L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #301 Unit of meaning ... no "I" is not added to the text
Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.
This tip is inspired by the forum post: many, many posts
In public Canvas documents, Phil Gons shared an excellent diagram.
For most purposes this is sufficient. However, the smallest level of meaning is not "word" but "morpheme" - a distinction that matters when one looks at the original Greek to determine what the translator "added". I have chosen a very simple example because my knowledge of Greek is very limited, but please understand that the same principle applied to the helping verbs English uses to express many verbal elements.
From Runge, Steven E., and Christopher J. Fresch, eds. The Greek Verb Revisited: A Fresh Approach for Biblical Exegesis. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016. When you look at a Greek verb you are looking at 5 morpheme i.e. units of meaning. The verb word in the text is tense indicator+aspect prefix+lexical core+aspect suffix+voice/mood/person/number in the vocabulary of Runge. Other authors may use other terms.
So, when I see this in the reverse interlinear, the "I" is not added to the text, it is the translation of the fifth piece of the verbal word. This is indicated by the arrow in the interlinear pointing to the verb. Again, I repeat, it is not added, it is in the original text. Sometimes, tree diagrams of sentences continue to the morpheme level rather than stopping at the word level; that is one reason I strongly prefer them for language study. And that is why I would add a level below word to Phil's diagram.
English example of tree diagram of a word taken to the morpheme level.
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