is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

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daivid
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is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

Post by daivid »

jeidsath wrote:This isn't really advice for daivid, but for new learners approaching this thread. Perseus is a bad resource when you don't recognize a verb form. It may work (if you're lucky), but it doesn't really help you on to recognizing the next one. Hylander has already parsed these, but here is some method for attacking these kinds of words:
.
I think it was advice for me (but not just for me) but I appreciate how you (knowing my fragile self-confidence in relation to Greek) put it so diplomatically.

When people do things that appear to be self-defeating they often have good reasons for doing those things that make sense if you look at the situation they are actually in rather than where they ideally should be .

When I read a sentence of Xenophon or even an easier writer like Diodorus, just handling the new vocabulary and the syntax is as much as my brain can handle and if I try and add in the strategy you suggest I just get a complete failure to process (to use Markos' phrase).

There are options.

Claxton's book is very conventional but really takes grammar-translation to the ultimate. Because of that it works. She explains the syntax in such exhaustive detail that I am able to at least attempt to do the processing you suggest. (I have even used it to fill in the time in the middle of the night when I wake up for an hour and the computer is out of reach.)

I think you are able to use the strategy you propose because of your extensive reading. If had made reading part of my daily routine from the very beginning I think I would be now in a much better place. In is very hard to make it a regular habit when you have already become discouraged,

The verb test (the one which I have put online) is something that is part of my daily routine. I suspect the reason I manage that is because even very slow progress is visible which keeps me motivated. Is it the best way to learn verb forms? I'm not sure but if I stopped doing it I am unlikely to use the time for studying Greek in other ways and I do think it is more useful than nothing at all.

There is another easy reader that I have not yet tried:Elementary Greek Translation by A. E. Hillard, C.G. Botting
I was going to buy it with Claxton but the book seller I was using didn't have it so it will be on the list the next time I order books.

Finally Perseus does work most of the time. The most serious problem I find is when it gives too many results not the rare cases when it gives none at all.

EDIT
When I am mention "extensive reading" I was talking about reading aloud. Even when one's Greek is too shaky to fully understand what one is reading it does seem to be helpful to do this. (If you have already read http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-foru ... =2&t=64512 you probably knew what I had in mind).
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Dante
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Re: is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

Post by Dante »

TLG does a more consistent (but not perfect) job parsing, they have more choices of lexica, and their version of LSJ is formatted much better:

http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/Iris/demo/browser.jsp

(you may have to register but its free)

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jeidsath
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Re: is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

Post by jeidsath »

What I've been doing lately, is to say the related tenses of whatever verb I run into reading (and look them up if I need to). What I mean by related tenses, is to keep person, mood, voice, and number, all fixed, and rotate through the tenses. For the indicative, I stick with either principal or historical tenses.

For example, if I see ἔχει while reading, I say aloud ἔχει, ἕξει, σχήσει***, ἔσχηκε. (active indicative present, future 1 and future 2, perfect.)

If I come across ἐλείφθην: ἐλείπομην, ἐλείφθην, ἐλελείμμην. (passive indicative imperfect, aorist, pluperfect)

For moods, etc., I just go through all of the primary tenses (present, future, aorist, perfect), rather than sticking to principal or historical.

If you go through this exercise for a while, you'll find that you won't need Perseus nearly as much before long.

*** The LSJ says: "σχήσω (of momentary action, esp. in sense check, v. infr. A. 11.9, not found in Att. Inscrr. or NT)." Is he trying to suggest that σχήσω may be a literary/grammatical invention?
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

Joel Eidsath -- jeidsath@gmail.com

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rmedinap
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Re: is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

Post by rmedinap »

There are actually more precise (but sadly slow and relatively expensive) ways to deal with unusual forms.

I always try to make my students learn (slowly, and with examples of actual texts) the usual lists of verbs that come at all the good grammars (Like Smyth's List of Verbs, Zinsmeister's Alphabetisches Verbalverzeichnis, Adolf Kaegis' Repetitionstabellen zur kurzgefaßten griechischen Schulgrammatik, Zuntz's Summa Grammatica and the like.) And then drill them till exhaustion with the last 10-12 lessons of Zuntz's Lehrgang which focus on the most weird verbal forms that come about relatively often in texts (note that the last 20 or so lessons dedicate a very long space to verbal forms in general).

But there's always that one weird verb form you find while reading that leaves you puzzled. I do not disapprove at all of Perseus or any parser whatsoever, but precisely to avoid the creation of dependency I break my sacred rule of no dictionaries (assuming of course that by now they have learned to dislike the use of the dictionary as much as I do) and have them look for the form in one (or many) of the following materials and memorize the passage with the verb in question).

Assuming you don't have a students commentary like Cameron's Thucydides Book I: A Students' Grammatical Commentary or a even better, a special Index like Stork's Index of Verb Forms in Thucydides for the text you are working on, there are many good verb-form dictionaries out there that one can rely on:

+The biggest and most comprehensive is John J. Bodoh's Index of Greek verb forms.

+Nino Marinone's All the Greek Verbs.

+Georg Traut's Lexikon über die Formen der griechischen Verba. There's a free (but old) version here.

+William Veitch's Greek verbs, irregular and defective.

daivid
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Re: is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

Post by daivid »

rmedinap wrote: I always try to make my students learn (slowly, and with examples of actual texts) the usual lists of verbs that come at all the good grammars
I do back up my technique of using an online verb-form test with examples. When I keep getting a form wrong I search for a sentence with that specific form. However, as these tend to be sentences stripped of context I can only manage a few at a time. In a sense I'm using the verb test as a way of picking out those forms that need extra work. However, night before last during one of my middle of night periods of wakefulness I encountered (while reading Claxton's book) 2 forms which I would never have recognized in the past but this time I recognized on sight entirely down to the test. So I am encourage that my test has some value even though time consuming.

Nevertheless, I still think lots of graded readers that concentrated on various rare form would be the best and most efficient way of learning forms. When I say "concentrated" I mean stories that are written to repeat a limited number of tricky forms so often that the readers brain truly absorbs them.
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Re: is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

Post by Hylander »

To my eternal and unendurable shame, I have to confess that I used the Perseus Word Study Tool to find a form that should have been obvious in these lines from Euripides' Hippolytus (403-4):

ἐμοὶ γὰρ εἴη μήτε λανθάνειν καλὰ
μήτ᾽ αἰσχρὰ δρώσῃ μάρτυρας πολλοὺς ἔχειν.

The word that stumped me was δρώσῃ.

But

γλώσσῃ γὰρ οὐδὲν πιστόν, ἣ . . .
αὐτὴ δ᾽ ὑφ᾽ αὑτῆς πλεῖστα κέκτηται κακά.

And now that αἰσχρὰ δρως μάρτυρας πολλοὺς ἔχω,

κατθανεῖν ἔδοξέ μοι,
κράτιστον — οὐδεὶς ἀντερεῖ — βουλευμάτων.

Farewell, everyone.
Bill Walderman

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Re: is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

Post by mwh »

I can think of more shameful things.

But that speech of Phaedra’s in the Hippolytus does provide an affirmative answer to the question of the thread (as well as serving as a reminder to heed accents):
δουλοῖ γὰρ ἄνδρα, κἂν θρασύσπλαγχνός τις ᾖ.

But then,
ἃ χρήστ’ ἐπιστάμεσθα καὶ γιγνώσκομεν
οὐκ ἐκπονοῦμεν, οἱ μὲν ἀργίας ὕπο, …

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Re: is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

Post by Hylander »

νῦν δ᾽ ἐννοοῦμαι φαῦλος ὤν, εν γαρ βροτοῖς
αἱ δεύτεραί πως φροντίδες σοφώτεραι.

I'm still here.
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Re: is looking up words on perseus on dependency forming?

Post by jk0592 »

About two or three years ago, the perseus site was very difficult to load in navigator, so I lost interest in using it. I prefer using pdf versions of dictionaries, or even paper copies of them. it has not created a dependency here!
Jean K.

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