*Important: this notebook does not display properly in GitHub, so please read it in nbviewer instead, using this link.
The greeksyntax package for Jupyter now supports Boxwood diagrams to display the syntactic structure of a sentence. Let's open a database and take a look at Matthew 1:20, take a look at it using Boxwood, and compare that to an interlinear display.
from greeksyntax.lowfat import *
q = lowfat("nestle1904lowfat")
q.find(milestone("Matt.1.20"))
You can wave your mouse above any word in the output shown above to see morphological information and an English gloss. You can also generate an interlinear - we will do that later. But before we do that, be aware that interlinears have some drawbacks. As Barry Hofstetter likes to put it:
There is not too much concerning which I am dogmatic. A few theological issues and the fact that interlinears are the spawn of the devil. They are the linguistic equivalent of brain eating zombies. They are the dark side, the power of which you don't want to experience...
The problem with interlinears is that they do not represent the syntactic structure of a Greek sentence at all. Instead, the associate each word of the text with an English gloss and rely on your ability to connect English words to create meaning. But the meaning of a Greek sentence cannot be accurately conveyed using English glosses. Syntax diagrams do a much better job of that.
There are many kinds of syntax diagrams, the greeksyntax package for Jupyter supports Boxwood, a format designed to be simple and to avoid distracting readers with lots of overhead. You can use the q.boxwood() method to display a sentence in this format:
q.boxwood(milestone("Matt.1.20"))
This display uses hierarchy and grouping to show the structure of the sentence. Compare that to an interlinear for the same sentence:
q.interlinear(milestone("Matt.1.20"))
This display gives no real clue about the overall organization of the Greek sentence. It can be helpful for vocabulary and parsing, but not for understanding sentence structure.