question from Basics of Biblical Greek (by Dr Mounce)

[Jonna Schmidt]

7.14 Alternate first declension pattern. There are 36 first declension words in the New Testament that shift their final stem vowel in the genitive and dative singular from alpha to eta. Only four of these words occur with any frequency (see MBG, n-1c; see MBG for an explanation of this coding).

 

nom sg do/xa nom pl do/xai

gen sg do/xhß gen pl doxw◊n

dat sg do/xhØ dat pl do/xaiß

 

acc sg do/xan acc pl do/xaß

 

_____

 

Here is my question: and bear in mind: I own Morphology of Biblical -- so I am not trying to avoid purchase of the book!  Is there a way that I can do a search in Accordance that would yield these 36-first declension words?

 

Thanks for any help.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hi Jonna,

 

  I am prompted to ask what the purpose of searching for them is. The reason being that it might influence your choice of technique.

 

  If you just want to see how they are all used in the wild so to speak, then the simplest search is to cut and paste the 38 (MBG says 38, BBG 36 - not sure why) examples into a search list in a text search tab.

 

  If you want to see if you can find them without knowing them beforehand but knowing the morphological rule (from MBG) perhaps you can do something like : *?(-ειρ)α@ [noun fem nom]. This will you some mismatches mostly in proper nouns. If you exclude them you'll get thirteen hit only two being false positive. Part of the problem is that you cannot express the genitive condition "and a genitive in ης." properly, that where the nom is as described. In addition the genitive is not always present - Πρίσκα for example only occurs in the nom and acc. Misses such as μεμβρανα are due to the fact that the nom does not appear though the acc does and the @[nom] excludes it. Hmmm.... so *?(-ειρ)α@ [NOUN feminine] nets a lot more hits with correspondingly higher number of false positives.

 

Thx

D

[Ken Simpson]

Or use a construct like this.

 

 

As Daniel points out, we get some false hits of the loan words like Ἱεροσόλυμα and Ταβιθά which don’t decline at all, and certainly don’t decline to a genitive in ης. But, if we look for the gentives in ης, then we only find those that actually occur with ης in the NT, which is only 11 forms. Far better to get the larger list and sort through them. You could limit the search to proper nouns and then search through a much smaller list.

 

This was lots of fun to think about. Thanks for the challenge :-)

 

(I experimented with the positive as well. The specific category of 1st declension feminine nouns has a preterminal letter that is a “double-sound” ψ ζ θ or a "double-letter”. So you can search for  ψξ and double letters σσ λλ but that was getting pretty complex, so using Dr Mounce’s “definition” then cutting them down by hand made more sense.)

[Jonna Schmidt]

I forgot to thank you both! Yes: my goal was to be able to "generate the list on my own". Thank you so much

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Your very welcome. Thx D.