Is there a Greek resource in Accordance for looking up verbal roots and nominal stems?

[Steven S]

I feel like I'm overlooking something obvious here, but, with all the Greek lexicons I have in Accordance, I've been unable to find one that provides me with the root(s) for a given verb and the stem(s) for a given noun/adjective. That is, I would like to be able to look up the same root/stem information given in Mounce's BBG4 vocabulary. I thought for sure this would be a feature of Mounce's Analytical Lexicon, but that's apparently not the case. 

 

Is there such a Greek resource available in Accordance?

 

Thanks!

[A. Smith]

A decade and more ago I got a Zondervan Scholarly Bible Study Suite which came with Greenlee's NT Morpheme Lexicon. This sounds like exactly what you're asking for. Unfortunately, I can't see any way to get the suite or the lexicon on accordance any more.

[Steven S]

@A. Smith, thank you! I wasn't aware of Greenlee's lexicon. There's apparently already an Accordance module request for it. But I'm content to use a paper copy until that happens. 

[Donald Cobb]

1 hour ago, Steven S said:

I feel like I'm overlooking something obvious here, but, with all the Greek lexicons I have in Accordance, I've been unable to find one that provides me with the root(s) for a given verb and the stem(s) for a given noun/adjective. That is, I would like to be able to look up the same root/stem information given in Mounce's BBG4 vocabulary. I thought for sure this would be a feature of Mounce's Analytical Lexicon, but that's apparently not the case. 

 

Is there such a Greek resource available in Accordance?

 

Thanks!

 

Could this get you where you're wanting to go?

 

https://www.accordancebible.com/product/etymological-dictionary-of-greek/

[Steven S]

@Donald Cobb, thanks for pointing that out. However, from the few screenshots on the product page, I'm not sure it's exactly what I want. While one of the verb entries lists a root, and another verb entry lists various tense stems, I didn't see any stems in the nominal entries. But maybe I'm just not following the entry syntax correctly?

 

As examples of the kinds of "tests" I have been using to see if a resource meets my needs, I would like to

 

• look up the entry for the verb βαπτίζω and see the root *βαπτιδ;
• look up the entry for the verb ἐρχομαι and see the roots *ἐρχ and *ἐλευθ; and
• look up the entry for the adjective εἷς and see the stems *ἑν and *μια.

[Donald Cobb]

Maybe someone else can chime in here. I don't personally own this resource. 

[darrylmy]

I can confirm that the Etymological Dictionary of Greek does not have the information you are looking for; neither does Greenlee's A New Testament Greek Morpheme Lexicon. I would suggest Mounce's Morphology of Biblical Greek. It has the information on your examples. And for roots that aren't, you should be able to reason to them based upon the paradigms. HTH.

[Steven S]

Thanks, @darrylmy! I actually have Mounce's MBG in Accordance and have previously referenced portions of it that are cited in BBG. However, because I never saw any kind of "table of roots/stems" as I described in my OP, I dismissed it. But, given your endorsement, I reevaluated it and agree that I can get the information I need. The only drawback seems to be that most of my searches require two steps to get to the desired information—usually first to a footnote and then to body text, or vice versa—but not really a big deal since the Accordance module is nicely hyperlinked. 

[Lawrence]

@Steven S

 

Have you tried looking through the context menu? I can get to BDAG by right-clicking on a Greek word in Mounce, then selecting look-up -> dictionary. Perhaps some of the other options can get you closer to what you're looking for.

[Steven S]

Hi @Lawrence. As far as I can tell, the best I can do is use the context menu to get all the lexeme hits within MBG. After that, I still might have to check an attached footnote, or review the introduction of the section containing the hit, in order to determine the associated root(s). This isn't something I'm going to be doing multiple times a day, so I'm okay with a little extra work. 

[mgvh]

I don't know that this doing exactly what you want, but here are a few things to check (using βαπτιζω as an example):

1) Do a root search on βαπτιζω > Open Analysis >> (Note: This search was run on "Greek Bible" which includes both LXX and NT)

2) Look up the word in NIDNTTE which groups words by root

3) Not quite as effective but a resource you probably have: Look up word in the NT Word Study Dictionary. At the end of the entry are derivatives and synonyms and antonymns.

4) Another resource, similar to Greenlee, is Trenchard's Complete Vocabulary Guide to the GNT. Just looking at the Amazon sample you can check, here is the kind of entry it provides:

 

For their root searches, I'm pretty sure that Logos uses Trenchard. It may be behind Accordance also, but it has some differences.

E.g., both programs connect νηστευω with the εσθιω root (which is wrong in my opinion and that of NIDNTTE). Accordance correctly connects ἐραυνάω to ἔρομαι, but Logos incorrectly, imo, connects it to ερωταω.

 

 

 

 

 

[Steven S]

1 hour ago, mgvh said:

I don't know that this doing exactly what you want, but here are a few things to check

 

Hey Dr. Hoffman. Thanks for your suggestions! After reading through them, I'm thinking that I didn't properly define the overloaded term "root" in my OP. I probably should have said "verbal root" to match the nomenclature Mounce uses in his grammar when discussing how a verb is formed. That is, he defines "verbal root" as the most basic form of a verb from which its various tense stems are formed. So, in the βαπτίζω case, the verbal root is *βαπτιδ (using Mounce's notation of prefixing the verbal root with an asterisk).

 

My understanding of what Accordance means by "root" is the word from which another word is (etymologically?) derived. As you showed in your screenshots, βαπτίζω is derived from βάπτω (which Mounce's MBG says has the verbal root *βαπ).

 

In my βαπτίζω case, I was interested in finding the former (*βαπτιδ), not the latter (βάπτω). I apologize for any confusion.

[RKG]

6 hours ago, Steven S said:

Hi @Lawrence. As far as I can tell, the best I can do is use the context menu to get all the lexeme hits within MBG. After that, I still might have to check an attached footnote, or review the introduction of the section containing the hit, in order to determine the associated root(s). This isn't something I'm going to be doing multiple times a day, so I'm okay with a little extra work. 

 

In case you were using the context menu differently, you can also get all the lexeme hits in MBG by using Word Study and clicking on MBG in grammars. It seems to search for the lexeme in MBG even if "inflected" is chosen for Word Study.

 

Also, I have Greenlee's lexicon in Accordance (bought it years ago), but it won't give you the information you want. These are the entries for the words you mentioned:

βαπτίζω                 βάπτω -ιζω

ἔρχομαι                  -ω

εἷς, μία, ἕν             -ας, -ασα, -αν*

 

Edited October 12, 2023 by RKG

[c. stirling bartholomew]

In the last half century or longer the word root or the concept traditionally  associated with that word has been cast into the outer darkness, where it is undergoing eternal torment.  Johannus P. Louw and Eugene  A . Nida published a book in I believe 1992 discussing the theorectical framework for their lexicon. Reiner de Bloise in 2002 published his dissertation which is available as a pdf on Academia. He develops the theoretical framework for his Hebrew lexicon which is a web resource. 

 

For reasons unknown to me the BSF & Precepts word study conceptual frameworks on lexical semantics seem to live on as if the last hundred years of linguistics didn't happen.

 

There are endless discussions of this in the 1990s archives of B-Hebrew and B-Greek so there is no need to waste our time duplicating what is already there.

 

Before anyone sends out a hit squad to take me out, I should add that there is nothing wrong with talking about roots. it isn't the word that is wrong its the conceptual framework that has problems. Word roots have a role in 19th century philology. Word roots currently have a somewhat different role than what they had in the 19th century. You can see this clearly in the literature on biblical Hebrew. BDB is a good lexicon SDBH is a different framework. I use both lexicons regularly.

 

 

 

 

Edited October 12, 2023 by c. stirling bartholomew

[Steven S]

46 minutes ago, RKG said:

Also, I have Greenlee's lexicon in Accordance (bought it years ago), but it won't give you the information you want. This is its entry for βαπτίζω:

βαπτίζω    βάπτω -ιζω

 

Thank you for that example! Now I understand that when the product description for Greenlee's lexicon says, "Part 1 gives prefixes, root words, suffixes, and terminations," root word doesn't mean verbal root as I described it in my earlier reply to mgvh. That's good to know and confirms what darrylmy said above about Greenlee not being the answer to my question.

[Lawrence]

2 hours ago, c. stirling bartholomew said:

In the last half century or longer the word root or the concept traditionally  associated with that word has been cast into the outer darkness, where it is undergoing eternal torment.  Johannus P. Louw and Eugene  A . Nida published a book in I believe 1992 discussing the theorectical framework for their lexicon. Reiner de Bloise in 2002 published his dissertation which is available as a pdf on Academia. He develops the theoretical framework for his Hebrew lexicon which is a web resource. 

 

For reasons unknown to me the BSF & Precepts word study conceptual frameworks on lexical semantics seem to live on as if the last hundred years of linguistics didn't happen.

 

There are endless discussions of this in the 1990s archives of B-Hebrew and B-Greek so there is no need to waste our time duplicating what is already there.

 

Before anyone sends out a hit squad to take me out, I should add that there is nothing wrong with talking about roots. it isn't the word that is wrong its the conceptual framework that has problems. Word roots have a role in 19th century philology. Word roots currently have a somewhat different role than what they had in the 19th century. You can see this clearly in the literature on biblical Hebrew. BDB is a good lexicon SDBH is a different framework. I use both lexicons regularly.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for mentioning that. It helps me make sense of why 'βαπτιδ-' style roots aren't included in modern reference books such as BDAG, Brill, L&N etc, and even Accordance's instant details panel. Instead, they use the BDAG-style entry that includes the lexical root and some extra information (e.g. for nouns: lexical root + genitive suffix + article).