Trismegistos Words: New Tool for seaching Documentary Papyri

There is a new tool in town for searching morphological analysis of 5 million words in the Duke Database of Ducmentary Papyri. I’ve only been able to have a brief play around so far (on αὐθεντέω which has only five occurrences [4 of which are very late]), but I thought you might be interested to hear about this and try it out.

Trismegistos is pleased to announce a new database: TM Words (www.trismegistos.org/words). It contains the just under 5 million words contained in the Duke Database of Documentary Papyri. The new database is the result of work by Alek Keersmaekers, who started from the XML-version available on GitHub on 19 September 2016. He used a stochastic machine-learning approach for tokenisation, part-of-speech-tagging and lemmatization [I had to look all of these up too ;-)]. The accuracy is about 95%, which seems high, but also means that there are still about 250,000 errors of morphological interpretation in the database, some of which very obvious for humans. We would be very grateful if you would communicate errors you notice by giving us a ’thumbs-down’ and clicking the 👎 icon after each attestation. On the basis of that feedback we can improve the database further.

We have made the online version as user-friendly as possible, with many possibilities for filtering and automated weighed-dates charts. This obviously is very demanding for our server, and we hope that the system won’t crash as a result. In any case for some large datasets (very common words) you may need to wait half a minute or more.

A special feature is the possibility to look for attestations of words in specific genres of texts. This is only possible through cooperation with Joanne Stolk, who has undertaken a rough classification in the margin of her work on TM Text Irregularities.

Finally: all of this is only possible thanks to the existence of the DDbDP and papyri.info. In the future we hope to work together with them to share all information and make the lemmatisation available there as well. This will be a non-trivial matter, because of the dynamic nature of the text in the DDbDP. Nevertheless it is an urgently needed effort to prevent the creation of multiple versions of the same text. For that reason we will share all corrections as much as possible, and new readings should of course continue to be entered through the Papyrological Editor.

Tyndale House Workshop in Greek Prepositions

From Will Ross and Steve Runge, a conference modeled after the well-done Greek verb conference from a few years back:

Students and scholars of Greek have long wrestled with understanding the meaning of prepositions. This challenge is partly the result of the centuries-old tradition in Greek lexicography of providing glosses (or translation equivalents) in the target language that fail to capture the meaning of a lexical item. 

Moreover, the semantics of Greek and English prepositions do not isometrically overlap, giving the misleading appearance of polysemy. In an effort to address these challenges, this Workshop aims to approach semantic description of Koine prepositions from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and prototype theory.  

Following the work of Silvia Luraghi (2003) and Pietro Bortone (2010) on Greek prepositions, there is growing consensus among scholars of Greek that the cognitive linguistic approach to meaning is the most promising way forward.  

Yet to date no concerted effort has been made towards applying this cognitive approach in a form that is accessible to non-specialists, which provides the occasion and motivation for our Workshop.  

This Workshop will be cross-disciplinary, bringing together classicists, biblical scholars, linguists, and theologians.

Speakers include

• Dirk Geeraerts, University of Leuven
• Richard A. Rhodes, U.C. Berkeley
• Jonathan A. Pennington, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
• Patrick James, University of Cambridge
• Steven Runge, Logos Bible Software
• Randall Buth, Biblical Language Center

June 30-July 1, 2017. Registration opens March 1. No call for papers is forthcoming. More info at greekprepositionworkshop.org. Background on the conference at Will’s blog. It sounds fun. I wish I could be there for it.

Muraoka on Septuagint Lexicography (LXX 5)

For general orientation to this series of posts see here.

Takamitsu Muraoka, ‘Recent Discussions on the Septuagint Lexicography With Special Reference to the So-called Interlinear Model’ in Die Septuaginta - Texte, Kontexte, Lebenswelten: Internationale Fachtagung veranstaltet von Septuaginta Deutsch (LXX.D), Wuppertal 20.-23. Juli 2006 (ed Martin Karrer & Wolfgang Kraus; WUNT 219; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 221-235.


The Septuagint lexicography debate continues and Muraoka reminds us of the polarities of the discipline: translator-oriented vs reader-oriented approach.

NETS approaches LXX as the translator, not the audience, perceives the text, and the so-called Interlinear Model, advocated by Albert Pietersma, understands that the LXX aims at bringing the reader to the Hebrew, not vice versa.

Muraoka disagrees with Boyd-Taylor's pessimistic approach to LXX lexicography. Boyd-Taylor sees the LXX as a mirror of the Hebrew. He holds that, to treat such a decidedly hybrid linguistic environment as bearing on the study of word-use in the target-language is, to say the least, highly problematic. He thinks that LXX data are nothing more than parole data from which one cannot extract and distill a langue. (p. 228, 230)

Muraoka, however, does not think it is restrictive. For him it is wrong to start with the assumption that LXX Greek, being translational Greek, must necessarily deviate from the "normal" contemporary Greek. (p. 228-229)

A reason for strangeness of LXX Greek is the interference of the source language, some of which may have been tolerated. The average member of the congregation would have adjusted his bearings a little bit to understand the text. Therefore, the reader is not compelled to fall back on the source text to infer what possibly the translator wanted his reader to understand. (p. 235) According to Muraoka, no serious lexicographer can leave out translated works when compiling a lexicon of any language or time. (p. 234)

Myrto

Foundations for Syriac Lexicography I

A. Dean Forbes and David G.K. Taylor, eds, have just brought out the volume Foundations for Syriac Lexicography I: Colloquia of the International Syriac Language Project (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2005). It contains much that is of interest to Syriasts and lexicographers with contibutors such as Terry Falla, Alison Salvesen, George Kiraz, Dean Forbes, Janet Dyk, Andreas Juckel and Sebastian Brock. Perhaps I may be forgiven for drawing attention to my own contribution, which is probably the one most relevant to textual criticism. It is: 'On Matching Syriac Words with Their Greek Vorlage' (pp. 157-166). Andreas Juckel, Syriac expert at the INTF in Münster, writes on 'Should the Harklean Version Be Included in a Future Lexicon of the Syriac New Testament' (pp. 167-194), which, despite the title, also includes material of text-critical interest.