Lexical forms

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alanmacall
Posts: 15
Joined: January 9th, 2017, 2:45 pm

Lexical forms

Post by alanmacall »

I was interested to read in the below link some comments from learned individuals saying that it would be better to have the lexical turn as the aorist infinitive rather what we normally find of present active indicative 1S. But they don't say why. Why might the aorist infinitive be better?

The grammars and other reference texts I have used all use the first person singular PAI.
Alan
A beginner trying to self learn Greek
Robert Emil Berge
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Joined: August 24th, 2016, 1:34 pm

Re: Lexical forms

Post by Robert Emil Berge »

I'm sorry, but you seem to have forgotten to include the link.

I'm trying to think of a good reason for using an aorist infinitive (often there are several), but I can't. A not so good reason would be that you then would see what type of aorist the verb has, but you would lose a lot of information which the 1st person present offers, like the present stem and whether it is a -o or -mi verb. But of course, you need to know all the principle parts in order to conjugate a verb.
alanmacall
Posts: 15
Joined: January 9th, 2017, 2:45 pm

Re: Lexical forms

Post by alanmacall »

Apologies, I did indeed forget the link. They were in the comments section at the bottom of this page...

https://koine-greek.com/2008/12/30/koin ... /#comments
Alan
A beginner trying to self learn Greek
RandallButh
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Re: Lexical forms

Post by RandallButh »

alanmacall wrote:I was interested to read in the below link some comments from learned individuals saying that it would be better to have the lexical turn as the aorist infinitive rather what we normally find of present active indicative 1S. But they don't say why. Why might the aorist infinitive be better?

The grammars and other reference texts I have used all use the first person singular PAI.
Some reference works have used infinitives as citation forms, like the Septuagint Concordanceby Hatch and Redpath.

The aorist infinitive makes a nice starting point as being the most semantically neutral form of a verb φιλησαι αγαπησαι αξιωσαι.
Of course, it is nice to add the continuative infinitive in order to see the class of verb φιλειν αγαπαν αξιουν.
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Lexical forms

Post by Jonathan Robie »

alanmacall wrote:Apologies, I did indeed forget the link. They were in the comments section at the bottom of this page...

https://koine-greek.com/2008/12/30/koin ... /#comments
Rod put it well in those comments:
Thanks for your gracious words Mike. As for your hope of a reader using a “vocabulary beginning with the aorist infinitive”–I understand that sentiment! At times I’ve even dreamed and schemed as to how to pull that off. But what always brings me back to reality is that ALL modern tools (grammars, lexicons, etc) use the PAI as the lexical form rather than AAN. This has not always been true; many older works give the lexical form with the infinitive (but usually PAN rather than AAN). It also seems more common in the British tradition. I’m not sure how helpful it would be to students to learn one form, as technically sound as it might be on some grounds, but then use tools built on another paradigm. What I’ve done instead in my *teaching* (though not in the Reader) is to have students learn the actual gloss of a PAI verb (e.g., λυω, I am loosing) rather than learn the PAI lexical form with an English infinitive gloss, e.g., λυω, to loose (which is how many others do it).
I agree with both Randall and Rod. If you had to learn only two forms of a given verb, the present infinitive and aorist infinitive give you an awful lot of morphological information. For many verbs, it's all you need. But for some verbs it's still not enough.

I have toyed with using present infinitive for headwords, and listing both present and aorist infinitive for a verb in a lexicon. But I suspect I really want all the principal parts, at least for some verbs.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
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