I have assumed that the NA28 and the UBS5 Greek New Testaments would have the same morphological tagging, since they use the same Greek text except for some punctuation. But digging into this, I have found this not to be the case.
For example, a Morphological search for 2nd person imperative verbs (@V??M2) in John 5 produces different results:
- NA28: 12 results
- UBS5: 10 results
The NA28 includes two different tags on John 5:38: indicative and imperative, but the UBS5 only includes indicative. This is actually an advantage for the NA28, since it allows finding places where where the morphology could be understood two different ways and there is no scholarly consensus.
I could dig further, but I suspect this is the reason for the difference. Searching the whole Greek New Testament finds a large discrepancy:
- NA28: 1643 results
- UBS5: 1387 results
Another example is that 58 neuter adjectives are dual tagged as nominative or accusative in NA28 (the morphology is the same). The UBS5 does not dual tag these. I did a search for @JA?N INTERSECTS @JN?N in both Greek New Testaments to check this out.
Unfortunately, this dual tagging is not consistent. One famous example is Matthew 6:13, which could be translated "deliver us from evil" (neuter) or "deliver us from the evil one" (masculine). In both NA28 and UBS5, πονηροῦ is only tagged as masculine, even though the form could be neuter as well and some scholars believe it should be understood as a reference to Satan ("the evil one").
I am shocked by the difference in tagging. It has undermined my confidence in the search results to find such a large difference in searching two otherwise identical Greek New Testaments. I prefer to use the UBS5, but I have switched to the NA28 for now, because of the large difference in search results.
Can someone explain what I should expect from these morphological tags?
