This raises a serious and very significant question: How should verbs properly be lemmatized?RandallButh wrote:... the risk of having people trying to think through rules rather than with words if you give them all of those artificial forms in -αω -οω instead of -ᾱν -οῦν, not to mention needing to signal which voice is preferred?
That seems a very accurate account of the convention. Randall several years ago published an article in a Gedenkschrift for Fred Danker, suggesting: (1) using the infinitive as the lemma rather than the 1 sg. present indicative active or middle-passive, (2) preferably using either the present or aorist infinitive depending on which tense is most commonly used, and (3) using either the active or the middle-passive infinitive depending on which voice is more commonly used. That’s consistent, I think, with the notion of using the unmarked rather than the marked form for the verb in question. For my part, I would fully support changing the convention thus. It’s absurd to be using as a dictionary form an uncontracted verb that was never used in ancient Greek, and I think that the clear indication of the more common tense and voice of a verb would be a far better identifier of a verb than the conventional standard.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_%28morphology%29 wrote:In many languages, the citation form of a verb is the infinitive: French aller, German gehen, Spanish ir. In English it usually is the full infinitive (to go) although alphabetized without 'to' (go); the present tense is used for some defective verbs (shall, can, and must have only the one form). In Latin, Ancient Greek, and Modern Greek (which has no infinitive), however, the first person singular present tense is normally used, though occasionally the infinitive may also be seen. (For contracted verbs in Greek, an uncontracted first person singular present tense is used to reveal the contract vowel, e.g. φιλέω philéō for φιλῶ philō "I love" [implying affection]; ἀγαπάω agapáō for ἀγαπῶ agapō "I love" [implying regard]). In Japanese, the non-past (present and future) tense is used.
On the other hand, instituting significant changes in any fixed standard practice is a hard sell -- nigh unto impossible even; my stomach turns when I think of how close the U.S. was to adopting the metric system -- but Congress would not have it (would the Supreme Court have upheld it?).
Do we have any emerging consensus on this issue here? Probably it's easiest to make changes in our own pedagogy, however much we might like to see changes of this sort in major printed reference works. It would surely be much easier to have changes made in electronic lexicographical databases.
What do others think?