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Tag: Lerna
Lerna: Hitler finds out that the Greek language has no more than 200000 words
Travelling as I am in the U.S., I’m going to be light on blogging here at Hellenisteukontos (well, even lighter than usual); any blogging I do is going to be travelogues in The Other Place (once I’m somewhere worth traveloguing about.) But I’ve just found out that Stazybo Horn, honoured member of Team Fortier who […]
Lerna: Epilogue
Καλοσωρίζω κάπως καθυστερημένα τους αναγνώστες του Βήματος που ενδεχομένως να βρέθηκαν σ’ αυτό το ιστολόγιο, και τους καλώ να εντρυφήσουν όσο τους βαστά στα νερά της Λέρνας… I never did close off the Lerna series of posts, on the count of lemmata of Greek and the urban legends that have grown around its misinterpretations. Part […]
Lerna VIIc: Variants
The various counts of lemmata that I’ve been putting out for the last while have made little mention of the difficulty in deciding whether two forms belong to variants of the same lemma, or distinct lemmata. The judgement call is difficult enough within a homogeneous language, with slight variations in derivational morphology. It’s even worse […]
Lerna VIIb: Lemma counts and proportion of text recognised
We can keep dredging lemmata up to move towards a target of 300,000. But of course for a living language, as Modern Greek now is and as Ancient Greek once was, there is no ceiling in lemmata: people can always make up new words, and do. And because dictionaries will never exhaust what words people […]
Lerna VIIa: Classical and Late vocabulary
Here, I’ll try making some sense of how the vocabularies of Greek have shifted between the corpora. This is where we got to. Lemmata Excluding Proper Names TLG + PHI #7 (viii-XVI, +tech +christ +inscr/pap) 214,381 172,646 TLG (viii–XVI, +tech +christ -inscr/pap) 201,823 162,009 LSJ Corpus (viii-VI, +tech -christ +inscr/pap) 159,636 124,215 Mostly Pagan (viii–IV, […]
Lerna VId: A correction of lemma counts
Last post had its share of egg on my face, showing systematic overcounts of word forms in the corpora. This post is another healthy serving of omelette, correcting the lemma counts given in Lerna VIa. The overall story is: There are less distinct word forms in the PHI #7 corpus than I thought There are […]
Lerna VIc: A correction of word form counts
This post fixes counts given in Lerna Va and Lerna Vb, with corrected counts from the PHI #7 disc—and a couple of weeks’ work on the archaic dialects and proper names of the PHI #7 corpus. I’ve also fixed several errors in how I was counting forms as unique. The end result is that the […]
Lerna VIb: A derailing of lemma counts
You may have noticed an extended radio silence for the last couple of weeks in the series counting lemmata. The people at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, where the good fight against Lerna is fought, know why: I found some problems in the way I was counting lemmata in the inscriptions and papyrus corpus (PHI […]
Lerna VIa: For Zeus’ Sake, How Many Words?
[Counts in this post have been corrected in Lerna VId] At long last, after nine posts of teasing, will I finally give the punters a count of lemmata of Greek? Why yes. Yes I will. And then for a change, I will also set to work inflating it, to extrapolate from the current corpus and […]
Lerna Vb: Forms of Good Pedigree
[Counts in this post have been corrected in Lerna VIc] In the last post, we did some pruning of the word form count of our corpora, and came up with some numbers. We also noted that, once you pruned away the 137 forms of ἀνήρ, you’re still left with 42 forms of ἀνήρ. (Did I […]