* Morphological Analysis
* Greek-English Lexicon
* Greek Word Search
* Greek Words in Proximity
* English-Greek Word Search
* Greek Dictionary Entry Search
* Greek Word Frequencies -- Overview
* Greek Word Frequencies -- By Author
This paragraph contains 123 words. If you read through it from start to finish, counting each word as you read it, you would end up with a total of 123. In some contexts, however, we might mean that the entire paragraph contains only 74 "unique" words: i.e., the English word "the" would count only once, no matter how often it showed up in the text. Again, we must take account of grammatically inflected forms. Do "went," "gone" and "going" all count as unique words or only as forms of the verb "to go"? In Perseus, word-count frequencies are a total of all words in the text, repeated and inflected. Words in the lexical tools are reached via the form given in their dictionary entry headings, rather than their inflected forms.
The following definitions will be useful:
Strings: Any collection of letters strung together is a "string." A string can be a full word (e.g., "philological") or a word fragment ("philol-", "-ologic-", "-ical") or both ("logic" is both a word in its own right and a substring of "philological"). Virtually all of the tools developed for searching Greek texts (and many of those for English as well) search not for words, but for strings embedded in words. Thus "go" will retrieve "goes" and "gone" but not "went," and there is no convenient way to locate all forms of an irregular word (e.g., "is", "was", "be" etc.). While this problem may be a nuisance in English (which retains relatively few endings), in a highly inflected language such as classical Greek, string based searching can be especially frustrating. The remedy for this is Perseus's Morphological database, which has the ability to trace the irregular forms to their dictionary entry.
Inflected Forms and Dictionary Entries: The forms "goes", "going" and "gone" are all inflected forms that belong to the same word, "go." The philological tools distinguish sharply between inflected forms and their dictionary entries. One of the major achievements of the Perseus database is that it allows users to deal not only with strings and inflected forms but with dictionary entries as well: thus, you can perform the Greek equivalent of asking for "go" and retrieve "goes", "gone", and "went."
A note on typing Greek: While cutting and pasting Greek text into a
field may serve in most cases as a workaround, you will find that the ability
to type correctly accented Greek is indispensible in making the most efficient
use of the Philological Tools. Perseus supports the SMK GreekKeys font, which
must be installed in your system. Information on ordering GreekKeys may be
found in section 2.1.2. The Greek characters generally correspond to the Roman
ones, with . The accents live "under" the numbers
and are typed in combination with the Option key before the vowel is typed. The
Greek alphabet, its transliteration into Roman characters, and its GreekKeys
equivalents may be found in Online help under the Stack Topic, The Greek
Alphabet.
Table 8.1 Success rate for analyzing forms in Perseus.
The Morphological Analysis tool can only recognize forms. It is not aware of
the syntax of a sentence. If a form has more than one possible analysis, the
only thing that the morphological analyzer can do is to list all applicable
parses. It is not able to identify the syntactically correct form. Therefore,
several of the Philological Tools display two sets of statistical results: one
that takes into account only unambiguous forms with one possible parse, and
another that includes all forms, ambiguous and unambiguous. Thus, faced with a
form such as , the Morphological Analysis tool simply
reports that this could be either the dative singular of the noun
, "shame," or one of several forms of the verb
, "to cause shame." The English equivalent is to recognize "fly"
as either a noun or a verb but to leave it to the user to sort out the
ambiguity between these two choices by using the context. (For more information
on this, see the discussion of the Morphological Analysis tool below.) It is
important to keep this in mind when working with the Philological Tools.
All of the Philological Tools allow you to enter your own word or string, in Greek or English (as appropriate). Although the Philological Tools allow the user to enter a word or string, they are primarily used by selecting text within another Perseus resource (Greek or English text depending on the tool to be activated), then choosing the desired tool from the Links menu. If any text is selected when a tool is activated, that tool will try to act on the selected text. To type accented Greek text, you must have SMK GreekKeys 7.0 installed in your system (information on where to buy GreekKeys is in chapter 2.1.2). You must be precise in typing accents and diacritical marks for the morphological tools to recognize the word (unless otherwise specified).
Some inflected forms are, however, "lexically ambiguous," i.e., they can come
from more than one dictionary entry (e.g., Greek can
be an inflected form of either the noun
, "shame," or of the verb
, "to cause shame"). Each frequency thus has both a maximum and a
minimum. The maximum "instances" and "freqs/10,000 words" assumes that
all possible inflected forms of a dictionary entry really do belong to that
entry (if you are searching for the verb
, assume that
is a verbal form). The minimum figure assumes
that none of the lexically ambiguous inflected forms belong to the dictionary
entry (if you are searching for the verb
, assume that
is not an inflected form of this verb). If the
maximum and minimum frequencies are the same, then all the possible forms of
the dictionary entry are lexically unambiguous. On the other hand, if the
maximum and minimum frequencies are different, then you will have to use your
judgment to determine the true frequency of the dictionary entry.
The eight Philological Tools are described below. They divide into four basic groups:
1) Morphological Analysis and Greek-English Lexicon: When working with a text you can use the Morphological Analysis tool to find out the grammatical function of a form and the Greek-English Lexicon to find out its meaning.
2) Greek Word Search and Greek Words in Proximity: These tools allow you to locate passages in which one or more particular dictionary entries appear.
3) English-Greek Word Search and Greek Dictionary Entry Search: These tools allow you to locate Greek words (or groups of Greek words) for further study.
4) Greek Word Freqs -- Overview and Greek Word Freqs -- by Author: These tools allow you to explore quantitative differences in usage between different authors, genres and periods.
Not only will beginning and intermediate students of the Greek language find
the morphological analysis helpful, but advanced students also will find this
tool indispensible in determining the precise dictionary entry for a form: your
can find out quickly whether LSJ list the words under or
,
or
, or
or
.
Selecting English text or proper nouns will result in a message that no analysis is offered for this word.
You must provide the exact spelling to locate an entry. You can use the Morphological Analysis tool or the Greek Dictionary Entry Search tool to help locate the right spelling.
Looking for an English word or an inflected Greek form in the Greek-English Lexicon will result in a message that the selected text is not in the dictionary.
Searching for English text will result in a message that the lemma is not used in the selected author's works.
The English-Greek Word Search searches in the Greek lexicon for words whose definition contains the selected word. Any italicized text in a dictionary entry from the Liddell-Scott Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon is treated as a definition, and in using this tool you are, in effect, consulting an index of English words from this lexicon.
You can go from the Greek Dictionary Entry Search tool to any of the other Philological Tools.
This tool retrieves a morphological analysis, not a syntactic analysis, of the Greek word. If the form you are analyzing could be formed from more than one word, the Morphological Analysis tool will display all possible lemmas and analyses. It does not indicate which one is correct for the particular form you selected.
If you have chosen Morphological Analysis from the Tools & References Index or the Links menu, you must enter a word to analyze. If you are in a Primary Text and want to analyze a word, highlight it and click the Analyze button. The tool will automatically parse that word.
The examples used below will trace through the analysis of words selected from a Primary Text and from Philological Tools.
> Analyze forms from Pindar's First Olympian Ode.
Go to Pindar First Olympian in the Primary Texts by releasing the mouse on the item Lookup under the Links menu. Type Pind. O. 1.1 into the box and press Return.
Highlight the Greek word .
Click the button Analyze, upper right. The Morphological Analysis card
appears with the form above, the lemma (dictionary form) in
boldface type in the middle, and the grammatical analysis below (figure
8.12).
Figure 8.12 Morphological Analysis showing Related Tools pop-up menu.
To find the meaning of , highlight it. Then choose Greek-English
Lexicon from the pop-up menu Related Tools. You may highlight the lemma
and go to the other Philological Tools under the Related Tools pop-up menu,
described below. These include Greek Word Search, Greek Word Frequencies --
Overview and Greek Word Frequencies -- By Author.
To return to the text of Pindar, click the Go Back arrow on the Navigator Palette.
> Analyze a form directly from the Morphological Analysis card.
Type into the Form field, and click Analyze to parse the word
(figure 8.13).
Figure 8.13 Morphological Analysis tool.
Here the word analysis results in three lemmas.
The four related tools are those which work with one or more dictionary
entries. In the example above using , if you select one of the three
lemmas (dictionary entries) and then call up one of these four related tools,
Perseus will automatically paste the selected dictionary entry into the
selected tool.
If you do not select anything and call up the Greek-English Lexicon or the Greek Word Search tools, nothing will be pasted into them.
On the other hand, Greek Word Frequency tools will look up all lemmas listed if you do not select one of the lemmas, in this case, all three.
* It makes no attempt to determine whether a form such as
is a substantive or a verb.
* If it sees a form such as , it recognizes this as a possible
present indicative or imperative, but it also reports that this could be an
unaugmented Epic or Ionic. Even if you are reading an Attic author such as
Demosthenes, it still reports the possible Epic and Ionic interpretation
because you may, for example, be looking at a form from a piece of quoted
poetry.
2) The Morphological Analysis Tool seeks every possible morphological analysis for every form that it examines. With 30,000 stems, 10,000 inflections and rules for coping with several Greek dialects, some of the morphological analyses can be surprising.
3 The Mophological Analysis Tool does not systematically cover proper names. Its can recognize 22,000 of the 32,000 proper names in Perseus 2.0, a success rate of 69%.
Our morphological database is based on the morphological information from the Liddell-Scott Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, a reference tool which covers only a small number of proper names. While we have added morphological information for over 10,000 additional words, we continue to systematically add proper names.
4) The Morphological Analysis tool has been taught to recognize many words that are not in the Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, but it still is not complete. It can recognize 223,000 out of the 228,000 unique strings in Perseus 2.0, a success rate of 98%.
8.4.7 GREEK-ENGLISH LEXICON The Greek-English Lexicon contains the Greek and English definitions from the Liddell-Scott Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. The Greek-English Lexicon is entered from the Links menu, from the Gateway via the Tools & References icon, and from the Related Tools pop-up menu in the various Philological Tools.
Figure 8.14 Greek-English Lexicon.
Go to Pindar First Olympian in the Primary Texts by choosing Lookup from the Links menu. Type Pind. O. 1.1 into the box and press Return.
Highlight the Greek word in line 7. Click
Analyze. On the Morphological Analysis card, highlight the lemma
, then choose Greek-English Lexicon from the
Related Tools pop-up menu.
Alternatively you can look up lemmas by typing them directly into the Entry field if you have SMK GreekKeys 7.0 installed in your system. Click the "Entry" field to make the insertion point appear. Then click Look Up to see a definition of the word. You can paste in a Greek word (in its dictionary form).
The Greek-English Lexicon displays the entry for a word as it appears in the Liddell-Scott Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (figure 8.11). The first field lists the definitions.
The buttons See Previous Entry and See Following Entry move backward and forward in the Lexicon.
The "Derived From" field lists explicit cross-references between dictionary entries. In practice, any word or brief phrase enclosed in parentheses at the beginning of a dictionary article in the lexicon will be placed in the Derived From entry. Thus in the following entry:
Figure 8.15 Derived from: field.
The other three fields on this card include information derived from, but not explicit in, the print version of the lexicon. These fields provide machine generated indexes to help you make connections between words.
The Source For field lists words produced by the Entry word. In the example
above, is given as derived from
. If you
call up the entry for
, you will find
in
the Source For field, along with
, <
and
, other words produced by
(figure
8.16).
Figure 8.16 Source for: field.
Figure 8.17 Other possible forms from the
lemma that appear in the definitions of other dictionary
Entries.
From the Greek-English Lexicon entry for , click
in the field Other possible forms in the lexicon,
bottom left. Click
, then click Look Up. Perseus will highlight
in the definition for
(figure 8.17).
Figure 8.18 in the definition of
.
Figure 8.19 The Related Tools Menu
Figure 8.20 Greek Word Search: in Aeschylus.
In the field Look for, paste or (if you have SMK GreekKeys installed) type in a Greek word or string of characters to search for. (Strings are defined in section 8.4.1.)
Choose an author to search in by choosing any author from the pop-up menu (figure 8.21).
Figure 8.21 Author pop-up menu in Greek Word Search.
Figure 8.22 Search Type pop-up menu.
Figure 8.23 Options pop-up menu in Greek Word Search.
To retrieve citations for just one form, select it and choose Citations for Selected Form from the Options pop-up menu. To go to one of the cited passages, select it and click the button Go To Text, upper right.
To parse a form, select it and choose Morphological Analysis for Selected Form from the Options pop-up menu. To return to Greek Word Search, click the Go Back arrow on the Navigator Palette.
The list of forms can be sorted alphabetically, by frequency or with the ambiguous forms at the top. Choose Sort Forms by Frequency, Sort Forms Alphabetically or Show Ambiguous Firms First.
To discard one of the forms from the list of results, select it and choose Delete Selected Form.
Figure 8.24 Greek Word Search statistics.
To see statistics of this type on a particular word among all the Primary Text authors, use the tool Greek Word Frequencies -- Overview, available under the pop-up menu Related Tools, upper right.
2) Some of the most common words in Greek are not indexed:
Neither Greek Word Search (nor the Greek Words in Proximity Search) search Greek texts directly. Instead, they rely upon indexes of the Perseus texts. To limit the size of the indexes, some of the most common words have not been included (see the table below). If you wish to study these words, you must use Pandora or some other search tool for the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.
For information on the TLG cd-rom, please contact Theodore F. Brunner, Director, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92717-5550 USA, (714) 824-7031, (714) 824-8434 FAX, Email tbrunner@uci.edu.
3) Lexical Ambiguity
Remember that Perseus makes no attempt to determine whether a form such as
is from the noun
or the verb
. Thus, the form
will show up in
searches for both the noun
and the verb
.
8.4.9 GREEK WORDS IN PROXIMITY This tool allows you to locate passages in which any form from one list of dictionary entries appears within a given number of words of a form from a second list of dictionary entries.
The Greek Words in Proximity tool is available from the Links menu and by clicking the Tools & References icon in the Gateway. The tool itself is constructed on two cards: the card appearing first (figure 8.25) contains the author lists, operating buttons and results fields; the second card (figure 8.26) contains fields for entering and editing search lists.
Figure 8.25 Greek Words in Proximity
Figure 8.26 Greek Words in Proximity: Edit Lists.
> Find the words and
within a proximity
of 10 words in Homer.
Go to the Greek Words in Proximity tool by choosing this item from the Links menu. Or from the Gateway, click the Tools & References icon, then click Greek Words in Proximity under the topic Philological Tools.
To bring up the Edit Lists card, click the button Enter/Edit Dictionary Lists. If Lists 1 and 2 contain words from a previous search, click the buttons Clear List 1 and Clear List 2.
If you are equipped to type accented Greek, put the cursor into the field of
List 1 and type , then put the cursor into the field of List 2
and type
. Enter the numbers of words in proximity of which
the search will take place (10) in the box at the bottom. Click
Done.
Note that this tool will only work with the properly accented dictionary entry
(lemma) of the words to be searched. If you cannot type accented Greek with
GreekKeys, or if you are unsure of the proper accent and spelling, click the
button Greek Dictionary Entry Search. Locate the cursor in the Look Up
field, type (no accents, no final sigma), and release the mouse on the
item Words with this Substring as the kind of Dictionary Entry Search
to make (figure 8.27).
Figure 8.27 Greek Dictionary Entry search with proper form of
.
If you have just completed the task of accumulating a long list of words from all over Perseus, you can now alphabetize your list by clicking the buttons Sort List 1 and Sort List 2.
Figure 8.28 Dialog window with queryfor word list.
If you have selected a form from one of the Primary Texts in Perseus,
for example, you can obtain the lemma by clicking the button
Analyze. The Morphological Analysis tool will find the lemma for you.
Now click the lemma (
) and choose the item Greek Words in
Proximity under the pop-up menu Related Tools. As above, a dialog window
will ask which List you wish to add the word to. Make the choice and Perseus
will return you to the Edit List card.
Now that your list of words to search is complete, type the number words in proximity, 10, into box at the bottom. Click Done to return to the first card. Alternatively, click Cancel to return to the first card without making any changes.
and
will now be displayed in the fields
Dictionary Entries in List. Choose Homer fro the Choose
Another Author pop-up menu. To perform the search, click the button Do
Search. Perseus will find two citations for
in proximity
with
in Homer:
Hom. Il. 1.1 ,
range=10
Hom. Il. 21.523 ,
range=4
In the first citation, a form of occurs within ten words of
the form of
in the second citation, they are within a range
of four words. To go to one of the cited passages, select it and click Go
To Text. In addition, Perseus displays a variety of statistics. In Greek,
inflected forms may be ambiguous, deriving from one lemma or another (e.g., the
form
could come from either
or the Ionic word
, "moon.") Accordingly, the numbers 22 and 16 following
mean that forms of that word appear in Homer a maximum of
twenty-two times (i.e., not counting ambiguities) and a minimum of sixteen
times (i.e., eliminating ambiguous forms).
> Find a list of Greek words associated with the concept "revolt" and a list of words associated with the concept "persuade" within a proximity of 10 words in Thucydides.
From the first card of Greek Words in Proximity, go to the List Edit card by clicking the button Enter/Edit Dictionary Lists. If words from a previous search are in the fields, click Clear List 1 and Clear List 2.
You will now use the English-Greek Word Search feature to generate lists of words to search. (This tool is described in greater detail below.) Choose the item English-Greek Word Search from the Links menu. Type "revolt" into the Look Up field and click the button Look Up, upper left. Choose the item Greek Words in Proximity from the Related Tools pop-up menu. A dialog window will ask you which list you want the "revolt" words entered into (figure 8.29). Click List 1. (If you wish to cancel the request, click Neither.) A further dialog may appear asking whether to add or replace your selection to the list. In this case, click Replace.
Follow the same procedure for the English-Greek Word List for "persuade," and enter the list of "persuade" words into List 2.
The Greek words in the two lists are drawn from entries in the Lexicon containing the English words "revolt" and "persuade" in their definitions. There will not always be a close connection between words on the list and the meaning targeted. In some cases, you may want to edit your lists.
Your Edit Lists card should now look like the illustration in figure 8.29.
Figure 8.29 Greek Words in Proximity Edit Lists card.
Figure 8.30 Greek Words in Proximity statistics.
For List 1 Totals, Max=119 means that for the 10 words associated with "revolt," the maximum number of forms found in Thucydides is 119 (disregarding ambiguous forms), and Min=84 means that for the same list, the minimum number of forms is 84 (subtracting ambiguous forms).
Further statistics are in the lower left. Words in Perseus means that for the author Thucydides there are 150,116 words in the database. For the matches in this search, the maximum number is 4 (disregarding ambiguous forms), and the minimum is 2 (subtracting ambiguous forms).
Figure 8.31 Greek Words in Proximity Options.
Please be aware that search results are limited to 30,000 characters by the
HyperCard software. Thus a search for words ending in within a range of
five words of those ending with
(both over 600) will bring an error
message.
Some of the most frequently occurring words in Greek have not been indexed.
That means that the Greek Words in Proximity tool will not work with words such
as and
. For a list of these words, see Table
8.2 above.
Figure 8.32 English-Greek Word Search
If you choose the English-Greek Word Search via the Tools & References Index from the Gateway or via the Links menu, you must enter a search string when the tool appears. If you choose English-Greek Word Search via the Related Tools pop-up menu within another Philological Tool and have already selected a word, that word will automatically activate the English-Greek Word Search.
The string or word you type in must not include any spaces. The English-Greek Word List tool will only look up one-word strings.
Figure 8.33 Type of Search.
> Look up several kinds of strings with the Englisk-Greek Word Search tool.
Type "household" in the String to Find field (if you haven't already done this). Choose the item This word only from the Type of Search pop-up menu, then click Look Up. (It will work to press Return here also.) The result of the search is displayed in the text field on the lower left of the screen. The word "household" appears in the definitions of 19 Greek words, which appear in the left column. The search does not find text that is a direct translation of the selected word; instead, the search identifies Greek words that contain the selected English text in their definitions.
Now try searching the English-Greek Word List for the string "house" (do not include a hyphen) with the Type of Search set to Words with these starting characters. The starting characters house- begin 12 English words, which occur in 187 dictionary entries.
Try searches for the ending strings -hold and -use-.
Searches for extremely common English strings will take longer. On a Macintosh Performa 636CD running Perseus at 5 MB the search for -use- took 53 seconds.
Figure 8.34 Options pop-up menu.
To condense the list, choose Resort List and Merge Duplicates.
These options will take a long time with lists containing many hundreds of words.
You can eliminate less interesting entries by editing the results. Since you can select dictionary entries and call up their English definitions from the Greek-English Lexicon, you can even use this tool with little or no knowledge of Greek.
Figure 8.35
You can also work directly with the entire list of dictionary entries that you have generated. By going to either of the two Greek Word Frequency tools, you can see how often all of "household" words appear in different authors. You could thus begin to see whether this concept seems to be more or less common in different authors. (Words associated with "household" show up with twice the frequency in Aeschylus that they do in Sophocles, and 2 1/3 times as often in Euripides as they do in Sophocles.)
If you use the Related Tools to call up the Greek Words in Proximity Search, you can add the entire list of dictionary entries for "household" to one of the two lists (see the example in section 8.4.9 above). You could thus use the English-Greek Word Search to set up a search for dictionary entries that contain "household" in their definition within 5 words of dictionary entries that contain "guest" in their definition.
Figure 8.36 Greek Dictionary Entry Search.
Note: it is not necessary to enter accents and breathings in order to use this tool.
Click Look Up to produce the list of words.
The results appear in the field lower left. A dictionary entry may be selected and pasted into a field where a lemma is required (in Greek Word Search, for example). You may also link with one of the related Philological Tools.
The pop-up menu right of the Look Up field gives you three ways to specify where in a word the string occurs: Words with these starting characters, Words with theese ending characters, and Words with this substring.
Figure 8.37 Greek Word Frequencies with scrolling window.
Figure 8.38 Edit List of Dictionary Entries card.
Figure 8.39 View Data pop-up menu.
Figure 8.40 Greek Word Frequencies -- By Author.
Figure 8.41 Enter List of Dictionary Entries card, Greek Word Frequencies -- By Author.
The current author is displayed in the upper left. Change authors by choosing an author from the list of authors under the pop-up menu Choose Another Author. The example will continue with words associated with "horse" in Demosthenes. (The orators as a group use a low frequency rate of "horse" words.)
Figure 8.42 Ways to calculate word frequencies by author.
Figure 8.43 Frequency of words associated with "horse" in Demosthenes.
Figure 8.44 Options pop-up menu.