Description
The Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott is one of the most famous dictionaries in the world, and for the past century-and-a-half has been a constant and indispensable presence in teaching, learning, and research on ancient Greek throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Despite continuous modification and updating, it is still recognizably a Victorian creation; at the same time, however, it carries undiminished authority both for its account of the Greek language and for its system of organizing and presenting linguistic data. The present volume brings together essays by twenty-two scholars on all aspects of the history, constitution, and problematics of this extraordinary work, enabling the reader both to understand its complex history and to appreciate it as a monument to the challenges and pitfalls of classical scholarship. The contributors have combined a variety of approaches and methodologies - historical, philological, theoretical - in order to situate the book within the various disciplines to which it is relevant, from semantics, lexicography, and historical linguistics, to literary theory, Victorian studies, and the history of the book. Paying tribute to the Lexicon's enormous effect on the evolving theory and practice of lexicography, it also includes a section looking forward to new developments in dictionary-making in the digital age, bringing comprehensively up to date the question of what the future holds for this fascinating and perplexing monument to the challenges of understanding an ancient language.
Table of Contents
- Frontmatter
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- A Note on the History of the Lexicon
- I. HISTORY AND CONSTITUTION OF THE LEXICON
- 1: Christopher Stray: Liddell and Scott in Historical Context: Victorian Beginnings, Twentieth-Century Developments
- 2: Margaret Williamson: Dictionaries as Translations: English in the Lexicon
- 3: David Butterfield: Latin in the Lexicon
- 4: Amy Coker: Obscenity: A Problem for the Lexicographer
- 5: Joshua T. Katz: Etymology and Etymologies in the Lexicon
- II. PERIODS AND GENRES OF EVIDENCE
- 6: Brent Vine: Incorporating New Evidence: Mycenaean Greek in the Revised Supplement (1996)
- 7: Tom Mackenzie: A Canonical Author: The Case of Hesiod
- 8: Christopher Rowe: Philosophy and Linguistic Authority: The Problem of Plato's Greek
- 9: Elizabeth Craik: Medical Vocabulary, with Especial Reference to the Hippocratic Corpus
- 10: Patrick James: The Greek of the New Testament
- 11: Mark Janse: The Ancient, the Medieval, and the Modern in a Greek-English Lexicon, or How To Get Your Daily 'Bread' in Greek Any Day Through the Ages
- 12: Philomen Probert: Greek Dialects in the Lexicon
- 13: Evelien Bracke: Between Cunning and Chaos: mêtis
- III. METHODOLOGY AND PROBLEMS
- 14: Michael Clarke: Looking for Unity in a Dictionary Entry: A Perspective from Prototype Theory
- 15: David Goldstein: Discourse Particles in LSJ: A Fresh Look at γε
- 16: James Clackson: LSJ and the Diachronic Taxonomy of the Greek Vocabulary
- 17: Michael Silk: Literary Lexicography: Aims and Principles
- IV. COMPARISONS IN TIME AND SPACE
- 18: Michael Meier-Brügger: Lessons Learned During my Time at the Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos (LfgrE)
- 19: Martin L. West†: Diminishing Returns and New Challenges
- 20: Anne Thompson: báptō: An Illustration of the State of our Ancient Greek Dictionaries
- 21: John Considine: Liddell and Scott and the Oxford English Dictionary
- Endmatter
- Bibliography
- Index
