aorist passive participles in Josephus

[danzac]

I've noticed in a few spots in the tagged Josephus model what appears to be incorrect tagging, but perhaps I am wrong and need to learn a little bit more

 

If you look at War 6:47, the word nosousi is parsed as VERB aorist passive participle neuter plural dative

 

as far as I can tell this is a present active. This is not the only place that this happens- the verse before pesousin is parsed as VERB aorist active participle masculine plural dative, but again it looks like a present. Each time, the characteristic ?? is not present.

 

I went a little further and searched for aorist passive participles in Josephus's War, and when I scroll through the hits in the analysis window, the majority of them don't look like aorist passives at all, again there is no ?? present.

 

Is this a mistake? Is this characteristic of Josephus Greek? Or do I just need to go study my Greek charts some more?

 

Danny

[Marco V. Fabbri]

Danny,

 

you are right in noting that the Joseph-T tagging of verb voices is faulty. We should keep in mind that it is a huge corpus, and that tagging it has been a huge accomplishment. I think it will take some years for it to be refined and meet the standard of, say, GNT-T.

 

I know that all too well, as I have helped to revise the tagging of Philo-T, which about as big a module as Joseph-T. That is a work in progress, too. But the great thing is that this is the first time that the whole parsed corpus of these authors is available.

 

I think the authors of the tagging will welcome any suggestion of yours. That particular module has not been tagged directly by scholars working for OakTree. I personally know Aletti and Gieniusz, the two scholars involved, and I very much appreciate their effort.

 

If you send your suggestions to Rex Koivisto, the scholar that prepares most of the Greek modules, he can forward the corrections to Aletti and Gieniusz. I could do that, too, but I would suggest to address Rex first, as he already sent in a lot of corrections to Joseph-T.

 

It's an interesting form of cooperation of the world community that studies the original texts of the Bible or related to the Bible.

 

I think I can cooperate, too, by elaborating further on the texts that you quoted.

 

If you look at War 6:47, the word nosousi is parsed as VERB aorist passive participle neuter plural dative. as far as I can tell this is a present active.

You are right, it's present active from NOSEW. This is a good instance of a mistake that should be corrected. The same mistake is apparent in War 7:184.

 

the verse before pesousin is parsed as VERB aorist active participle masculine plural dative, but again it looks like a present

 

This is found in War 6:53, but it is correctly tagged. It's second aorist, that has no SIGMA. The ndicative is EPESON.

 

I went a little further and searched for aorist passive participles in Josephus's War, and when I scroll through the hits in the analysis window, the majority of them don't look like aorist passives at all, again there is no ?? present

 

I suppose you typed in THETA where I read question marks. Yes, you are right, many forms are listed there that are not passive at all.

 

So, while you can assume that the parsing of GNT-T is correct, you can't do the same when searching Joseph-T. They are refining it, and it will improve over the time.

 

I would like to add that this is the strongest reason to upgrade to new releases of the Scholar's CD, whenever they are offered. Even if you don't unlock any new module, if you do a standard install, the installer substitutes the updated version of the modules that you are already using.

 

I hope this helps. Ah, and if you find mistakes in Philo, please write to Rex or to me.

 

Marco

[danzac]

now there's an answer!! Thanks Marco. I had assumed that this had been noticed already, but you may pass on this to Rex if you think appropriate- I don't have any contact info for him.

 

And please don't take my questioning and critique as dislike- I couldn't agree with you more about the rich resource and massive undertaking that it was (and is).

 

Danny

[Marco V. Fabbri]

I will write to Rex, then.

 

If you want to do that, you can find his address in the "readme first" of many tagged Greek modules. I am not posting it here just because of the danger of spam.

 

No need to worry about your criticism: you submitted suggestions that will help.

 

Marco

[Marco V. Fabbri]

Danny,

 

I have heard from Rex and I can now confirm that we (you and I, not Rex ) are both using Joseph-T 1.0. There were more than ea dozen active participles that were wrongly tagged as passive.

 

In version 1.1, released in January 2006, the active participles are tagged correctly. We can fix that when we order the next CD, that will have the updated module, and perform a standard install.

 

 

Marco