pster wrote:Very good. Very promising. This is very exciting! OK, just a few more questions.
1) Why is it Pass. and not Med.?
I assume you are referring to κεκλάγξομαι? Personally, if I had been compiling the lexicon I would have been wary of documenting a passive form unless I had seen at least one instance where there was an agent construct (ὑπό + gen.). And, I would be very suspicious of declaring a passive of an intransitive verb. I'm going to reiterate my idea that here we have a perfect with present meaning, and so the future perfect form carries an ordinary future sense. Further, like so many verbs related to the senses, perception, etc. the future has a middle/passive form but active meaning.
Here is an interesting passage from
A Companion to Homer, edited by Wace and Stubbings, 1962. Chapter 4,
The Language of Homer is by L. R. Palmer and is nearly 100 pages long. At the bottom of page 145 he writes:
L. R. Palmer wrote:There remains to be mentioned one peculiarity of the Homeric language—the tendency of verbs expressing perception to take on the middle form, e.g., ὁρῶμαι, ἀκούομαι. Such a usage underlines the interest of the subject in the action, and it may be related with a still more widespread phenomenon of the Greek verbal system—the tendency for the future tenses to appear in the middle voice. This is doubtless due to the fact that future formation have developed from expressions of will and wish, where it was natural for the interest of the subject to be stressed.
He also mentions that there were a number of instances of reduplicated futures, which were independent of the reduplicated aorists and perfects. (p. 123) Now, it's quite a jump from Homer to Aristophanes but I bet that some of these old tendencies were very much still in use at the later date.
So why did LSJ identify the form as passive? (Note that it doesn't use the special future perfect passive endings which probably accounts for its identification as future, rather than future perfect.) The truth is, I'm not really sure. The cited passage is obviously an active usage, or perhaps a middle with a reflexive sense. This might just have been their conventional way of labeling such forms. I guess that I'll have to compare this article with enough other verb articles to see if a stable pattern emerges.
pster wrote:2) I am looking at the entry for καταβοάω.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/mor ... w0#lexiconHow are we to understand the missing numbers and letters in the outline? Is it just their convention that A. is understood to stand for A. I. 1.? The first element of a subsection doesn't need to be separated from the supersection? I guess that is it.
When I look at the paper edition, there is no initial A. in any of the entries. That is an artifact of the Perseus project's digital conversion of the book. Also, half the article after the 2. is missing. (I tried viewing it with two different browsers and with various settings, but it always ended with "2. Pass., to be loudly entreated, Nic.Dam.4J.". There are several more citations and a II. and III. section missing.
Since none of the articles has an initial 1. or I. (or even A.) it seems likely that such labels were omitted as being superfluous. Obviously, every article has to begin with a 1. or I. and since many articles don't require additional subsections, they simply omitted them all. Your conjecture seems spot on. As for the precise distinction between a 2. or II., for example, I can't always tell. Sometimes they are trying to show sense variations, sometimes they are trying to show variations of syntax (verbs accompanied by different cases for the objects, or prepositional phrases, or infinitives, or participles, etc.) Sometimes they are trying to show variant meanings associated with the various voices and/or moods. In short, it would have been a great help if they had included a definition of the structure of their articles.
pster wrote:3) Also, they use question marks, dashes, and circumflexes in the actual headwords. What do they mean?
E.g., προσα^γωγ-ός
I don't have a question mark one handy, but there are plenty of them.
In the paper version, that is not a full headword at all but is buried in a dense thicket of citations and varying senses under προσᾰγωγ-εῖον, which is a carpenter's square!.
The circumflex is Perseus's way of representing a breve (the upward curving arc indicating a short vowel), as you can see in the way I entered the headword. Not all fonts include the breve, especially not precombined with Greek letters. The same thing happens with the macron (the straight line indicating a long vowel) so Perseus uses an underscore to indicate one. (e.g., Dor. κέκλα_γα from the κλάζω article). I believe the dashes in the headword, as in your example, show where the word can be divided for the purposes of morphological formations. So, in the paper version, there is a wide gap followed by
-ός, όν,
attractive, persuasive,. The bold type indicates a headword which the reader is obviously meant to construct from the main headword up to the dash followed by the indicated ending. The folks at Perseus opted to unroll this form of compression and create a separate headword. I don't recall seeing a question mark in an entry (and the paper version certainly doesn't have any) but when you come across one, post it here where we can puzzle through it together.
Up through about Unicode 4.0 (I think) there were no glyphs defined that had a breve or macron combined with an accent or breathing mark. If you look at Mastronarde's book, he was forced to show the length of such vowels by writing it with just the breve or macron in square brackets after the word in the vocabulary lists. Just to pick one at random, Unit sixteen has "κωλύω [ῠ] hinder, prevent (+ acc. + inf.)". Mastronarde was part of the group working on defining the Greek symbol part of the Unicode standard and getting fonts created with the necessary glyphs.
pster wrote:I am going through verbs now and checking your hypothesis for consistency.
Thanks a lot for the insight.
You're most welcome. But, oh boy, my goose is cooked now! FWIW, I have struggled myself with these same questions and have generally come to have a love-hate relationship with LSJ. One has to take note of the fact that it was begin in the 1840s but based on older work, went through more than one period of dormancy, had about four principal editors and several assistants, collected all those citations on paper slips, in a manner similar to the OED, and in the end, the last principal editor still did not live to see its completion very nearly one hundred years after it was begun. (This is all in the preface in the paper edition.)
Personally, I would love to know more about how they went about working out the meanings. Cognates are not always reliable and usually don't offer much help with nuances. There are some glossaries written in antiquity, and the various works of the ancient grammarians, but I'll bet that a lot of the senses are carefully guessed at based on context and they choose an English word that 'works' in a translation of a given passage. I see the same thing in Cunliffe's Homeric lexicon. Maybe I should start a new thread on this topic. It's not really restricted to producing a bilingual lexicon or dictionary of Ancient Greek, but applies to just about any form of lexicography. I starting looking for any good books on the subject but haven't really seen anything that I like so far.
Well, enough blathering for now.
Cheers.
Those wasps definitely have a sharp sting!
. (I've used an image of the word since the default font for the Textkit site can't show these extra glyphs.)
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