Interlinear ~ MSS, Lemma, TRL, Source

John Alexander
John Alexander Member Posts: 1
edited November 20 in English Forum

Hey guys:

I know this is a simple question, but I'm starting Greek in seminary and have some questions with translations.

First, when you pull up the display on the ESV for instance, it provides a translation below.

What does MSS mean? What does MSS trl mean? Lemma? Lemma trl? 

More specifically, what is it translating on each line? By the way, I have the Leader's library and I don't believe I have a Septuagint translation (Hebrew to Greek to English). Any suggestions?

Thanks for any help!

John

Comments

  • Todd Phillips
    Todd Phillips Member Posts: 6,735 ✭✭✭

    If you right click on the labels, you'll get a menu that shows the non-abbreviated form of those labels:

    image

    The menu can be used to turn the various lines on and off.

    MSS = manuscript (the actual form of the Greek word in the text)

    Trl = transliteration (the Greek word written using English letters)

    Lemma is the dictionary form of the Greek word.  The lemma is what you would use when searching so that you find every form of that word.  It's also used in dictionary lookups.

    By the way, I have the Leader's library and I don't believe I have a Septuagint translation (Hebrew to Greek to English). Any suggestions?

    You should upgrade to the Scholar's library to get that, and you'll also get many other tools that will be useful for Greek studies, including the Greek texts and better lexicons.  Reverse Interlinears are not a substitute for having the actual Greek New Testament.  See the comparison chart: http://www.logos.com/comparison

    Scholar's has these septuagint resources:

    • Lexham Greek–English Septuagint Interlinear
    • Brenton Septuagint (an English translation of the LXX)
    • Lexham Greek–Hebrew Septuagint Reverse Interlinear
    • The Old Testament in Greek according to the Septuagint, ed. Henry Barclay Swete
    • Septuagint with Logos Morphology

    MacBook Pro (2019), ThinkPad E540

  • steve clark
    steve clark Member Posts: 3,591 ✭✭✭

    QLinks, Bibl2, LLR, Macros
    Dell Insp 17-5748, i5, 1.7 GHz, 8G RAM, win 8.1

  • I know this is a simple question, but I'm starting Greek in seminary and have some questions with translations.

    Welcome [:D]

    An alternate idea to displaying Reverse Interlinear information is using visual filters, which can combine highlighting so one word shows many highlights.  For example (in the screen shot below), Pray in Matthew 24:20 has present tense (background), imperative mood (font), middle voice (superscript image after word), and plural number (image above word: squiggly line) from four of my Logos Greek Morphology visual filters.  Several of my highlighting palettes have style names to reflect usage so can use Highlighting tool as a color code key.

    In the the top two resources am highlighting verbal usage and things.  In the ESV, a right click on brown words often has a Biblical Things choice.  With verbs and things highlighted in Greek and English, can quickly compare across languages. The Greek verbal system is more expressive than English so verbal highlighting shows range of expression: e.g. Matthew 24:15-28 has nine verbs in the imperative mood, including two with negation so have seven items to do plus two items to avoid.  The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament (LDGNT) also includes tagging to emphasize words that are not in expected order (have been moved for emphasis, which has a visual filter with image below):

    image

    The bottom two resources has more Logos Greek Morphology visual filtering turned on along with displaying Louw-Nida numbers for Greek words.  Hovering over a Louw-Nida number shows a pop-up with contextual range of meaning.

    Note: using different resources for visual filtering since same set of visual highlighting is used in all open copies of a resource.

    WIki has => Examples of visual filters with screen shots showing visual filters.  Personally wish for way to share visual filters and highlighting palettes.

    For learning Greek, if language mastery goal is sight reading, then avoiding interlinear resources with Greek and English on parallel lines is prudent to avoid until sight reading mastery has been achieved.  Morphology lines in an interlinear can also be a hinderance to memorizing and recognizing variant spelling.

    By the way, learning Greek provides new insights for the phrase "That's Greek to me."

    Personally reading "Learning New Testament Greek Now and Then" for sentence diagramming along with reviewing Greek grammatical nuances.  Logos has resources tagged so memorizing variant spelling is not needed to grasp thought flow in Greek and English.  Also, sentence diagramming is useful across languages.

    Verse numbering lacks correspondence with Greek sentences.  One Greek sentence can have many verse numbers: e.g. Ephesians 1:3-14  In other places, one verse can have many Greek sentences: e.g. Ephesians 2:8 contains two Greek sentences while John 1:21 has four Greek sentences.

    Personally wish for an option to visually hide verse numbers in Logos 4 (setting font color to match background color so numbers not readable on screen).

    Logos has New Testament discourse analysis resources.  Old Testament discourse analysis resources are under development.

    By the way, I have the Leader's library and I don't believe I have a Septuagint translation (Hebrew to Greek to English). Any suggestions?

    You should upgrade to the Scholar's library to get that, and you'll also get many other tools that will be useful for Greek studies, including the Greek texts and better lexicons.  Reverse Interlinears are not a substitute for having the actual Greek New Testament.  See the comparison chart: http://www.logos.com/comparison

    Scholar's Gold has my favorite commentary series: United Bible Society (UBS) Handbook series, which has what is important for translation into other languages plus cross cultural insights (without needing original language mastery).  Caveat: Logos does not have several Old Testament UBS Handbooks.

    Logos offers Academic pricing, which has the lowest cost for upgrading base packages.  Also Logos offers payment plan with no interest, but does pass along part of merchant fee for processing monthly payment ($ 5 per month)

    Keep Smiling Smile

  • donald j perry
    donald j perry Member Posts: 7

    "MSS = manuscript (the actual form of the Greek word in the text)"


    What does MMS mean? Depending on what text it can be a different Greek word. Scrivener backward guess translated the Greek from the KJV wrongly using sometimes Latin texts for help.  Beza or Stephanus had other ideas in mind. What does MSS mean? How is it determined which Textus Receptus word is used?  Is It a Greek word that represents a Latin word, not intended by the KJV translators who only used Greek?  Or is it a Greek word always reflected by Beza?   I am completely confused because there is no indication that I can find where these words are coming from.  Any clarification would be much appreciated. Thanks.

     

     

  • NB.Mick
    NB.Mick MVP Posts: 15,966


    "MSS = manuscript (the actual form of the Greek word in the text)"


    What does MMS mean? Depending on what text it can be a different Greek word. ...   I am completely confused because there is no indication that I can find where these words are coming from.  Any clarification would be much appreciated.


    Don't be confused that this is called "manuscript" - these are not actual manuscripts dug up from the sand or discovered in ancient libraries, but complete "eclectic" (= sorted out) Greek texts compiled on the basis of these. The text in Logos depends on the resource you're in. Most modern bibes use the NA27/UBS4 text - some may use a slightly changed text, weighing the textual evidence differently, some (such as KJV/NKJV) may use a different Greek text (a variant of Erasmus' Greek NT) Typically such things are explained in the foreword to a bible.

    Hope this helps

     

    Have joy in the Lord! Smile

  • Mark Barnes
    Mark Barnes Member Posts: 15,432 ✭✭✭

    What does MMS mean? Depending on what text it can be a different Greek word. Scrivener backward guess translated the Greek from the KJV wrongly using sometimes Latin texts for help.  Beza or Stephanus had other ideas in mind. What does MSS mean? How is it determined which Textus Receptus word is used?  Is It a Greek word that represents a Latin word, not intended by the KJV translators who only used Greek?  Or is it a Greek word always reflected by Beza?   I am completely confused because there is no indication that I can find where these words are coming from.  Any clarification would be much appreciated. Thanks.

    As you probably know, there is no Greek text that 100% aligns with the KJV version. So in Logos' reverse interlinears, they used the Byzantine text as a base, and where there appeared to be discrepancies, attempted to work out why the KJV authors had translated as they had. I'm not sure exactly the process they used, but I presumed it involved looking at Scrivener and other texts in the TR family.

    If you've an example of a place where you think the KJV is influenced by Jerome, then it might make an interesting case study.

    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!

  • donald j perry
    donald j perry Member Posts: 7


    " I'm not sure exactly the process they used, but I presumed it involved looking at Scrivener and other texts in the TR family"


    There should be some kind of notes on what happened. What is the Logos Greek text that supports the KJV? Who worked it out? How long did it take? What kind of process was used? Does Logos think It is important to know?, it's not really a private matter.

    I hope I am not the first person asking these questions, but I do not think I should have to. I think anyone who manipulates the World of God should at least explain how they did it. Westcott and Hort explained what they did and so did Scrivener, and they all worked together as a body of men who were not even too concerned about inspiration to begin with.
     

     

     

     

     


     


     

     

  • Mark Barnes
    Mark Barnes Member Posts: 15,432 ✭✭✭

    There should be some kind of notes on what happened. What is the Logos Greek text that supports the KJV? Who worked it out? How long did it take? What kind of process was used? Does Logos think It is important to know?, it's not really a private matter.

    There has been a little discussion on these forums about the Greek text in Logos that most closely aligns with the KJV text (e.g. http://community.logos.com/forums/p/18406/138623.aspx#138623). There's also been discussion on now reverse interlinears are created, although I'm afraid I couldn't find that.

    But, in answer to your questions: When creating reverse interlinears (for any version), Logos starts with the Greek/Hebrew text that the original translators used, so far as it is known. In the case of the KJV, that was Scrivener's. No doubt on a very small number of occasions the English KJV text didn't line up with Scrivener's, so other Greek texts would have been consulted at that point, with a view to trying to determine why the KJV translators reached the translation decisions they did. This work was all done in-house at Logos, by a team of Greek scholars (led, I think, by Rick Brannan in the NT).

    I think it's fair to say that the Logos editors were not 'manipulating the Word of God' as they performed this task - they were merely helping us to better understand the Greek text behind the KJV and use that data in our studies. If we want to use the Greek text itself, then there are various editions available in Logos, most with their own introductory material which explains the rationale behind each textform.

    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!

  • There has been a little discussion on these forums about the Greek text in Logos that most closely aligns with the KJV text (e.g. http://community.logos.com/forums/p/18406/138623.aspx#138623). There's also been discussion on now reverse interlinears are created, although I'm afraid I couldn't find that.

    Wiki => http://wiki.logos.com/Logos_Speaks includes link => Original language sources for Reverse Interlinears and => Alignment of Reverse Interlinears

    An internet search:

    site:community.logos.com brannan reverse interlinear

    finds many results, including => http://community.logos.com/forums/p/54057/422098.aspx#422098

    Also found a 2010 thread => SBL Greek New Testament: What's Next?

    Keep Smiling [:)]

  • Myke Harbuck
    Myke Harbuck Member Posts: 1,646 ✭✭✭

    Hi Todd, if I may, let me ask a follow-up question to this post, even though it's been several years since it was added. If I wanted to do a search on the manuscript instead of the lemma that yielded the various visual graphs, charts, etc, (such as you can the the lemma in the translation wheel and usage graphs), can I do that? Seems to me one would rather be able to see the visuals on the actual manuscript word as opposed to the lemma, which is what logos seems to focus on in the Word Study feature and such. 

    Any wisdom on actual manuscript over lemma analysis would be greatly appreciated. 

    Thanks!

    Myke Harbuck
    Lead Pastor, www.ByronCity.Church
    Adjunct Professor, Georgia Military College

  • f I wanted to do a search on the manuscript instead of the lemma that yielded the various visual graphs, charts, etc, (such as you can the the lemma in the translation wheel and usage graphs), can I do that?

    Right click option for a lemma (or root) is Morph search, which has Analysis that allows grouping by Form and Result.  Hebrews 6:1 has a participle whose aorist active plural nominative masculine form occurs 15 times in the New Testament reverse interlinear for ESV with two places translated as "leave"

    Dreaming of Bible Word Study with morphological filtering so could see translation ring for nominative usage, ...

    Keep Smiling [:)]

  • Todd Phillips
    Todd Phillips Member Posts: 6,735 ✭✭✭

    Hi Todd, if I may, let me ask a follow-up question to this post, even though it's been several years since it was added. If I wanted to do a search on the manuscript instead of the lemma that yielded the various visual graphs, charts, etc, (such as you can the the lemma in the translation wheel and usage graphs), can I do that? Seems to me one would rather be able to see the visuals on the actual manuscript word as opposed to the lemma, which is what logos seems to focus on in the Word Study feature and such. 

    You can only do a Word Study on the lemma form. It would be nice if we could apply morphological filters to the word being studied.

    You can however search for the manuscript form using a Bible search in the search window.

    MacBook Pro (2019), ThinkPad E540

  • gralan
    gralan Member Posts: 5

    In my BTh studies I've found Apostolic Polygot and Brenton's to be helpful. I look forward to utilizing logos more and enjoy this discussion immensely. Thanks all!

    your fellow suffering servant,

    Gregory