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Day: June 5, 2009
Lerna IIId: Why we do not count lemmata
Now, the whole point of any word counting venture, such as Lerna attempts and gets galumphingly wrong, is not the corpus size, which is contingent and always less than infinity; nor is it the number of word forms, which tells you about morphological happenstance but not about vocabularies. When people talk about words, they mean […]
Lerna IIIc: Why the Greek scales are rigged
Even if you allow for the fact that Greek is flexional and has lots of inflections, a literary corpus of Greek is going to have a lot more morphological variety than most other literary languages. That doesn’t tell you something about the superiority of the Greek language. But it does tell you a bit about […]
Lerna IIIb: Why we do not count word forms
Greek is a flexional language: it’s not English. A single noun can have 11 different inflections. A single adjective can have 23 inflections. A single verb? I’ll throw in the second aorist as well as the first, though I really shouldn’t—verbs mostly had just one aorist at a time. I’ll be generous, we’ll call it […]
Lerna IIIa: Why we do not count word instances
This blogpost in the ongoing thread on the Lernaean Text and counting words in Greek (see Lerna II, Lerna I) may be misdirected to the readership of this blog. It goes through basic notions in linguistics that some of you will be familiar enough with to be annoyed at. And given how the Lernaean text […]