[B-Greek] hHiDEIS Mt 25:26

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Wed Dec 3 14:48:54 EST 2008


On Dec 3, 2008, at 1:46 PM, Oun Kwon wrote:

> Thanks all.
>
> (hHiDEIS is my typo. It's  a symptom of dissociation between the  
> written word and the pronunciation.)
>
> At first, I had a little difficulty to find its dictionary entry   
> form (lemma?). In one resource in e-Sword program,  it gives EIDW,  
> which is not there in BDAG.
>
> Looking through the page up and down, I could locate EIDON. Is it  
> supposed to be its lemma? Why not EIDW as the dictionary entry?
>
> I had to dig out another book which told me to look  under  OIDA.   
> Quite a roundabout for a novice.

I think you may be trying to do more with the text of the GNT than you  
are equipped to do if you haven't already worked through at least a  
primer of NT Greek. In the course of any ordinary first-year course  
one learns the verb hORAW with its non-cognate regular aorist EIDON  
and its non-cognate future OYOMAI and one learns the verb OIDA (as  
lemma) as a distinct verb from hORAW/OYOMAI/EIDON.

As I tried to clarify in my post this morning, there is indeed a  
single root fEID/fOIDf/ID --> EID/OID/ID whose distinctive E-grade  
(EID), O-grade (OID) and zero-grade (ID) have had distinct and  
different destinies in the history of the langauge. Ordinarily the E- 
grade forms a present stem, the O-grade a perfect stem, and the zero- 
grade an aorist stem. In this verb the O-grade did indeed form a  
perfect-tense with a "quasi-present" semantic force, while the zero- 
grade formed the standard aorist-stem of "see" and the E-grade did  
indeed form a present-stem in EID which you'll find in LSJ under lemma  
EIDW but not in BDAG because it was replaced in common usage verb  
early with hORAW. The lemma really should be EIDOMAI because the  
present-tense verb doesn't appear in the active voice at all; it is a  
middle intransitive with the sense "appear," "seem" or "be visible."

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)





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