cwconrad wrote:TimNelson wrote:Regarding the glosses, I suspect Nigel is asking "whence cometh the database".
Also, it might be useful to be able to annotate a work with all words that occur less than eg. 10 times in *another* work. For example, suppose I know all words that occur more than 10x in the New Testament (alas, I'm not there yet), and wanted to read Xenophon's Anabasis. I'd be able to get a version of the Anabasis which footnotes all words occurring less than 10x in the NT. That could be handy. That's not an "in a hurry" feature, just a "nice to have".
That sounds a bit odd; it does make me wonder how predictable it is that one will turn from any one item in Greek literature to any other item in Greek literature. I suppose that most BG participants who go on to read other Greek texts do start out with the GNT. I did too, but that was an accident; the following year I was reading Homer and then went on the year after that to read Aristotle and Sophocles. I would think that implementation of such a feature would require some sort of calculation of what's most likely to be read next. How random might that be? Consider the thread Stephen Hughes has started on what to read after Xenophon's
Oeconomicus?
Carl, what I'm suggesting here is that the user interface make it possible, when selecting a work, to choose another work (or works plural, as Jonathan seems to be suggesting) for which you already know vocabulary, and then footnote any vocabulary the user doesn't know. This would be done dynamically and computer-generated. This is not a perfect system, but it would be a nice feature to have. So it would also be possible to generate a similar list for the NT once someone has read, for example, Homer and Xenophon.
Jonathan Robie wrote:
And perhaps each principal part should be treated as a separate word for this purpose? That's a thought I've been toying with ...
Interesting idea. In my first year of Greek, the lecturer finished the basic textbook (Wenham, in 2011, when it was out-of-print - I think we were the last class in the world using it), and went on to teach from Wallace (in particular, the meanings of the cases and tenses). Actually, it wasn't from Wallace, it was from material that our lecturer had developed himself before Wallace's textbook was written. I found this frustrating, because it felt like I was trying to go from the first floor to the third floor, and the second-floor landing was missing. I eventually figured out that the missing piece was derivational morphology (for the non-linguists, this means prefixes and suffixes that turn words into other words, like the prepositional prefixes (εἰσ-έρχομαι) or some of the suffixes (ἔργον + -της = ἐργάτης)), so I ended up doing a project unit on this. It also means I've spent a fair bit of time wrapping my head around verb morphology, at least as far as forms go (funtion is a different matter). It seems to me that, once you've learned λύω (thematic), δίδωμι (athematic), and the suppletives (verbs derived from multiple roots; there are 9 of these in the NT), most of the rest should be easily inferrable.
Or are you separating them not because of the potential confusion about forms, but because of a perceived difference in meaning?