A Modern English to Attic Greek Lexicon

[David Lim]

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/Woodhouse
I just came across this, and I am just wondering if it may be helpful in picking up ancient Greek? Well, not quite modern English, but what is a century compared to two millenia?

[Barry Hofstetter]

Ah, yes, Woodhouse, a fine resource for people taking advanced Greek prose composition, or if you are just trying to remember things like "What is the ancient Greek word for floor?" The trick to doing this is first to look it up in Woodhouse, then look the same word up in LSJ and/or BDAG. Get a good idea of its range of meaning, and ask yourself if it really is the proper word to use in the specific context you want. When I was in grad school we had one copy in our library and one available in our grad student office (it was chained to the wall and guarded by a three-headed fire breathing ferret named Cerberus, ok, slight exaggeration, but over 20 students in the class and two dictionaries available? Ugly...

[cwconrad]

Ah, yes, Woodhouse, a fine resource for people taking advanced Greek prose composition, or if you are just trying to remember things like "What is the ancient Greek word for floor?" The trick to doing this is first to look it up in Woodhouse, then look the same word up in LSJ and/or BDAG. Get a good idea of its range of meaning, and ask yourself if it really is the proper word to use in the specific context you want. When I was in grad school we had one copy in our library and one available in our grad student office (it was chained to the wall and guarded by a three-headed fire breathing ferret named Cerberus, ok, slight exaggeration, but over 20 students in the class and two dictionaries available? Ugly...

Yes, it was in doing advanced Greek prose composition that I encountered Woodhouse, too. And I'll agree with Barry here that this is not an adequate resource by itself, but a useful tool to find a starting point for undertanding the "semantic domain" of a word you might want to use in composition or speech: find it in Woodhouse, then go to LSJ and start exploring the usages in context from the citations provided in LSJ. For NT Koine, a procedure that is perhaps more immediately useful, if you have access to BDAG and Louw & Nida in an electronic edition, is to search these latter two resources for English definitions and English glosses, then check out the Greek words you discover in L&N's semantic domains listings -- sort of like the way you'd use a thesaurus to sort out the nuanced differences between near-synonyms.

I recall too the problem of too few copies of Woodhouse readily accessible. Another resource that I've wished were more readily accessible is E.A. Sophocles' Byzantine Lexicon.

I think this thread really belongs under Resources in the "Books/Lexicons" forum. I'm not going to try to move the whole thread, but I'll post a note about the Woodhouse Lexicon and put in a cross-reference to this subtopical thread there.

[Richard Ghilardi]

This link is broken as of May 18, 2011:

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/Woodhouse/

A year without Woodhouse is like a year without sunlight!

[Ken M. Penner]

The trick to doing this is first to look it up in Woodhouse, then look the same word up in LSJ and/or BDAG.

At the risk of promoting a commercial product, it seems to me the slick way of doing this would be for the Logos resource to enter production: http://www.logos.com/product/15748/engl ... c-language

[David Lim]

This link is broken as of May 18, 2011:

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/Woodhouse/

A year without Woodhouse is like a year without sunlight!

This link works fine for me, but sometimes it seems the hosting server is down.

[Richard Ghilardi]

You're right, David. Thank you.