User talk:Proteins

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Concordance

A very interesting project. You may also find User talk:Dubaduba/strong's greek1000 useful (or not, but I thought I'd at least make you aware of it). Hopefully you'll eventually be linking the words, right? Would be quite helpful in prioritizing new Ancient Greek creations. Any questions feel free to ask. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 13:01, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your nice welcome, Atelaes! I'm pretty familiar with Wikipedia, but Wiktionary is still largely terra incognita for me; help from experienced Wiktionarians is very welcome. I did know about Dubaduba's list, but I have special needs for this concordance, since I'm coupling it to a textbook on Wikibooks and a course on Wikiversity. That's why I'm including more information, such as the frequency counts, sample usage and the cognates.

I'll take your advice to start linking the words sooner rather than later. I'd been planning to do that after I finished the list, but it makes much more sense to do it as I go along, especially since there are over 5000 words in the Greek New Testament. Proteins 13:28, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

PS. I just discovered Category:Ancient Greek templates - incredible. Thanks to you and everyone else for making them! I might update the structure of the concordance to incorporate them, and perhaps create JavaScript routines for doing something similar. The latter might allow a reader to, e.g., click on a word and see its full declension in a pop-up window. Proteins 13:50, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, in fairness, if they're linked (and exist) then all they do have to do is click in order to see the full inflection, but I'll leave you to format this as suits your needs. I apologize in advance that we have such spotty coverage of these words. Taking care of all Greek NT words is actually one of my top priorities (I have fond memories of spending hundreds of dollars on lexicons as a poor Biblical languages minor student). It will happen eventually, but eventually is probably a ways off still. One very nitpicky thing, you have a section labeled English cognates which you seem to be filling with English descendants. So, for example ἀπό (apó) has apostle, but of is really the English cognate. Then again, some use cognate as anything within the same clade (which would include descendants), where others use it more specifically as sister taxon. In any case, as appendices are rather removed from the general readership, I'm not really worried about it conforming to Wiktionary's SOPs; so again, do as you wish. On a completely tangential note, I found it interesting to see another bio person working with Ancient Greek (it's kind of an eclectic mixture). Happy trails, and don't hesitate to ask for help with anything you come across. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 21:02, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Home

I'd also like to comment on this project. I raised the question of whether the English wiktionary is the proper home for this concordance - the language is Greek, not English. Such a concordance might be created in every language, but a singular version should be hosted on the Greek wiktionary.

(Assuming this were, instead, a textbook for biblical studies, it should more properly be hosted at Wikibooks.) - Amgine/^talk 03:22, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

A concordance is a natural compliment to a dictionary (especially one which is intimate with source texts, which we aren't yet, but aim to be). el's coverage of grc is pretty shady, even worse than ours (which is, itself, nothing to brag about). In any case, every project should have their own such concordances, and el's lack of one shouldn't prevent the creation of ours. I plan on ultimately creating a concordance for every (important?) Ancient Greek work at some point. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 03:50, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

I understand and appreciate your point, Amgine, but allow me to add to Atelaes' arguments for keeping the concordance here. Wiktionary already hosts the English translations of foreign words and vice versa; this is just a concentrated version of that, as I think you'll agree? Such a concordance also serves the purposes of Wiktionary, I believe, because it shows readers the origins of many English words. Learning the Greek stems allows readers to enlarge their English vocabularies when they see a new word built of those stems.

As an aside, I am drafting a textbook on Wikibooks for New Testament Greek. I helped in writing such a textbook roughly 20 years ago, but I'm planning to organize this one differently, so it will go more slowly. Proteins 15:44, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, no, it isn't the same as translations. It's a list of words used as a tool for studying a specific text in a specific language. As such it could certainly be a stand-alone textbook. But it would not be a customary appendix for a dictionary not in the language of the text.

As for Atelaes's argument, I think it is reversed - a dictionary is a complement for a concordance, but not the reverse as the former does not even imply the latter, while the latter is useless without the former. As a list of requested entries it has temporary value, but that value becomes null immediately upon completion of entering the list. The value as an etymological tool is also completely dissipated if each entry has an etymology. - Amgine/^talk 16:36, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to moving the concordance to Wikibooks or the Greek Wiktionary once you've created all the redlinked words. But I'm not sure if I understand where you propose to put its translations? For example, I can imagine that this concordance, once finished, might be useful to students in France, Kenya, Japan, etc.; we would need only to translate its English parts into French, Swahili, Japanese, etc. Are you suggesting that those translated concordances all be hosted at the Greek Wiktionary? That seems imperfect to me, although I recognize that I'm a newbie and unfamiliar with the customs here. I propose instead that each language host its own translation. Thus, the Greek Wiktionary would host a translation into Modern Greek, which is similar but not the same as New Testament Greek.

I'm not persuaded that we should exclude concordances from Wiktionary because they're absent from the OED and other traditional dictionaries. Wiktionary hosts a thesaurus, foreign word frequency lists and other items not generally found in a dictionary. We should be guided by what would be useful for the reader, no?

As a compromise, it might be possible to combine all the translations into a single document, such as the Forum on Meta. In that case, I can imagine it might be best to host the combined document on the Greek Wiktionary. Proteins 17:02, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

The problem is you're separating the translation definitions from the terms. This allows the concordance to be in disagreement with the actual language translation, and possibly perpetuate misinformation for scholars who only study the religious document and not the language. Any translation should reside with the specific term, which should be authoritative.

Different languages often have differing approaches to textbooks due to curricular elements common across the language group, in much the same way but to a greater degree that UK-style textbooks have a marked difference from their north-american counterparts. I would suggest the concordance be a much simpler list of terms found, rather than breaking out the terms into subgroups because those groups are biased to the language in which the concordance is being written. (That is, a written Japanese text does not describe verb inflections in the same way Swahili, English, or German does, so at most a base reference should describe those inflections the way the language of that base reference does so but better as a simpler list of terms.)

Are you aware of the concepts of scope creep and feature creep? They are traditional methods of failure for complex intellectual endeavours, and are particularly common to wiki-based community projects. They are also why Wikimedia Foundation has supported the different projects so their constituents may focus on production rather than developing divisive internal politics.

The idea of creating a list of terms which should be included in Wiktionary from texts is not at all new. For example Connel's Project Gutenberg concordances have been a running thing since 2005 or 2006. I'm actually working on a couple of related projects myself. I just don't see that your list is appropriate as a mainspace article for the English wiktionary because it's not about English.