Re: Erws
At least in Homer, ERWS can mean to lust after, to desire. In Homer's Iliad,
3.442, ERWS is used like this:
"But come, let us take our joy, couched together in love; for never yet hath
desire (ERWS) so encompassed my soul--nay, not when at the first I snatched
thee from lovely Lacedaemon and sailed with thee on my seafaring ships..."
I find this interesting, because I had always thought erotic love, at least
in English, meant "taking our joy, couched together in love". (Incidentally,
isn't that a wonderful description of sex? Much nicer than "make love",
"have sex", etc. Save that phrase and use it on your wife in some romantic
setting...) In this passage, the ERWS refers to the desire, not the
fulfillment of that desire.
The New Testament uses EPIQUMEW, a verb, for sexual desire. I wonder how
much difference there is between having ERWS and EPIQUMEW.
Re: Some amazing search tools
I would like to point out some of the amazing tools that you DO have access
to. If you have access to the web, you can see how common a word is in the
classical texts of the Perseus library. Go to:
"http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/searches.html"
Choose "morphological search". When you get your result, click on "LSJ
Entry". I got these results for "erws":
"http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/lexindex?lookup=e)/rws"
If you notice, the numbers giving the maxiumum frequency of usage are
hyperlinks. The reason that there is a "Max instances" and a "Min instances"
is that the parser is not always sure if a particular form is the word you
are looking for, so sometimes you have to investigate. Click on one of them,
and it takes you to a listing of frequency by author:
"http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/persfreq?lookup=e)/rws&corpus=2.0"
Of course, the frequencies next to each author are *also* hyperlinks; e.g.,
if you want to see exactly where the word appears in Homer, click on the
number next to Homer, and you get this:
"http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/wordsearch?author=hom.&lookup=e)/rws&c
orpus=2.0"
>From here, you can click to every possible use of the word in Homer and see
if it is a genuine usage of ERWS.
For information on usage in the papyrii, you can look here:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/papyri.html
They even let you choose a range of dates and a place to search within. You
can't see statistical information on the search results. At least not yet -
those Perseus folks are amazing, so never say never!
Jonathan
___________________________________________________________________________
Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com
Little Greek 101: http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie/greek/lessons
Little Greek Home Page: http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie/littleGreek.html
B-Greek Home Page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek
B-Greek Archives: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek/archives