Designed to Work with MS Word and Users of Bibleworks Or Accordance

Designed to Work with MS Word and Users of Bibleworks Or Accordance

Designed to work with MS Word and users of BibleWorks or AcCordance

To install the Greek marking tools:

Open Tools/Macro/Macros… and choose the Organiser button. If you’re like me, this should open up the organiser with Macro Projects tab selected, and two panes: one for GreekMarkingMacros.dot, and one for normal.dot. If this isn’t the case, you may need to browse to get these two files in the two panes (ie one each). Then, highlight GreekMarking in the GreekMarkingMacros.dot pane, and click the Copy button to copy this into normal.dot. Now switch tabs to the toolbar tab, and you should find the same two panes – again highlight Greek Marking in the GreekMarkingMacros.dot pane and copy it into normal.dot.

Close the organiser, and right click on one of your toolbars and choose Customise… (alternatively, for those lacking a right mouse button!, Tools/Customise…). Choose the Commands tab, scroll down the left hand list to Macros, and from the right pane find Normal.GreekMarking.ToggleGreekToolbar. Drag this item up to a suitable location on one of your regular toolbars. It will probably appear as a fairly long button with a text caption – if you right click on it here, you can change the button image and switch it to default style so it looks less ugly. Close the Customise box, and you’re done. Quit Word and restart, saving changes to Normal.dot if prompted.

If all works, then you don’t need this file any longer. The button that you placed on your toolbar should turn on the marking toolbar (try this now).

How it works:

(Some of this will not apply to Mac users, who don’t need it)

  • Underline and double underline are just like any other font style buttons – whatever’s selected will be done.
  • Next is a square box button – this is for drawing a box around conjunctions – select the word, click the button.
  • Next are 5 ‘character buttons’ – to insert particular characters that are annoying to do with Bwgrkl font for PC users. Mac users can do these with their regular keys, I believe. (And to get rid of the buttons if unwanted, when customising toolbars, simply drag them off).
  • Next are two right-angle arrows, down and up. Use these for syntactical diagrams – they draw an arrow as diagrammed. Place the cursor at the start of the word that the arrow is drawn from, and click the button. For some unknown reason (well, it’s a Microsoft bug, but we won’t mention that), the arrow may sometimes appear at the top of the page on the first use (and you can delete it), but generally these work alright.
  • If you need to stretch or delete an arrow, you will need to select it – if you can’t do this, try clicking the next button in line (looks like a mouse pointer), and then you should be able to play with the arrows. You may need to click this button again to go back to typing text.
  • To do coordinate markers like [, fudge. Do a down arrow from one line, and an up arrow from the next. The two shapes will line up to give a [ shape with a blob where the two arrowheads sit on top of each other like this:
  • Coordinates
  • Here
  • Hey, nobody’s perfect. Another point to note is that this arrow drawing assumes each line is its own paragraph – try putting an arrow next to the last word in a multiline paragraph, and it’ll pop up in the wrong spot, as above
  • Next off the rank are four case marking buttons. Select the text – single word, or a longer phrase – click the button, and the marker will appear above the word. Dative and Genitive are in text boxes which will centre above the word – this might not be so good with phrases, so you might want to do them word by word. Some examples:
  • A nominative case
  • An accusative phrase
  • A dative case
  • A genitive case
  • To do vocative, use either 2/4 or of buttons, and change the text in the text box to a V by hand.
  • Next, two coloured superscript buttons – I used these for footnoting parsing and form/function bits in the holiday assignments. Left them in for those who like the idea. The blue ‘a’ does italics, so b/w printers can still distinguish them.
  • Last two buttons apply the standard Greek and English fonts, respectively. For Mac, I’ve used Helena from AcCordance and Times, and for PC Bwgrkl and Times New Roman.
  • Finally, the ToggleGreekToolbar button that you placed on your regular toolbar does more than just turn the marking toolbar on and off. An annoying feature of Word is its readiness to tell you that the Greek word you’ve just typed isn’t in English (ie checking spelling as you type), and helpfully capitalising sentences where you don’t want it. Also, snap-to-grid is going to mess up all the marking elements by putting them over the text. So, using the toggle button turns all these off, and lets you work with the toolbar better. (Note – it won’t work if no document is open) I find it easier to use this rather than turning the toolbar on and off any other way.

The markings assume that your lines of Greek are spaced at 1.5 line spacing. It gets crowded otherwise. Depending on what you’re doing, you may need to format paragraph to get this effect. Alternatively, it is meant to be safe to select your slab of Greek, and click the ‘pi’ button to apply standard Greek font, which will make this adjustment to line spacing for you.

Due to the way Word works with shapes and text boxes, you may find that your markings don’t move when you add in a return here and there. Each marking will be accurate when placed, but it is tied to the end-of-paragraph marker, and if you split a paragraph after marking it, it could get messy. So, it is best to break the text up into the paragraphs/lines that you want before marking it. This is not ideal, but nor is it avoidable. Computers still can’t do everything…

Questions: feel free to ask me. Good luck! Anthony (Douglas, though our numbers are reducing)

Verbal Aspect Theory (VAT) 'Prominence Marking'

Various theories have recently been advanced regarding the function of Greek 'tenses' as aspect markers, not time-markers. Some suggest the 'tenses' are used to highlight prominence of ideas or events.

In 2005 a group of 3rd years agreed on a system of colours for highlighting verbs in order to assist in aspectual analysis of passages. I have added colour buttons to Anthony's Greek Marking Toolbar to make marking easy. Just select the word (or clause) and click the button.

In addition to the aspectual highlighting colours decided, I have added a font colour to distinguish present from imperfect and perfect from pluperfect. So the colours mainly emphasise aspect but also show 'tense'. The colours chosen are distinguishable even when printed in black and white:

Imperfective Aspect
present/imperfect – Violet
perfect/pluperfect – Red

Perfective Aspect
aorist – No highlight colour (as the aorist is seen as the default / not prominent 'tense')

(But I have made the Green font an optional extra here to help find the verb quickly)

Vague Aspect
future – Grey 25%
Verbless or Vague Clause – Yellow (eg for implied eimi and aspectually vague words like oida

which don't have forms available in all 'tenses'. The button looks like ? ).

The Nil button cancels both highlighting and font colour.

All moods + participles have aspect and are thus marked.

Substantival uses of the participle are not marked.

An article which gives the idea is

Reed, Jeffrey T. and Ruth A. Reese. 'Verbal Aspect, Discourse Prominence, and the Letter of Jude'.

Pages 181–199 in Filologia Neotesamentaria 18 Vol. IX – Noviembre 1996.

Hope it helps,

Philip Swan.

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