Contemporary lexicons

Other Greek writings of the New Testament era, including papyri and inscriptions
Forum rules
Please quote the Greek text you are discussing directly in your post if it is reasonably short - do not ask people to look it up. This is not a beginner's forum, competence in Greek is assumed.
Stephen Hughes
Posts: 3323
Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Dictionary to one of the Ancient Greek novels

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Warning! This post is in an intelligence-free zone!

I've been looking for a few days, but I'm having no success in finding one contemporary dictionary that I remember seeing. It was published in 1980 or 1990, and was specifically for just one of the ancient Greek novels.

Anybody know of it?
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Contemporary lexicons

Post by Stephen Carlson »

As far as I am aware, BDAG is the closest thing to a Hellenistic Greek lexicon, unless one for the LXX had better coverage in light of its larger corpus. I don't think that there enough people reading non-Christian Hellenistics text who find LSJ unhelpful to justify a publisher's investing in such a project, so I doubt that one could exist. But I could be wrong. All kinds of surprisingly narrow specialist works get published.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: Contemporary lexicons

Post by cwconrad »

Stephen Carlson wrote:As far as I am aware, BDAG is the closest thing to a Hellenistic Greek lexicon, unless one for the LXX had better coverage in light of its larger corpus. I don't think that there enough people reading non-Christian Hellenistics text who find LSJ unhelpful to justify a publisher's investing in such a project, so I doubt that one could exist. But I could be wrong. All kinds of surprisingly narrow specialist works get published.
So Toynbee was probably right! And since we're speculating so much of late -- surmising the probable but open to unexpected possibilities -- perhaps a Platonic perspective on the matter of vocabulary is not altogether out of order: ignorance of non-Christian Hellenistic literature may skew our grasp of the range of meanings of vocabulary in the Christian literature. It does seem to be the case that study of the GNT has been handicapped in the past by an assumption that its language is in a category by itself in contemporary Greek literature.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
MAubrey
Posts: 1090
Joined: May 6th, 2011, 8:52 pm
Contact:

Re: Contemporary lexicons

Post by MAubrey »

If such a book does exist, you would likely find a reference to it in this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Greek-Novel-B ... 003OIB59A/
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
Post Reply

Return to “Koine Greek Texts”