Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?

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bobwoodburn
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Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?

Post by bobwoodburn »

Greetings. I am a new member here, and will soon start another attempt to learn NT Greek. I hope the following doesn't get me kicked off of the Forum before I can really take advantage of it...
I found this forum while looking for a frequency list of Greek NT words that counts and lists each different inflected form as a separate word for the purpose of frequency. Apparently, no such list exists in public form. It strikes me as misleading (at best) that some teachers and textbooks claim that there are only about 5,400 Greek words in the NT, and that by learning only the most frequent few hundred (a small fraction of the total), one can understand about 80% of the GNT words.
Of course this doesn't mention that many of these words are are counted as their lexical forms---in effect, lexemes---most of which have numerous morphological variants. IMNSHO, these are not individual words, they are, at best, stand-ins for word families, or groups of related words. If a word is spelled differently, pronounced differently, and has a different meaning from another word, how can it be considered the same word? are "be, am, is, and are" all one word? all the same word? Good luck on a spelling test. This misleads would-be students and greatly understates the complexity of learning Greek. At best, it misleads. At worst, perhaps, it could actually be considered fraudulent.
So does anyone know where I could find a count of how many unique words (including all the different word forms/inflected forms/morphological variants of those lexical forms, excluding only capitalized instances) there are in the GNT? And perhaps an accurate count of how many of these one must learn in order to understand, for example, 80% of the words in the GNT? Would that not be a MUCH higher number than a few hundred? Thanks!
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Welcome to B-Greek!

How many words are in your post? I think there are three answers:

1. The post contains 312 words.
2. It contains 164 distinct inflected forms - the definition you seem to be using.
3. It contains about 148 headwords (this is approximate)

So how many words are there in the Greek New Testament? Depending on your edition and the way it is analyzed, this is roughly true (I haven't checked carefully enough to be certain, but these are close to being correct).

1. The GNT contains 137,741 words.
2. It contains 18645 distinct inflected forms.
3. It contains 5501 lemmas. I think this is what you say Greek teaching is based on.

I think Greek teaching, like English teaching, is actually based on all three. You can learn a word like "swim", then learn forms like "swam" and "swum", but we don't normally consider these to be different words. As you say, you do need to learn to recognize all forms of the word.

To learn 80% of the inflected forms, you need to learn 2141 distinct inflected forms. Probably best to learn them together with their dictionary form.

Does that help?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

At best, it misleads. At worst, perhaps, it could actually be considered fraudulent.
If you suspected you might be kicked out, why did you use that one word which has very strong and even aggressive meaning? Did you really consider as real possibility that all Ancient Greek teachers are liars? Otherwise your post is good and I can understand why someone may feel being "mislead".

My personal opinion is that you have been in a confusing situation because you haven't been exposed to other languages or to thinking about how languages in general work. There's nothing special in learning Greek, and as a native Finnish speaker I happen to know a language which is, like Greek, based heavily on inflection (declension and conjugation etc.). Taken all combinations together, one Finnish word (noun, verb) may have hundreds of forms. But nobody says a learner must actually learn hundreds of words instead of one. Learning the forms is part of learning grammar, not part of learning vocabulary.

When (hopefully "when", not "if") you are learning Greek, you will notice that Greek lexicons (just like English dictionaries) don't have many inflected forms as headwords (lemmas), and that's how you count them. You will learn to find a lemma of an inflected word when you see an unknown word in a text. It's not always easy, but that's a basic task. Most 1st year Greek courses walk through morphology and morphological semantics and if you are conscientious in your studies you will internalize the rules so that it won't feel like learning separate words.

One characteristic feature of Ancient Greek is tense forms of verbs: you may actually need to learn different "words" for one verb, a bit like in English you need to learn irregular verbs, and in Greek those forms are sometimes seemingly very far apart and in fact may originally have been different words. In those cases the forms are also usually separate headwords in lexicons, although they then point to the main lemma. So, this is not black'n'white, but nothing in natural languages is.
Meilin
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Re: Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?

Post by Meilin »

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote: August 11th, 2025, 3:25 am
At best, it misleads. At worst, perhaps, it could actually be considered fraudulent.
If you suspected you might be kicked out, why did you use that one word which has very strong and even aggressive meaning? Did you really consider as real possibility that all Ancient Greek teachers are liars? Otherwise your post is good and I can understand why someone may feel being "mislead".

My personal opinion is that you have been in a confusing situation because you haven't been exposed to other languages or to thinking about how languages in general work. There's nothing special in learning Greek, and as a native Finnish speaker I happen to know a language which is, like Greek, based heavily on inflection (declension and conjugation etc.). Taken all combinations together, one Finnish word (noun, verb) may have hundreds of forms. But nobody says a learner must actually learn hundreds of words instead of one. Learning the forms is part of learning grammar, not part of learning vocabulary.

When (hopefully "when", not "if") you are learning Greek, you will notice that Greek lexicons (just like English dictionaries) don't have many inflected forms as headwords (lemmas), and that's how you count them. You will learn to find a lemma of an inflected word when you see an unknown word in a text. It's not always easy, but that's a basic task. Most 1st year Greek courses walk through morphology and morphological semantics and if you are conscientious in your studies you will internalize the rules so that it won't feel like learning separate words.

One characteristic feature of Ancient Greek is tense forms of verbs: you may actually need to learn different "words" for one verb, a bit like in English you need to learn irregular verbs, and in Greek those forms are sometimes seemingly very far apart and in fact may originally have been different words. In those cases the forms are also usually separate headwords in lexicons, although they then point to the main lemma. So, this is not black'n'white, but nothing in natural languages is.
You are absolutely right about the distinction between learning vocabulary and learning grammar in Greek. I was wondering: in your experience, at what stage of learning should learners focus more on grammar (morphology) than vocabulary? And is there a method to make lemma recognition more natural?
skyler
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Re: Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?

Post by skyler »

Yeah, the 5,400 words number just means dictionary headwords, not all the different forms you’ll actually see in the text. If you count every form, the total is much higher, and that’s why learning Greek takes more than just a few hundred vocab cards.
Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

Meilin wrote: August 27th, 2025, 3:40 am You are absolutely right about the distinction between learning vocabulary and learning grammar in Greek. I was wondering: in your experience, at what stage of learning should learners focus more on grammar (morphology) than vocabulary? And is there a method to make lemma recognition more natural?
When: right away, as you would do when learning any new language. How: reading real texts as much as possible. Analytical parsing is used quite often in Koine teaching and I'm not against it, but you should try to read fluently, intuitively, instinctively. Your goal is to read like a native, and as you know by necessity, natives don't learn their language by analyzing.
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote: September 6th, 2025, 9:42 am
Meilin wrote: August 27th, 2025, 3:40 am You are absolutely right about the distinction between learning vocabulary and learning grammar in Greek. I was wondering: in your experience, at what stage of learning should learners focus more on grammar (morphology) than vocabulary? And is there a method to make lemma recognition more natural?
When: right away, as you would do when learning any new language. How: reading real texts as much as possible. Analytical parsing is used quite often in Koine teaching and I'm not against it, but you should try to read fluently, intuitively, instinctively. Your goal is to read like a native, and as you know by necessity, natives don't learn their language by analyzing.
I agree. Let's try rephrasing the question: When do you want to recognize words and how they relate to each other? That's what it means to learn a language.

Funk's grammar says this very nicely:

https://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/project/ ... tro-2.html
Learning a Language is Learning the Structure Signals

003. It is commonly supposed that the major task in learning a new language is learning the lexical meanings of words. This is not in fact the case. The more important as well as the more difficult task is learning the grammatical structures and structure signals (Gleason: 98).

The basic significance of grammatical structures and structure signals in relation to major vocabulary is illustrated by the following text, which has been stripped of all major vocabulary.

Code: Select all

In his _____ _____, [Socrates] was _____-ed in the
_____________ ____________ of his _______ and was ___________-ed with
___________ the _________._________ he __________-ed the ________
___________ _________ of ___________ and ________-ing. He ____-ed
the _______ with whom he _______ in _____ about the _____ _____
of ___. He was a ___ of _____ ____ and _____ _____ of
________. He was ______ _______ to ________ and
_____. In ________ he was ____-ed by a ______ _____ on the
________ of ________-ing _______ ______ and of _______-ing the
____. He was ______-ed ____ to _____. He _____-ed to _____.
_____ _____ after his _____ he _____ the _____.
The structure of sentences and word groups is clearly discernible, although the major lexical items have been omitted, with the exception of the subject of the paragraph, Socrates. For example, the sentence beginning in line 4 He ________-ed the _________ is evidently composed of the “subject” he, a verb in the past tense (indicated by the morpheme -ed), and an “object” (the ______); the object is then expanded by a relative clause, with whom …. Similarly, the native speaker of English knows that the sentence beginning in line 6 is that type of sentence in which the “subject” is identified. Taking He was a _______ as a sentence frame, any number of predicate nouns might be found to fit:
  • He was a philosopher
  • He was a Greek
  • He was a father
The predicate, however, is expanded by a prepositional phrase initiated by of. We therefore have this frame: He was a _______ of ______ _______. One might also fill in this frame at random:
  • He was a philosopher of great wisdom
  • He was a Greek of great renown
The choice of vocabulary is of course limited by the frame, i.e. by the grammatical structure. Given the frame, the speaker of English knows that certain possibilities are “ungrammatical”:
  • x He was a good
  • x He was a very
  • x He was a philosopher of extremely wisdom
This is to say that the native user of English instinctively knows which vocabulary items are possible choices for each slot.

The grammatical frame of reference is the system within which major vocabulary can be distributed in accordance with rules governing the filling of particular slots or the structure of phrases and the structure of the sentence. Violation of these rules produces phrases and sentences that are grammatically unacceptable or nonsensical.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
bratgen
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Re: Introduction - Is teaching Greek based on a fraud?

Post by bratgen »

bobwoodburn wrote: August 7th, 2025, 6:35 pm Greetings. I am a new member here, and will soon start another attempt to learn NT Greek. I hope the following doesn't get me kicked off of the Forum before I can really take advantage of it...
I found this forum while looking for a frequency list of Greek NT words that counts and lists each different inflected form as a separate word for the purpose of frequency. Apparently, no such list exists in public form. It strikes me as misleading (at best) that some teachers and textbooks claim that there are only about 5,400 Greek words in the NT, and that by learning only the most frequent few hundred (a small fraction of the total), one can understand about 80% of the GNT words.
Of course this doesn't mention that many of these words are are counted as their lexical forms---in effect, lexemes---most of which have numerous morphological variants. IMNSHO, these are not individual words, they are, at best, stand-ins for word families, or groups of related words. If a word is spelled differently, pronounced differently, and has a different meaning from another word, how can it be considered the same word? are "be, am, is, and are" all one word? all the same word? Good luck on a spelling test. This misleads would-be students and greatly understates the complexity of learning Greek. At best, it misleads. At worst, perhaps, it could actually be considered fraudulent.
So does anyone know where I could find a count of how many unique words (including all the different word forms/inflected forms/morphological variants of those lexical forms, excluding only capitalized instances) there are in the GNT? And perhaps an accurate count of how many of these one must learn in order to understand, for example, 80% of the words in the GNT? Would that not be a MUCH higher number than a few hundred? Thanks!
As for the vocabulary statistics of Greek in the New Testament, as you said, many textbooks and teachers often refer to 5400 words based on root statistics, ignoring the diversity of morphological changes. In the Greek language of the New Testament, many words do have different morphological changes that may affect their meaning and usage.

As for the statistics of unique vocabulary, the exact numbers may vary depending on different text versions and research methods. Generally speaking, if all morphological changes are considered, the number of unique words may exceed 5400. For learners, it is usually recommended to first learn several hundred commonly used vocabulary so that they can understand most of the content when reading the New Testament.
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