stem is usually expanded (MAQ- is the aorist stem,
MANQAN-, the present stem has a nasal infix and a tense-formative
suffix -AN-; if we take the aorist infinitive MAQEIN we can readily
see the simplest form MAQ- whereas the indicative 1 sg. would have an
augment EMAQON. Another: PASCW but aorist inf. PAQEIN; another PIPTW
but aorist inf. PESEIN.
(4) Of course this wouldn't work with EIMI: we could use EINAI, but
there is no aorist of this verb.
Actually, I think that use of the present indicative 1 sg. (active)
is arbitrary, although it certainly is conventional.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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