E.A. Sophocles

[Barry Hofstetter]

Has anyone had any experience for this? Logos is offering the E.A. Sophocles collection at low bid. Their marketing makes it sound wonderful, but I'd be interested anyone's opinion who is actually familiar with it.

[Jonathan Robie]

Has anyone had any experience for this? Logos is offering the E.A. Sophocles collection at low bid. Their marketing makes it sound wonderful, but I'd be interested anyone's opinion who is actually familiar with it.

The Sophocles lexicon seems really very useful - we are converting that at biblicalhumanities.org.

So I'm also interested whether we should consider converting some of these other resources as well. You can read them all on archive.org:

• Greek lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine periods (from B.C. 146 to A.D. 1100)
• A Greek grammar, for the use of schools and colleges (1861)
• A catalogue of Greek verbs. For the use of colleges (1844)
• History of the Greek alphabet and pronunciation

[Stephen Hughes]

In his lexicon, Sophocles presents the Latin "loan" words as they are used in Byzantine texts which Dimitrakos doesn' t include.

He glosses in Greek more often than LSJ does which make using it in those cases a two step process - if the glosses in Greek were hyerlinked that would be more manageable.

Varient spellings and alternate morphologies with no appreciable difference in meaning are often (faithful to the text they occur in) given their own headword - on paper the eye can scan down and over the page to look for similar glosses (or slight spelling differences) and get an overall impression of a word. In a digitalised version, however, I think that users would get the impression that a particular word was what it was, without seeing such words as a variants of a "standard" forms. Some sort of cross hyperlinking could overcome the limitation of the a digital version only displaying them individually.

[Stephen Hughes]

I'd be interested anyone's opinion who is actually familiar with it.

Thinking about it, you were probably referring to the software that you saw on offer rather than the lexicon per se. My comments were about the lexicon in its print form. I actually have no exprience with personal Bible Study aids software to speak from. Sorry about misunderstanding your request for information.

[Barry Hofstetter]

I'd be interested anyone's opinion who is actually familiar with it.

Thinking about it, you were probably referring to the software that you saw on offer rather than the lexicon per se. My comments were about the lexicon in its print form. I actually have no exprience with personal Bible Study aids software to speak from. Sorry about misunderstanding your request for information.

Actually, I was lookig for overall comments and impressions of anybody who had any experience with the material in whatever form.

[cwconrad]

I remember using it on several occasions when I had access to a print edition. You might take a look at it at Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/cu31924021609395). I thought it was helpful and I think that the Logos offering is a steal -- I've bid on it! The e-book versions at Archive.org have Greek fonts converted and are not really useful and the PDF of the scan is klutzy to navigate. A digital format of this with Greek fonts is certainly a desideratum.

[MAubrey]

If it means anything in terms of expressing my opinion of Sophocles' lexicon, I can just say that I was the one who wrote the marketing copy. It's still marketing-speak, but its still my opinion.

The entries are small and don't provide a lot of information, but there are plenty of words in Sophocles that aren't in LSJ. Basically, unless you're willing to drop a huge amount of money of Lampe, Sophocles is pretty awesome.

[Ken M. Penner]

I bought Sophocles' lexicon when I was working through the Greek pseudepigrapha several years back. Of the words I looked up in both lexica, Sophocles was usually (except for a couple of words) less helpful than LSJ. Still, I'm pre-ordering the Logos version!

[George F Somsel]

I've been in on this offering from the beginning though I tend to think that the lexicon is probably the only thing of any real worth in the set (here I would definitely be wrong since I'm judging from a lack of citation in various works). While it may not be overly helpful for classical texts or for biblical studies, it may well be of use for somewhat later literature—note that it is a lexicon of Byzantine Greek. Sometimes, however, it is helpful to see the way in which words have developed in a later period since it may indicate a certain tendency which was already present at an earlier time.

[Stephen Hughes]

I had a look through the .pdf copy of his A catalogue of Greek verbs. For the use of colleges (1844).

If I had been introduced to this work at college (University), I would not have had the need (or competency) to use it till my third year of Greek. The work assumes the reader has mastered a basic classical Greek vocabulary of (I estimate) at least 750 words, is able to both parse and compose forms, and has a basic recognition of which words belong to prose and which belong to verse - which recognition requires both reading experience / familiarity with the the classical "canon" and direct learning of both vocabulary and inflectional forms applicable to both genres. The central catalogue of verbs seems straightforward enough for a user with that background.

On the positive side, I like it because Sophocles doesn't frequently compare Greek grammar to Latin - frequent references to Latin are a chore rather than an aid for me, becuase I double majored in Greek and Modern Greek (rather than Latin). I particularly like the practice of capitalising "obsolete and imaginary presents" mentioned at the beginning of the catalogue section.

While I find the tabulated layout of A Catalogue of Greek Verbs, Irregular and Defective by James Skerrett S. Baird easier to flip through, I like Sophocles more "talkative" style of paragraph presentation for thinking things through.
https://archive.org/stream/catalogueofg ... 6/mode/2up

On the negative side, it seems that a user needs to have feel for the book itself to get the most out of it. The "Remarks" at the beginning present an analysis of verbal forms that might overwhelm someone starting there. The appendicies (especially the chrestomathy of inscriptions don't seem to have a direct relationship to the central catalogue of verbs (as interesting as they are in themselves they seem suited to a more comprehensive grammar-come-reader).

I would be interested to know how this work with it disjointed parts will be going to be presented in the software package on offer - especially how the seemingly disjointed parts are going to be worked together in a digital version.