[B-Greek] How to use a Hebrew -- er, Greek -- Dictionary
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Sep 2 06:33:21 EDT 2007
The blog to which I want to call attention this morning is John
Hobbins' "Hebrew Poetry." He has an entry dated Sept. 1, 2007
entitled as above (but, of course, I'm the one who added ".. er,
Greek--." If you change "Hebrew" to "Greek" at all points where
that's appropriate, I think every bit of it will apply to Biblical
Greek. One item that doesn't apply is his reference to a dictionary
by word-roots; I wish there were such an animal for Biblical Greek,
but even the etymological dictionaries of ancient Greek with which
I'm familiar have the usual alpha arrangement of words. The URL:
http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2007/09/
how-to-use-a-he.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/3dlbcz
The first two of seven admonitions on use of the dictionary are ones
that I have, in my time, reiterated ad nauseam with regard to
Biblical Greek. It won't hurt to reiterate them still yet once again,
especially in this much blunter and more exhaustive formulation:
"(1) Don’t use it. That’s right. Stay away from the dictionary until
you are really stuck. Always try to determine what a word means from
context and from whatever other Hebrew you know first. Verify the
understanding of the text you have come to on your own as a last step.
"(2) Remember, you can’t just plug in the gloss from the dictionary
that appeals to you most. The meaning a word has is determined by
patterns of usage and by context. The gloss from the dictionary that
is most likely to approximate the sense the word has in the text you
are reading will be the one it has in similar syntactic and
paradigmatic contexts. By syntactic context, I mean the prepositional
phrase a verb co-occurs with, the verb that governs the noun in
question, etc. By paradigmatic context, I mean the specific contents
of the prepositional phrase a verb co-occurs with, the specific verb
that governs the noun one is looking at, and so on."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Ret)
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list