Greek Lemma Questions
Comments
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My way? No, George. I tire of repeating myself.
The intuitive way. The commonly accepted way. The clearly explained way.
If that way happens to be the Logos way, so be it. Rationalize, explain, document, implement. And everybody's working along smoothly, and this thread might never have started.
If not, something needs to change.
That's for Logos. As for me, if I need to make any important queries for research, you can be sure I won't be using Logos for now.
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Lee said:
My way? No, George. I tire of repeating myself.
The intuitive way. The commonly accepted way. The clearly explained way.
If that way happens to be the Logos way, so be it. Rationalize, explain, document, implement. And everybody's working along smoothly, and this thread might never have started.
If not, something needs to change.
And the "intuitive way" is by (your) definition your way.
george
gfsomselיְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן
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George Somsel said:
And the "intuitive way" is by (your) definition your way.
Are you implying some kind of idiosyncratic insistence on my part? Be my guest and prove your point. Checking out.
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Lee said:George Somsel said:
And the "intuitive way" is by (your) definition your way.
Are you implying some kind of idiosyncratic insistence on my part? Be my guest and prove your point. Checking out.
I don't need to prove my point since you've already done that.
george
gfsomselיְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן
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Nothing from linguistics, nothing from K.G. studies, nothing from current databases, nothing from other software practices, nothing from documentation. Just your pert opinion and the wall of status quo, versus "my way", as you would call it and wave it away.
And the world moves on.
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I agree with the concerns of the original post. I never knew that Logos does not find the irregular verb forms for some verbs. I frequently search on lemma with verbs that have second aorists and other tenses that are based on different stems. I had never encountered an instance where the irregular forms were not found. It seems to work fine for most verbs. For example, a search for lemma:ἔρχομαι@VA finds lots of second aorists based on ἦλθον. How is this different than lemma a lemma search on λέγω, which does not find forms based on εἶπον?
The only reason I can see is that BDAG says εἶπον is "used as" the 2 aorist of λέγω. But in the entry for ἔρχομαι, he simply lists the principal parts and includes ἦλθον as the 2 aorist of ἔρχομαι. In both cases, they were historically derived from words that came from different Greek dialects. But speakers of a language don't think about etymology, any more than modern English speakers care that "went" came from a different old English word than "go". Modern English dictionaries will list "went" under the article for "go", probably with a cross reference for "went".
I understand and appreciate the value of basing the morphological tagging on the conventions of BDAG Greek lexicon, which is the generally accepted standard modern scholarly lexicon of Hellenistic Greek. But I wonder in this case, whether the difference of wording between the lexicon entries for λέγω and ἔρχομαι is somewhat arbitrary. Did the author actually think that the 2 aorist of ἔρχομαι was not from a different stem? I doubt it. I think he simply chose in this case to list the principle parts and not to mention the etymology for forms of ἔρχομαι, whereas he did mention this for the forms of λέγω.From a software user standpoint, this tagging decision results in inconsistent searches. I never know whether I need to search for every individual principle part or whether the lemma search will do what I need. At the very least, I would like to see a documented list of verbs (and other parts of speech?) for which a lemma search does not find all forms of verbs with irregular tenses. Otherwise, I never know if I can really trust my research tool.
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Lee said:
Nothing from linguistics, nothing from K.G. studies, nothing from current databases, nothing from other software practices, nothing from documentation. Just your pert opinion and the wall of status quo, versus "my way", as you would call it and wave it away.
And the world moves on.
Lee, Read Harry's post, just after yours. He agrees with you. But he sure says it a lot more reasonably than you have (and it seems he's taken more care to read and understand what others have said.
Harry raises some useful points, so I'm going to send an email to one of the Greek experts at Logos to ask them to comment. If they were reading this thread at the beginning, they're probably no longer doing so, as it's going round in circles.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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As far as I know, I am using good language. Not breezy American English. But Rest-of-World kind of English.
If anyone says I am not being reasonable, or factual, or logical or polite, he is free to quote me within context. I am open to correction. But one should always think of both sides of the fence, and not assume too much about anything.
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Mark Hoffman said:
SO... I'm hoping someone from Logos reads this and notes that the Logos LXX database needs some correcting for abbreviated forms of prepositions.
I can reproduce this and have sent the case to our Greek experts for investigation.
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Lee said:
If anyone says I am not being reasonable, or factual, or logical or polite, he is free to quote me within context.
Sometimes you can be unreasonable be what you don't say, as much as by what you do say. But as just one example of what I would see as unreasonable would be this:
Lee said:Logos can stay where it is. Ignore user suggestions, I don't care. I'm a user, not a fan.
There is no evidence at all that Logos are ignoring user suggestions on this issue. Everyone in the thread (apart from Bradley) are users, just like you. There are plenty of people that agree with you, and no-one is arguing with them. That's precisely because they're being reasonable and measured in voicing their concern.
Mark Hoffman said:I agree with you, Lee, though I can see why Logos does this…
That's what being reasonable looks like.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Lee said:
As far as I know, I am using good language. Not breezy American English. But Rest-of-World kind of English.
If anyone says I am not being reasonable, or factual, or logical or polite, he is free to quote me within context. I am open to correction. But one should always think of both sides of the fence, and not assume too much about anything.
You can consider it a rule of thumb that when someone says that they're "open to correction", they're about as open as a bank vault at midnight.
george
gfsomselיְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן
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Mark, it's really getting past my bedtime, so I'll try to be coherent.
I did try to be reasonable in my posts. Read my posts on this thread if you want to be fair. Is there anything that is not factual, not polite, laced with name-calling, ad hominems, based on unsubstantiated opinions, bare appeals to status quo or change for change's sake?
On the reverse angle, is there any positive at all in my posts that you might be missing?
But in this thread, what did I get? I get "neophyte". I get "if we do it your way, many others will be upset". I get that's just "your definition". I get "if anyone says he is open to correction, then you can be sure...". I get "this is perfectly acceptable".
If I can be accused of anything, it is that I have used some dense, technical language. But if it ends up noticed by the experts at Logos, so much the better. They deal with this kind of language all day, or they wont be experts.
What a fine lot this is.
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Lee said:
I did try to be reasonable in my posts.
I sympathise with the points you have made, and others do too. I spoke up for you at one point because I understood partly why you felt "got at". But I still feel you could have expressed your point of view more reasonably, and you clearly feel that I am being unfair. I don't think either of us is going to convince the other. It is perhaps better if we simply agree to disagree.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Hoffman said:
I'm hoping someone from Logos reads this and notes that the Logos LXX database needs some correcting for abbreviated forms of prepositions.
We need to report typos explicitly rather than hoping Logos will read, note and enter the error from the depths of a thread. Sorry. Or you can enter it as a ug and make Logos QA people get it to the right department.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Thank you Harry. I'll defer to your position on this issue as I know you know Greek far, far better than I and that you work with individuals at all levels of competence.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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(Copying the entirety of Mark's initial απο post so the context is here, see below for response)
Mark Hoffman said:Uggghhh... Instead of starting another thread, I'll add here another matter I just discovered.
I was working w/ prepositional phrases in the LXX and NT. I was looking for certain απο phrases. Using a Morph search with the Logos LXX, I start to type > lemma:apo
and this is what I get:
That last one has to be a typo somewhere. It turns out that the first, unaccented απο will return all the abbreviated forms: απ' and αφ'
The same deal goes for επι with two different forms, but a lemma search for υπο finds both abbreviated and non-abbreviated forms.
Upon further investigation, it appears that this is just an issue w/ the LXX. The NA27 correctly does things.
SO... I'm hoping someone from Logos reads this and notes that the Logos LXX database needs some correcting for abbreviated forms of prepositions.
With 5.x, we significantly expanded lemma support internally, so lemmas that are tied to a corpus (like LXX, NT, Josephus, etc.) are exposed when a corpus can be identified; hence all the seemingly new “lemma lists” in 5.x (check Help->About Logos Bible Software for the list in the left pane under "Morph Search").
In 4.x, only NT lemmas were known in dialogs and dropdowns like that. With such a large expansion of data like this, some things are bound to slip through – especially as we get to noncanonical corpora and even Perseus material (which, due to its nature, will introduce a lot of cruft as potential lemmas). As much of that work is a first-cut, there is some more work we could do to search out where only accents or lack thereof distinguish a lemma in a lemma list; such instances are probably incorrect and we should probably prefer where a form has a single acute.
I've actually put that on the "we need to do it list" but it may take a bit to get to. No, there really isn't a real list by this name, but you know what I mean —I have tasked someone with this issue. We will prioritize canonical and deuterocanonical/apocryphal material (so, probably start with LXX material) as we're able to start on this task.
Much has also been said in this thread on the λεγω/ειπον difference. There are two ways to look at it, as has been amply described and debated across the thread. For whatever reason(s) we chose one way. I don't have a breakdown or report on why we went one way instead of the other; it happened probably 10-15 years ago amidst a myriad of other similar decisions one has to make when implementing a morphological and lemma scheme for an entire corpus. As has also been brought up, one way to search for both (and more) is to use roots.
I don't want to simply dismiss anyone's concerns, but I don't see what else can be said on this specific matter, particularly since it has devolved a bit from the initial question.
Thanks, everyone, for your observations. We do value them.
Rick Brannan
Data Wrangler, Faithlife
My books in print0 -
The nights are short as the days are long. Some parting words.
Let me spell this out clearly to anybody who has even bothered to read this far. My desire is to improve Logos. Check my posts in other threads if you don't believe it. If this issue does not get clarified or handled well, then my opinion - and I may be speaking for many others who don't even bother to post around here anymore - is that there is a serious, unresolved issue in a basic search function. If word gets around, Logos will be hurt.
A few words to MJ: Fallacy is indeed something to be avoided by all sides. Please point mine out. I need to be sharpened, always. Please look at postID 492506 if you will. It contains something that has an error of fact. Perhaps that is not a fallacy. Let me try again. It contains a False Dichotomy, i.e. an alternative viewpoint not held by one expert (i.e. you and/or Logos status quo), has to be held by a complete non-expert. Did I spot that correctly?
A few words to George: If I "ask, will I receive"? Alright, I should ask. George, what are your definitions of "lemma" and "root"? Who else holds your opinion? Has the application applied "your definition" consistently in this case? If I may be so bold as to ask: right this very moment, are you or are you not "open to correction"?
A few words to Mark. You have already observed that I was not being fairly responded to, and that Logos employees may already have lost interest in the thread beyond the early posts, so you wanted to write to them a message after Dr Hahne's reasonable objection. You pointed out that some were "arguing" with me. You're quite objective, I really mean it. I urge you to consider some of the points you made.- "Most Greek scholars will consider λεγω and ειπον to be different lemmas." I don't know if that's true, and I don't know if many Greek scholars agree to separate λεγω and ειπον, and still keep the other suppletive forms together.
- "And if it was exactly what you want, it would upset plenty of other people." In the first place, you do not know what I want. I have made it very clear that whichever schema Logos chooses, even if it is some kind of obscure one, I want a system that is well thought out, well explained, well documented, well implemented. Crystal clarity, no hidden reefs, no potential surprises for the user. I want that from my research software. Wouldn't anybody? If everything were crystal clear, how was this thread inspired in the first place...
I don't have all the answers. I appeal to a higher wisdom.
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Lee, one (of many) things I have learned from too much time on the forums is that forum users don't know me and my communication style. The result is that people take offense at language I carefully choose to be non-offensive (e.g. Mark Barnes educating me on how "bias" was not a neutral term in his circles). And people read into my words things I not only did not say but never would say - things people who know me would never accuse me of saying. In such cases I often get defensive, partially because I am in unfamiliar territory.
I have also found that clarification usually works only if I initially stated my position poorly or made incorrect assumptions regarding what the reader already knows. I find my logic hound useful specifically because I don't identify the fallacy and start a side argument - generally, I don't even note the violator. It serves to alert everyone reading the thread that a common fallacy may be observed; sometimes the person(s) committing the fallacy will correct their statement ... in which case fallacy hound returns to his dog house.
I have learned that I must adjust my communication style in the forums based solely on others' reactions to my posts. That is a tricky business because some reactions are simply someone else's bad day, or a (to me) common term that is used differently in their tradition, and some are simply obnoxious personalities spoiling for a fight. I hope that the net result is that I come off as gentle, conciliatory, (sometimes too much so) logical and broadly educated. I feel I have failed to communicate if I come off as judgmental or elitist.
All of which is simply preparatory to stating that I feel I have failed to communicate clearly with you - what you appear to have heard and what I was attempting too say have a large gap. I don't feel any attempt at correction would be useful.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ. Smith said:
All of which is simply preparatory to stating that I feel I have failed to communicate clearly with you - what you appear to have heard and what I was attempting too say have a large gap. I don't feel any attempt at correction would be useful.
There will always be gaps in a communication medium such as this. Love covers a multitude of sins.
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Lee said:
A few words to George: If I "ask, will I receive"? Alright, I should ask. George, what are your definitions of "lemma" and "root"? Who else holds your opinion? Has the application applied "your definition" consistently in this case? If I may be so bold as to ask: right this very moment, are you or are you not "open to correction"?
"Lemma" is generally understood to signify the dictionary form of a word. "Root", however, is a different matter, and fairly obviously Logos intends for it to cover all words which are used under various circumstances to convey the same idea but which vary in form under differing circumstances. This would not be my use of the term "root", I would understand "root" to be more closely related to "stem", the formation from which all other words of a class are derived. It really doesn't matter that it doesn't happen to be the way I would use the term, but "root" will suffice so long as we understand what is intended. In the case of λέγω it seems to me that we have several differing stems which are lumped together by Logos under the rubric "root."
λέγω
εἰπεῖν <—ἔπος
ῥη* <— ??
I'm satisfied to follow Logos' usage here. If they like, they can call it "grunge:X" so long as I know what it means in this context.
I might also note that there is a difference in the lexical form between LSJ and BDAG. In the classical Greek of LSJ we find γίγνομαι as opposed to γίνομαι in BDAG. Similarly we find γιγνώσκω as opposed to γινώσκω. In Koine the reduplication has dropped out in a simplification of the language. Attempting to look up γινώσκω in LSJ will not meet with success since that is not the dictionary form (or lemma). Fortunately, Logos handles the problem so that if you only have LSJ or choose to use LSJ though you have BDAG it will find it for you.
george
gfsomselיְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן
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Peace be upon you, George, if by your intelligent post you mean for peace.
Probably there is some kind of inherited mess going on. I suspect that the only true solution would be to introduce some kind of interstitial data or interstitial mapping to take into account the very different varieties of Greek and the different corpora, and then to rationalize the terms used.
That could well be a job for Logos 6.
Meanwhile, I hope that Logos does some tweaking, not to the software, but to user confidence in searches.
Some guy quipped a while back that Logos was pronounced "Low-goes" in a TV spot. If "grunge:X" ever appeared as a command, you may stay, George, but I suspect that hundreds and thousands of research-level users will switch to saner alternatives.
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Just a note regarding my previous post. I noted that typing γινώκω into LSJ will not succeed while clicking on a form of γινώσκω and using LSJ as your lexicon will succeed since Logos has filled the gap, so to speak. I just decided to try the reverse so I looked up a passage in my Perseus collection which used a form of γιγνώκω and attempted to use BDAG as the lexicon—no joy.
george
gfsomselיְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן
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Posted => Suggestion: show suppletive forms in Lexham Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament
Keep Smiling [:)]
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A similar issue to my original post arose in another thread. As a result of that discussion, I can update some solutions here.
My original post was based on the discovery that separate searches had to be done for λεγω and ειπον and for οραω and ειδον. A bit annoying, especially if you don't know that these distinctions exist, but understandable in light of how the language developed and how BDAG handles such matters.
So... what I've become accustomed to doing is not simply trusting the right-click on a word to choose to search on lemma. Instead, if I am wanting to be comprehensive, I have some options:
- Choose to search on root rather than lemma. The downside to this is that it may give me a lot of hits I don't want. Additionally, I can't see that any of the LXX texts in Logos have tagged roots, so you can't use it for the LXX.
- Instead of right-click, simply use the search box dialogue. Start typing, and note the various forms that show up. In the example which initiated this thread, both of the ways of accenting ερημος show up in the dropdown box, so I know to search for: lemma:ἐρῆμος OR lemma:ἔρημος
This solution works well except for cases like λεγω or οραω noted above where a different stem is used for different tenses. - Search on the NT in the Original Greek Byzantine Textform 2005 (Byz) or on Westcott-Hort Greek NT 1881 (WH1881MR; not the Logos WH). These are coded differently and don't make the same lemma or accent distinctions.
- Create a collection of Greek NT versions. You can right-click and conduct a lemma search. Then, in the search results, change the specific version to that collection of Greek NT versions you created. Then use the grid view to spot right away where there might be differences in parsing or textual tradition. (Cf. below)
- I use BibleWorks which doesn't make these distinctions. (And remember that can be both good or bad depending on what you exactly want.)
I want to highlight how useful and valuable option #4 is. Here is what a search on λεγω returns:
As you can easily see, something is going on with the Byz and WH1881MR that immediately highlights that there are perhaps coding issues to which I should attend.
Note that the Grid view is not available in a Morph search, but you can use the Analysis view or Aligned view and with just a bit of comparing see rather quickly if there are any issues.
This method is also a great way of seeing if there are text critical issues. For example, a lemma search for σπλαγχνιζομαι will return:
What should catch your attention right away is that missing entry in Mark 1.41 of the SBLGNT, a somewhat well-known and notable textual variant.
The only thing that complicates matters here for me is that I am not entirely confident about constructing search strings from scratch. (Cf. in the graphics above the search string that was used.) I find it easier to right-click on a word in a text to start my search, then in the search results window, change the parameters I want: what passages, in what versions/collection, Bible or morph search, etc.
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Mark Hoffman said:
Choose to search on root rather than lemma. The downside to this is that it may give me a lot of hits I don't want. Additionally, I can't see that any of the LXX texts in Logos have tagged roots, so you can't use it for the LXX.
That wouldn't work since λέγω and εἴπον and the others as well come from different roots.
george
gfsomselיְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן
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