Your comment reminds us that a few of us on the list are academics while
most are not. The TLG CD-ROM, licensed by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae at
UC-Irvine, is a searchable database containing a vast chunk of Greek
literature from Homer to late antiquity; it is not complete, but if one is
looking for usage of particular words, it is an invaluable tool for
linguistic, stylistic, and other kinds of exploration; One PHI CD-ROM,
licensed by the Packard Humanities Institute, is the same sort of disk for
the bulk of classical Latin literature, and the second PHI CD-ROM, alluded
to by Don Wilkins, contains the Duke database of Greek papyri; again, this
is not an exhaustive collection, but it is vast, and an immeasurable amount
of what lexicographers have learned about the words and usage of Koine
Greek outside the Greek LXX and NT has come from the study of these papyri.
That is precisely why Don was suggesting that the so-called "solecisms" of
the NT--apparent breaches of standard and accepted grammatical usage--ought
to be checked in these vast databases in order to ascertain whether they
are really breaches of good usage or common alternative grammatical
constructions in the Greek of the period.
This is the sort of information that belongs in a FAQ ("Frequently asked
questions"--a set of Q&A formatted information) that may perhaps be
compiled for the list at some point in the future.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/