[B-Greek] Lexicography and Deponency

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Wed Nov 10 22:58:29 EST 2010


Stephen egrapse
>By the way, I've been reading a history of NT lexicography by John A. L. Lee,
and he has a page of the earliest NT lexicon, part of the Complutensian Polyglot
printed in 1514, and it uses the first person, uncontracted singular, much as we
do now.  So it's an old tradition.
>

I've wondered about that history of 1st person forms myself. Latin tends
to use it, too, though I haven't checked its history. With Greek I have
suspected a linguistic reason. Spoken Greek dropped the infinitives and
they no longer exist in modern Greek. Maybe it's only a coincidence.
But--
It would be hard to construct a lexicon with only archaic categories like
infinitives. and that applies to contract verbs, too.
My article in the Danker Volume explains why I think un-real forms are
a bad idea for language learning. This is expecially true for students
who are not using the language and hearing the normal forms
regularly. A person can put up with all sorts of crazy things in lexica
and grammars as long as real speech and usage pushes the
language inside a person. But when the artificial forms are used with
rule generation and presented as 'the language' to a student, but
without flooding the student with hearing the real forms, then
I think that a real hinderance is built against internalization/automaticity/
fluency.

By the way, Dionysius the Thracian listed contract verbs as three categories
and tried to refer to each one with real forms, like NOW, NOEIS NOEI
and XRYSW XRYSOIS XRYSOI, all pronounced normally as Greeks
did/do. But with BOW, BOAIS, BOAI he explained that the (I) was
not pronounced (and was not related to the contract vowel). It was what
we call a historical spelling and became the iota subscript when they
invented that kind of writing.

Well, if it was good enough for DIONYSIOS it is good enough for me.
And we notice that real forms don't block a language user from recognizing
the 3 categories and correctly producing and using them. The language
user just doesn't go through the process of tracing the history of the
development at the same time as trying to speak.  And the infinitives
work great, too. NOHSAI NOHSAI-- NOEIN; BOHSAI BOHSAI--BOAN;
XRYSWSAI XRYSWSAI--XRYSOYN.

my 2¢ and a cup of coffee.
Randall


-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life



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