Mastronarde, about a third of the time, gives English words derived from the Greek words as he introduces them, e.g., melanin, ontology. Does anybody know of a book that does this for a large number of words? I also want the Greek words to be spelled in Greek. There are plenty of vocabulary builder books with latin and greek roots but they usually have only around 100 roots and they usually use transliterations for the Greek. (Also, words are preferable to roots.) Maybe there is something 100 years old on archive.org?
Hi pster, I recall there is something along these lines for NT Greek. Metzger’s Lexical aids for students of New Testament Greek notes in the intro that it makes a special effort to give English derivatives. It says such derivatives are available (and gives them) for 45% of the words (see footnote 1 on p. 2). The Greek words are all in Greek, not transliterated, and you can borrow it from archive.org.
For classical Greek, the only example I can think of right now is a book in French I picked up in Paris years back: Fontoynont’s Vocabulaire grec; it’s probably not exactly what you want though. It gives texts with vocabularies (in Greek, not transliterated) and gives French derivatives where available, but it might not give you much more than Mastronarde.
The way these are actually presented for users in my software-generated pdf files depends on whether the word is in my 500-word list of core vocabulary. If it is, then it’s listed in the glossary of core vocab at the end of the book, e.g., “φέρω bring, carry ∼bear”. If it isn’t in the core list, then it’s on the per-page vocab in the same format.
All of this is set up for Homer, but the gloss files will also have a “perseus” field in cases where the Project Perseus lemma (usually Attic) differs from the Homeric form.
Although I enjoy doing this sort of stuff, and the word-study it entails, it is probably true that you reach a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly as you try to add more and more such cognates to the list. For example, I have “τίκτω beget ∼oxytocin,” but a lot of people don’t know what oxytocin is (although if you’ve had kids you’ve probably heard of pitocin). Often the cognates are not super close semantically, e.g., “πέτομαι to fly ∼petal,” but they’re good enough for constructing a pretty nice mnemonic. Some are pretty non-obvious phonetically, e.g., “εἶμι go, come ∼ion,” which I guess is from the participle or something.
The Metzger book seems nice. My only criticism would be that his presentation encourages you not to process things as compounds. E.g., συνέδριον is συν + hedron, as in polyhedron, but he shows it as cognate with Sanhedrin, which is just the Semitized version (and not familiar to most people). Also εὐσέβεια. He also seems to really want to find words whose forms are superficially similar to the Greek, like odontology instead of dentist.