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Category: Ancient Greek
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 […]
Lerna II: Definitions
I’ve started a series of posts on counting words in Greek (see: Lerna I). This is the kind of thing that revokes your linguistics cabal membership card, so I have to add that the posts are really about the journey to counting words, and the questions that come up along the way, rather than the […]
Lerna I: 5000 × 3 ≠ 8500
I mentioned in the other place the Lernaean text, which fulminates that Greek has 90 million words, and English a mere 490,000. The text, of course, comes from people who have seen the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae’s word counts, and can’t tell between a word count and a word list. Still, it’s a wonder DARPANET could […]
Analogy in third declension -ης nominals
If you’re blogging about language, and want a readership broader than two linguists to follow you, lexicon is easy to blog about: people get words. Grammar is harder to blog about: people get grammar only when they’ve been told they’re doing something wrong. And the operation of analogy on the declension of Ancient Greek—well, that’s […]
pessos and pinsus: a pedimental peculiarity
Sorry about that title. I promise not to do that too often. Over the last several months, I’ve been contributing translations to the Suda On Line project. (See writeup of project.) The Suda is a 10th century encyclopaedia cum dictionary, and often preserves information about Ancient Greece not available elsewhere. It also provides a lot […]
Dictionary coverage of Greek
There’s three and a half millenia of Greek lexicon out there. Of course, that’s three and a half millennia if you accept that Mycenaean is the same language as is spoken on Greece’s Got Talent—which demands a bit of looseness in when you deem a language to have become a different language. (And the distinction […]