Root not showing in Analysis Pane with Lexical form

[Mark Nigro]

In the "customize dispaly settings" I have selected "Show root with Lex" but the root is not appearing in the analysis results. All I'm getting is the search hit form and the lexical gloss.

 

What am I missing?

[Helen Brown]

What text are you searching? What elements are selected for display in the first column?

[Mark Nigro]

In this particular case it was the Greek NT (NA27). First column of the display has "LEX" only.

[Mark Nigro]

Here is a screen shot of what appears in my analysis window after a quick sample search.

[Joel Brown]

Mark, I believe this word has not been tagged with a root form.  Try a search for παιδίον or others, and that should work.

[Mark Nigro]

παιδίον is actually the only word I've seen to result with a root. I've tried common verbs like λέγω, ὁράω, γράφω, πορεύομαι, ἔχω etc. but none of them yields the root. Are only nouns tagged?

[Joel Brown]

Plenty of verbs and other parts of speech have been tagged.  Try this search:  +*@-[NOUN]     However, my guess is that we only display the root form if it is different from the lemma in some way, but someone much more familiar with our Greek should confirm this.

[Mark Nigro]

Thanks, Joel.

 

That's a good guess but in most of my searches I was dealing with second aorist verbs where the root is quite different to the lexical form (lemma). So my hope was to get the root in the instances where I couldn't recall the exact root. It seems to be something other than what your hunch was, or maybe limited to being a Windows issue? I haven't tried this on a Mac since I no longer have one.

 

I'll attach a screenshot of a search I just ran for all verbs in the Aorist tense. What the analysis window yields besides the gloss is a breakdown of compound verbs, but I'm not finding the roots yet. At least, not in the initial analysis results, but I haven't searched through all 530 results yet

Edited March 3, 2016 by Mark Nigro

[Helen Brown]

Looking at your analysis, I think most of these verbs do not have a different root. Roots are a little different in Greek than Hebrew. In Hebrew we know that words are largely derived from a three-letter root, and those same letters are the lexical form of the verb unless there are homographs. Thus in Hebrew many verbs won't display a separate root.

 

In Greek the roots are rather more, may I say, subjective? Often they are simply the verb form, but sometimes the noun form is defined as the root. For example: ἀγαπάω    (ἀγάπη). In this case, ἀγάπη has no root. I believe that Accordance is working properly. You can test any word as a root by searching for it preceded by a +.

[Mark Nigro]

Hmm, I wonder if we mean something different by root here or if I'm simply wrong in my expectation of the analysis results. Here are a few examples of what I was expecting to find as roots:

 

1. The root of the verb ἔχω (I have) should be "σεχ" but a search for ἔχω only yields the same lexical form ἔχω in the analysis without the root beside it.

 

2. Another example would be the verb ἔρχομαι where there are technically two roots: ἐρχ and ἐλευθ, but these don't appear either, just ἔρχομαι shows which is again the lexical form.

 

3. One last example of a two-root possibility is with λέγω (I say) which theoretically should yield both λεγ and ἐρ as roots. But again only λέγω appears.

[Helen Brown]

The most I can do is ask our Greek scholar to take a look at this topic and comment on the guidelines he used to define the roots.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

I would be interested in the answer here also.

 

Thx

D

[Helen Brown]

Daniel:

 

Here is your answer from Dr. K himself:

 

The user is actually looking for word stems rather than root words. We do not provide words stems at present. Word stems are the building blocks (like morphemes) of words but are not typically the words themselves. Word roots are the “sub-words” from which a given word is made up. Though some scholars use these terms interchangeably, to me it leads to confusion. What we provide are the simplest word (or words) from which a given word is formed. It is the word that typically is found in parentheses after the entry word in the Intermediate Liddell and Scott. If a root word is not given, then that means the word itself is the root word from which others derive.
 

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hi Helen,

 

  Thanx for this. I suppose I should have guessed this long ago, there being no * suffix on the roots as would be normal notation. I guess these aren't really stems in the true sense either but are close to them. In the case of verbs they are the first personal singular active indicative form. As to implications of this hmmmm... Mark will no doubt have thoughts on this, but my first concern is about cases where different roots are used for different tenses, λεγω and ερχομαι being good examples. What Dr. K has done is practical for the case where you want to know the verb which all these different stems are considered to be components. So for λεγω you have ειπον and its friends in the aorist and ερω in the future. (LSJ is interesting here pointing to λεξω in older Greek but in the NT ερ* seems to supplant such forms for the future. Actually I would have to research this more to clarify the future properly but it illustrates the point). But if you really want to recall the root, or stem of the future, it doesn't work quite so well. Of course for the NT MBG is indispensable here.

 

  But thank you for the explanation. More grist for another mill that's turning.

 

Thx

D

[Mark Nigro]

Thanks for the follow up, Helen. I wondered from the example you gave of ἀγαπάω (ἀγάπη), if we were referring to different things.

 

In the case of my example searches with verbs that I posted above, what I was looking for was what I've always understood the verbal root to be: the most basic element from which all the "tense stems" derive, rather than a relative root word, say a cognate noun for example.

 

The present tense stem, which is found in all the lexical forms, tends to morph the most and may look nothing like what the root (according to my definition of the verbal root) is. Especially in the case of 2nd Aorists, which typically are built on the "unmodified root" of the word. That's why I was hoping to find roots marked with *, as Daniel Semler mentioned.

 

I guess it's a matter of terminology and/or methodology. Dr. K's explanation of a "word stem" makes sense in light of how the analysis is functioning, I've just never encountered it before.

 

I wonder if many users would find useful the type of tagging Daniel and I were interested in and if so, should we make it a feature request? That is, tagging according to verbal roots and cognates as distinct? Or in Dr. K's definition "word stems."

Edited March 6, 2016 by Mark Nigro