What do you do when you encounter a verb difficult to find in the dictionary?
arne^sastho^ heauton kai arato^ ton stauron autou kath’ he^meran kai akoloutheito^ moi. let him deny himself and lift up the cross of himself daily and follow me.
I looked up dictionary for [arato^].
But I couldn’t find its entry.
There was [arao^] in the entry, which meant “pray”, a version of [araomai].
And I find in the grammar book that [ti^mao^] inflects like [ti^ma^to^] in the imperative sg.3, which resembles [arato^].
So I guessed the meaning of the sentence above like “let him deny himself and pray for the pain(cross) on himself every day…”.
But the interlinear has let him deny himself and lift up the cross of himself daily and follow me.
defining [arato^] as [airo^] (or haireo?).
So I looked up dictionary (the Liddel & Scott Intermediate) and see the entry, but I couldn’t find the imperative form.
So, there is nothing I can do further.
Please give me advice on what I should do in the circumstance like this.
I can’t fix my Internet Explorer to properly display polytonic Greek.
So if you type Greek sentences, please type in BetaCode or one near it.
I have Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista Home Premium, and I can see Greek fonts. From the IE menu, select View | Encoding. What is your encoding selection? I have “Unicode (UTF-8)”. Also, under Tools | Internet Options | General | Fonts, I have Times New Roman and Courier New. Hope this helps.
My copy of the Little Liddell lists ἆρον (a^ron) as the imperative 1st sg. of αἴρω (airo^).
I assume that you are reading the New Testament. A version with Strong or Goodrick-Kohlenberger numbers, and a matching concordance, would probably help immensely.
You may wish to get your hands on a little book called “Complete Handbook of Greek Verbs”. It alphabetically lists wellnigh every verb-form, so all you need to do is look up that specific form, and it indicates what verbform it is and the verb to which it belongs.
Caveat emptor. All the descriptive abbreviations are in Italian, although I understand from Amazon that some editions have a key to the abbreviations in English.
Junya, as with Whitaker’s Words and Latin, there are programs you can use online to parse verbs. Although Greek does not seem to have a program as efficient and free as Whitaker, the Perseus website is a reliable source.
Indeed, my book has a key to the abbreviations. But even if it didn’t, one shall not have much difficulty, for the abbreviations are 95% of the time the same as the English. I don’t know Italian, but it is easy enough to understand what aor. =aoristo, ind. = indicativo, imp. =imperativo, inf. = infinitivo, etc. mean.
Well, I guess I’m a bit too “traditional”. I do as my mother taught me: Check the ending to determine mood, person etc if it is not clear by context (in some cases of course I’ll have more than one possible answers but not all that many) . Check the beginning, determine if there are possible changes (esp. if it starts with a vowel. Make the necessary adjustments and check all possible entries.
The only problem with this of course is when you have an irregular verb and you haven’t memorised the necessary forms although usually you have enough data to scan through a few irregular verbs to find the right one. If I don’t ( ὁράω -ῶ [Hοράω- Hορ/ω] comes to mind for instance; you don’t know the different tenses, you are in trouble) then I ask, or, in this days, google the term, or go to Perseus.
my Intermediate too has the entry [a^ron].
But I wouldn’t be able to find [a^ron] entry from [arato^].
I want to know how you search out [a^ron].
Is it backed up by your thorough knowledge of inflection?
I read New Testament, as a training (I am using Greek-English Interlinear Bible). What I really want to read is philosophical texts.
thank you about the “Complete Handbook Of Greek Verbs”.
I have a copy of “All The Greek Verbs” by the same author Marinone.
Is this book (that I have) helps?
I have never used it since the day I bought it, because I wanted to try learning Greek without the help of it.
I use Perseus sometimes,
but my computer is set in the living room,
so when my family members are there, and watching tv or talking with each other,
I can’t study there and can’t use the computer for study…
So I can’t rely on the computer very much for my study.
I’m doing in the same way as you.
So, the conclusion is that when I have nothing to do after all that process you said, I have no other choice but to ask others or go to Perseus or use Marinone?
I don’t have a thorough knowledge of inflections (or I wouldn’t have mistakenly said that [a^ron] is the imperative 1st person singular. It’s the 2nd; I don’t think there is a 1st. Oops. And I forgot to say that it’s the 1st aorist imperative.). I just looked up [airo^] after I saw it in your post. [a^ron] is listed under the entry for [airo^] as the 1st aorist imperative in both my copy of Little Liddell and my PDF copy of the Intermediate Liddell/Scott.
But, to try to answer your question of how I would try to find the answer if you hadn’t already given it to me… I suppose I would have started with the ending [-ato^]. Then I could look here (or in a grammar book) to try to find this ending. The 8th selection on the verb chart in the web page (here) would tell me that [-ato^] is a 1st aorist imperative active 3rd person singular ending. Then I would change the ending to 2nd person singular [-on], based on the chart, to get [a^ron]. Then I would have a word I could look up in my lexicon, hoping that I get lucky.
Lex,
that’s what I wanted to hear, the way you actually search for a word using grammar chart as well as dictionary.
Basically I do the same,
but the method is not established in me yet, so I sometimes do as you do, but sometimes completely forget to do so.
I wrote: I read New Testament, as a training (I am using Greek-English Interlinear Bible). What I really want to read is philosophical texts.
Lex wrote: Which philosophers are you interested in?
Aristotle and the commentators on his book “Peri Psyche^s”.
I have translated Latin commentaries on “De Anima (=Peri Psyche^s)” into Japanese for about a year and a half.
Starting from Aquinas, then Averroes in Latin, Philoponos in Latin, Themistius in Latin, and some others available on the internet.
I think I’m better than scholars as a translator, because scholars’ translations are incoherent as usual, while I care much about coherency.
I also want to read Plotinus, whose books’ translations are so incoherent that I can’t understand at all.
My ambition is to make coherent, understandable, readable translations of those philosophers.
I’m lucky. My current focus is on Homer’s Iliad, and I have found a version of the Iliad that lists the lexical form of all words, plus morphological information.
Mounce’s Greek/English NT might be of similar use to you; it has “morphological tags” on all the words, I believe. I found a used copy of his Reverse English/Greek NT that does, anyway, but you probably wouldn’t want the Reverse one. For example, under the word [dedotai] it has v.rpi.3s (which decodes to verb, perfect passive indicative, 3rd person singular) and 1443 (a G/K concordance number so you can look up the lexical form).
Wow. I am having trouble learning one foreign language, and you’re dealing with three (including learning Greek from English books).
If you don’t mind me asking, are you referring more to Japanese or English translations that you want to improve on? What is the state of the translation of the classics and philosophy into Japanese? Are many Japanese interested in Latin or Greek, or Western literature/philosophy/medieval era? I imagine it might correspond to Westerners’ knowledge of Japanese philosophy, literature, and history: just a few specialists and enthusiasts here and there.
I have never used it since the day I bought it, because I wanted to try learning Greek without the help of it.
Well, why did you even buy it then?
Even after studying Greek for quite a time I still find moments of ignorance or forgetfulness, therefore I ended up buying that little book. Whenever I use it is as helpful as it seems meant to be and allows me not to be delayed too long from reading something for struggling to find out an uncouth verbform.
If you like Perseus, try Diogenes – it has the Perseus tools but installs locally on your computer. It will do morphological searches and will give you the full dictionary definitions. Does Latin, too, not just Greek. Of course it doesn’t have any of the Perseus texts or anything (other than dictionaries), but for looking up stuff it’s great because it’s so fast. Doesn’t solve the problem about needing to be at a computer, though. Maybe I can get it to run on my phone…
And I forgot to say that it’s the 1st aorist imperative.). I just looked up [airo^] after I saw it in your post. [a^ron] is listed under the entry for [airo^] as the 1st aorist imperative in both my copy of Little Liddell and my PDF copy of the Intermediate Liddell/Scott.
