one more difficult word from JACT Reading Greek

Greek Learning Greek
1

Well, I have worked on this problem I will present here and I can’t solve it. I have learned that it does take some concentration and something like detective work to figure some things out. (I am glad I posted today; I have learned I must slow down. But that said, Section 9 of the JACT Reading Greek text is pretty well loaded with grammar and I will act accordingly, i.e., slow down.)

But my bothersome word is on line 11 of 9-B. The word is:

εδει

I can’t figure it out from the context. There is a relative pronoun: ἂσ (fem. plural accusative) and I think I get the meanings of the other words in the sentence but I still can’t get εδει from the context. So if I guess and that is not a good thing to do but if I guess, I say εδει is a form of a past tense for ‘it is obligatory’ (plus accusative plus infinitive). But that is not a good thing to do, to guess like that. I don’t see any other verb that εδει can be related to. I think I will rest after this. Thanks again for any help. I’ll keep working on it.

2

Nothing wrong with guessing, so long as the guess fits. And your guess is a good one: ἔδει is the imperfect of δεῖ.

3

Thank you, mwh! I still can’t find that imperfect form of ‘obligatory’ in the grammar but it must be there somewhere!

(edited to replace ‘aorist’ by ‘imperfect’)

I close the day on a high note. And that means close the book.

I missed the earlier weak aorist problem. I never went the extra yard to try to figure it out. But I learned.

The relative pronouns are quite difficult so I will spend more time on them.

I won’t be joining in on any ‘upper level’ conversations any time soon. But I am persevering. This was a goal of sorts for quite some time, to learn ancient Greek, and I am persevering.

Last note: I think JACT is very good but it can be a bit troublesome, finding definitions in the vocabularies. I have ordered the Oxford dictionary of ancient Greek, which will help.