[B-Greek] AFISTAMAI or AFISTHMI FOLLOW UP

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Mar 28 11:05:21 EST 2004


At 9:35 AM -0500 3/28/04, Polycarp66 at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 3/28/2004 9:18:45 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>edmishoe at yahoo.com writes:
>
>Why wouldn't the UBS dictionary even list AFISTHMI as
>an entry?
>______________
>
>That's a good question.  It should be the listing for this verb.  That it
>isn't would seem to indicate a deficiency in the dictionary.

On the other hand, if one loosk carefully at the definition in the UBS
lexicon, one sees:

AFISTAMAI (deponent in all forms except aorist; impf. 3 sg. AFISTASO; fut.
APOSTHSOMAI; aor. APESTHSA and APESTHN, impv. 2 pl. APOSTHTE, inf.
APOSTHNAI, ptc. APOSTAS) intrans. leave, go away; desert, commit apostasy;
keep away; trans. incite to revolt (Ac 5:37)

I wouldn't call it a deponent either; but I would say that it appears only
as an intransitive verb except where we have the causative sense once in
the GNT in the aorist active. All of the other 13 instances in the GNT are
intransitive.

I haven't been familiar until very recently with use of the term "deponent"
to refer to verbs with aorists in -HN, which grammarians call "active."

It turns out then that the UBS lexicon provides accurate information about
this verb in the GNT (and the UBS lexicon does not pretend to be a lexicon
for any broader Greek literary corpus).

If one looks at LSJ, one finds that the active lemma is used, but the
information given shows the causal use is essentially secondary to the
intransitive sense of AFISTAMAI. That's what BDAG also indicates.

The moral of this is perhaps twofold:

(1) Users of a lexicon need to read carefully through the whole entry for a
verb (or, for that matter, for any other part of speech too!) to acquire a
sense of the preponderant or standard usage of the verb, as well as a sense
of the less frequent usages;

(2) Lexicographers might do well to do as UBS lexicon does here: use the
preponderant form of a verb for the lemma. My own inclination might even be
to have two distinct entries in the lexicon, one for AFISTHMI, another for
AFISTAMAI--but note, of course, that they are alternatives of the same
verbal root. The transitive, causative usage of this verb really does
appear to be secondary to the middle intransitive usage.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



More information about the B-Greek mailing list