Search – I seem to be doing something incorrectly

[Julia Falling]

Here's what I want to do:  find all the infinitives in the NT that do not end in -ειν or -αι.

 

The first tab was simple — [VERB infinitive],  I get 2291 hits in 1794 verses.  A quick review of the results (and displaying only the inflected forms in analytics) shows that the majority of infinitives end in -ειν or -αι.

 

I thought the best thing to do next was to subtract out the hits *ειν and *αι:   [HITS=i NA28 Greek NT] <NOT> (*ειν,*αι).  This gives me 372 hits, but most of them still end in -ειν or -αι.

 

There is either something wrong in my understanding of the commands or something wrong with my logic (or both?).

 

 

 

 

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hi Julie,

 

Don't you want something like [VERB infin]@-*eiv ?

I'm nowhere I can test this right now so sorry if that is way off.

 

thx

D

Edited July 28, 2015 by Daniel Semler

[Joel Brown]

Julie, remember the difference between @ and :

 

@ specifies this condition applies to the same word (what you are looking for).

 

specifies that this item should not appear in the same scope, by default verse.

[Ken Simpson]

Hi Julie, Daniel is on the right track, but not quite there. You need to add quotation marks to show only those inflected forms which do not have the ειν ending. So it looks like this:

 

[verb inf] @-"*ειν"

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Those pesky quotes Thanx Ken.

 

The full thing should be this : [VERB infin]@-"*ειν"@-"*αι"

 

But you will get *σθαι doing this which can of course also be remove by adding additional terms.

 

I get 158 hits in the NA GNT with this.

 

Thx

D

[Ken Simpson]

Or  [VERB infin]@-"(*ειν,*αι)"

 

Doesn’t make sense to me why it is finding the *σθαι ones though...

 

and adding -*σθαι didn’t get rid of them - why??? (though it explains why the *σθαι ones were not being excluded I suspect

 

I had to use  [VERB infin]@-"(*ειν,*αι,*σθαι)"@[VERB -(passive,middle)]

 

Ponder ponder

Edited July 29, 2015 by Ken Simpson

[Λύχνις Δαν]

It does if you remove the @-"*αι" also.

No idea why.

 

Odd

 

This doesn't work either : *@-"(*ειν,*αι,*σθαι)"@[VERB infin]

It looks like it knows to apply these to the suffix only rather than to the inflected form as a whole.

 

Thx

D

Edited July 29, 2015 by Daniel Semler

[Λύχνις Δαν]

I had another look and I think your @[verb -(passive, middle)] may point to an issue. Is there a problem where the words are tagged multiply ?

 

Thx

D

[mbcvida]

 [VERB infinitive] @-"*ειν" @-"*αι" @-"[VERB  (passive, middle)]" is the only way I could get it to work

[Ken Simpson]

 

Julie wrote:

 

 

 

I thought the best thing to do next was to subtract out the hits *ειν and *αι:   [HITS=i NA28 Greek NT] <NOT> (*ειν,*αι).  This gives me 372 hits, but most of them still end in -ειν or -αι.

 

 

 

Remember too Julie, that putting *ειν,*αι without quotes only excludes the lemmas that end with *ειν or *αι, not inflected forms as all infinitives are.

 

there is only one word that ends with ειν in its lemma, that’s a proper name “τοῦ Μάαθ τοῦ Ματταθίου τοῦ Σεμεῒν τοῦ Ἰωσὴχ τοῦ Ἰωδὰ”

(Luke 3:26 GNT28-T)

 

of course there are many more αι - 6156 inflected forms and 238 lexemes - mostly the middle infinitive forms. Didn’t check them all

Edited July 29, 2015 by Ken Simpson

[Julia Falling]

Joel – Thanks for the reminder - I had forgotten the distinction.

 

The reason I wanted to do this search at all was that, knowing that most infinitives end in -ειν or -αι, I wanted to take a look at the less common forms.

 

Daniel – I, too, had neglected the quote marks.

 

Ken – The Help Files really did help with the [HITS=i tabname] explanation.

 

What surprised me is that Accordance does not look for the characters themselves, but for the suffixes – not what I was expecting.

 

Thank you to all of you.  I now have my very short list of odd-ball infinitives, and that is exactly what I was looking for.  You've also taught me now to express the search correctly. 

[Λύχνις Δαν]

 

What surprised me is that Accordance does not look for the characters themselves, but for the suffixes – not what I was expecting.

 

This surprised me too. I had expected the string comparison to be done against the entire word. It would be good to know how this works exactly in an @.... clause.

 

I would also be interested to hear more from Accordance on the peculiar behaviour in the attempts to exclude *σθαι.

 

Thx

D

[Ken Simpson]

Sorry guys. I don't get what you mean by "Accordance only compares the suffixes". What makes you say that?

[Julia Falling]

You're right, Ken.  I guess 'compare the suffixes' isn't quite right, either.  If that were true, all the *σθαι infinitives would have been excluded when *σθαι was added to the string.  But it remains a mystery to me why those cannot be excluded without specifying voice.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

I think that might have come from my speculation above:

 

It looks like it knows to apply these to the suffix only rather than to the inflected form as a whole.

 

I think I've convinced myself I was off base on that one. Sorry.

 

On the not excluding "σθαι" properly I found another example that behaves the same way :

 

[verb part]@-"*μενον"

 

This produces a hit in Matt 1:23 for :

 

23     ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν,
    καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ,
ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον μεθ᾿ ἡμῶν ὁ θεός.

 

which is double tagged as a middle and a passive.

Again [verb part]@-"*μενον"@[verb -(middle, passive)] gets rid of it.

 

Have we got an issue with double tagged words ?

 

Thx

D

[Julia Falling]

Hey –

 

With the help y'all gave me (thanks!), I did some searches and got the info I was looking for.  (Dick – The search argument you posted was the only one I could get to work, too.)  As I saw the trends, I kept searching.

 

There are 2291 infinitives in the NT.  Of those – all but 39 end in -εῖν (920x) or -αι (1332x).  The -αι is accent-free except when followed by an enclitic, in which case it has an acute accent (46x).

 

Of those 39, all are present active infinitives, and all end in *ᾶν (21x), *ῆν (13x), or *οῦν (5x).  Those ending in -ᾶν, -ῆν are from α-contract verbs; those ending in -οῦν are o-contract verbs.

 

Infinitives of ε-contract verbs all end in either -εῖν (180/418) or -αι (238/418).  The -αι infinitives include -θαι, -θῆναι, etc..

 

Any verb in the NT that ends "=*ᾶν" or "=*ῆν" is a present active infinitive.  No exceptions.

 

Any verb in the NT that ends "=*οῦν" is either a present active infinitive (5x) or a nominative or accusative singular neuter present active participle (16x) (N/AsN PAP).

 

If a word, any word, ends in -θαι, it’s almost always an infinitive = 364/368 (99%).  The only 4 exceptions are ἄκανθαι (3x thorns), μέθαι (drunkenness).

 

Most infinitives are present or aorist (2237/2291= 97.6%).  There are 49 perfect infinitives and 5 future infinitives (ἔσεσθαι 4x, εἰσελεύσεσθαι).

 

So what use is all this?  For me, at least, it will make the parsing easier.  It also helped to fix the search syntax into my sieve-like memory.  And it was even fun.  Thanks for all your help.

Edited August 12, 2015 by Julie Falling