From: Randy Leedy (Rleedy@bju.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 26 1999 - 16:18:44 EST
Ted Mann is asking about the difference between BibleWorks 3.5 and
Accordance in their reports about the numbers of participles in the
various NT books. Perhaps someone has already explained this issue
more fully today; I get only the digests, and at the end of
yesterday's digest the matter remained somewhat unresolved. I hope my
post does not prove pointless or redundant.
Jim Poulsen is on the right track in describing the difference as due
to differences between Friberg taggings (used in BW 3.5) and Gramcord
taggings (used in Accordance) in the respective databases. The portion
of my review he quoted (and thanks, Jim, for the kind words) doesn't
address this particular issue, but another portion does. Note 14 (in
the current version of the review) reads:
"Other quirks (or features, depending on one's perspective) of Greek
morphology found in BIBLEWORKS include the use of middle deponent and
passive deponent as separate voices and subdivision of participles
into ordinary participles and imperatival participles.... The
treatment of participles is misguided in my opinion; many participles
tagged as imperatival are more accurately viewed as circumstantial to
a governing imperative (e.g. Col. 2:7). When searching for
participles, one must remember to search for both participles and
imperatival participles, or else the search results will be
incomplete."
I don't have 3.5 on my system any more, so I can't do the search for
all ptcps to compare with Accordance. However, the just-released
BibleWorks 4.0 contains an all-new morphological database that, by the
way, encompasses both LXX and NT (with a uniform tagging scheme). Its
participle counts for each NT book match precisely, in each book, with
those that have been previously reported from Accordance.
The original question, as I understood it, though, was how the various
books rank in the FREQUENCY of participle occurrence. I don't recall
seeing that matter addressed except in raw numbers, which are not
especially meaningful. The following statistics from BibleWorks should
be helpful, though not definitive, since they show only the percentage
of verses with at least one participle rather than the percentage of
WORDS that ARE participles. These percentages could be calculated
without too much difficulty, but my time is too short to take that
step just now. I've ranked the books in order of frequency in the
right-most column, which I believe is probably most helpful. I doubt
that these columns will align on most systems: I hope they're close
enough to be helpful.
Explanations:
col 2: Verses in the book containing a participle
col 3: Participles in the book
col 4: Total verses in the book
col 5: % of verses containing a participle
---------------------------------------------------------
1 2 3 4 5
Book Vss Ptcps # vss %vss
---------------------------------------------------------
2Pe 49 88 61 80.33%
Jud 20 39 25 80.00%
Act 738 1283 1006 73.36%
1Pe 75 119 105 71.43%
Heb 201 315 303 66.34%
2Jo 8 12 13 61.54%
Luk 698 1069 1151 60.64%
Rev 244 395 405 60.25%
Mat 599 936 1071 55.93%
Mar 371 562 678 54.72%
1Ti 59 81 113 52.21%
Col 48 77 95 50.53%
Tit 23 32 46 50.00%
Eph 76 107 155 49.03%
3Jo 7 11 15 46.67%
2Co 119 196 256 46.48%
2Ti 36 55 83 43.37%
Jam 46 70 108 42.59%
Rom 178 255 433 41.11%
Gal 61 83 149 40.94%
1Th 36 58 89 40.45%
Phi 42 56 104 40.38%
Joh 350 486 879 39.82%
1Jo 41 58 105 39.05%
2Th 17 26 47 36.17%
1Co 128 182 437 29.29%
Phm 5 7 25 20.00%
Readers will of course beware of the dangers of generalizing
conclusions based statistics drawn from small samples.
****************************
In love to God and neighbor,
Randy Leedy
Bob Jones University
Greenville, SC
RLeedy@bju.edu
****************************
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