Blog: Septuagint Vocabulary for Greek New Testament Readers

[R. Mansfield]

Got New Testament Greek under your belt, and you're thinking about jumping into the Septuagint? Abram K-J will show you just how to sort out LXX vocabulary so you can begin learning additional words. See "Septuagint Vocabulary for Greek New Testament Readers" at the Accordance Blog!

 

 

[jlm]

Granted that I'm not very expert at Accordance searching, I don't think that search does what it's meant to do. I worked through the example, but then got suspicious when I saw οὐ at the top of the list. Is it really possible that οὐ occurs less than 50 times in the GNT? A quick search showed that the answer was no: it occurs 2907 1624 times (NA 28 Sigla). So I don't think the search is showing words that occur 49 or less times in the GNT and 100 or more times in the LXX, it's showing words that occur 100 or more times in the LXX and also occur in a verse of the GNT that contains a word that occurs 49 times or less in the GNT. [HITS] is getting you a list of verses, not a list of words. I'm fairly new to this, so correct me if I'm wrong.

Edited February 8, 2020 by jlm

[Λύχνις Δαν]

No, HITS is correct but the result is not. In fact, checking the NA analysis shows οὐ is not there. But there are compounds (?) of it, like οὐδαμῶς. I suspect they may be being included in some way in the list.

 

Thx

D

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Ok that's not it either. The problem is with οὗ. It is in the NT 24 times. When you do this search [COUNT 100+]@(οὗ) in the LXX you get 6077 of οὐ which is of course not correct, but it's being done on unaccented form I would guess.

 

Thx

D

[jlm]

I stand corrected. The explanation does seem to be that the search ignores differences of accents, root number, and capitalization. So ἄν_1 is in the list because ἄν_2 is rare in the GNT, τόπος because of Τόπος (part of the proper name Κρανίου Τόπος), etc.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Don't get me wrong, I believe this is a bug. I don't believe it should be doing this. It is misidentifying the lexical form and then using that to do the search.

You can search for ὅς in the LXX and I think it should be. The αν cases might be harder if the tagging in the the modules is not the same. And yes Τὀπος might not be fixable without additional work, like tagging LXX for place.

 

Thx

D

[Abram K-J]

I posted this in another related thread (same issue at hand), and duplicate here:

 

Yes, a tagging issue. Joel (developer) says this:

 

 The HITS command first attempts to find and use the exact match in the destination.  If this exact word doesn’t exist, then it tries to find a match by skipping accents.  Due to the tagging differences in the LXX vs NA28, this can obviously create some discrepancies.  When working with all of our internally tagged texts (basically any greek text except for LXX1) you’ll get much closer results.  However, it still should involve some double-checking if you find a strange result, like οὐ.  Daniel’s explanation is correct since οὗ does not occur in LXX at all, it maps it to the normal οὐ.

 

I haven't tried the search with the Swete LXX, but that could be more accurate, depending on the tagging.

 

The intended use of such a search is to improve one's vocabulary, so presumably one would be working through the list anyway and could likely identify (as folks have done in this thread and another one) any superfluous/false hits. Worst case scenario, you learn a few extra words (which you'd probably know anyway).