[B-Greek] English Cognates for Teaching Biblical Greek Words

Louis Sorenson llsorenson at hotmail.com
Thu Aug 20 17:24:12 EDT 2009


Hello all,

I'm looking for a list of Greek NT words followed by their English Cognates. I know there are some books (beginning grammar, etc.) and online resource that list the Modern English cognates for Greek words. Trenchard does not list them in his 'cognate word groups' or 'frequency list' definitions. Mounce lists them as footnotes. Is there a list anywhere or does anyone have a list? I'm looking for quick/easy access, something like  

AGGELOS > angel
HCOS > echo
etc.....

A search of the archives brought these books up:

-Babiniotis' Dictionary of the Modern Greek Language
-Crosby and Schaeffer
-Horace Addison Hoffman, *Everyday Greek: Greek Words in English, Including Scientific Terms* (Univ./Chicago, 1919).
-Merrriam-Webster: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/
-Mounce- Basics of Biblical Greek (in the footnotes)

The reason I ask is because I'm trying to include a spoken element in my class using TPRS (now called "Teaching Proficiency Through Storytelling"; it was called "Total Physical Response through Storytelling). One of the concepts is that the vocabulary needs to be very tightly controlled. People only use about 300-600 words in normal speech and when one is trying to teach people patterns.  Excessive vocabulary clutters the learners' playing field with unneeded baggage.  Some modern language books have up to 2500 words in the first year books. (Most NT books stick with about 323 - a frequency of 50x or more in the NT - but one has to count odd forms, so I'm not sure the 323 number is accurate for the NT as EIDON and BLEPW are two words). 

In TPRS, certain words are "out of bounds" (i.e. not to be used) unless they were aleady expressly taught. The rule is Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS). New words can be introduced into the story if they are proper nouns/names which are internationally recognized 'BMW, Corvette, UN, etc.'  Blaine Ray in the US who teaches these workshops recommends cognates as a good way to introduce vocabulary. By cognates, he means English words (or words in the users native language) which have cognates in the foreign language one is learning.  Though the best recommended method for learning new vocabulary is by coming across a new word when reading a story. 

I recognize that using cognates is really only possible for some words, not all. A teacher needs to be careful not to use modern English words which have a significant shift in meaning from the Greek. Something close to the Greek is Hippo-potamus 'river-horse'. Some words are not as appropriate e.g. dyarchy (a two-level government structure).


Louis Sorenson

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