by Elucubrator » Tue May 20, 2003 10:06 pm
This is too great a topic not to throw in my two drachmas worth. Having read all the previous posts I'll just make a few brief statements on the books that have been mentioned with which I have some experience.<br /><br />(1) The Great Scott (LSJ): I am a graduate student of Classics and I maybe use this a couple of times a year, not more. Granted that I may be using it much more frequently if/when I get into research, but as far as reading texts goes, it has almost never been necessary for me to consult it except in very few instances and with uncommon authors. <br /><br />This isn't a dictionary for reading Greek as much as it is for learning all the details and uses of every word, and so, it can actually take you forever to find the definition you are looking for through the columns of text all packed together with no indentation or spaces to separate them, and with a strange system of numeration (capital Roman numerals, lowercase Roman numerals, arabic numbers, letters, and so forth), which I have still not figured out or bothered to. <br /><br />As for the bad condition of the text in the 9th edition: it is not nearly as bad as the comments on Amazon make it seem. The main thing is that the text is not very dark, but it is still quite legible. The ninth edition can be purchased with the supplement included and it contains all of the new words discovered since the earlier supplement had come out. It also contains all the Mycenaean words discovered in the Linear B tablets.<br /><br />(2) the Middle Liddel and the Little Liddel: the first of these was the first Greek dictionary I ever owned, and there is nothing wrong with it. It is good. You don't have to know any Latin to use it. It's advantage over the Little Liddel is that it includes, in addition to some of the conjugated forms of the verbs in the different tenses and moods, citations of passages where the words themselves are used. The Little Liddel does not, in order to save space.<br /><br />In spite of this difference which might be considered an advantage by some, once I had discovered the Little Liddel I never again used the Middle version of the dictionary. Why? Because the little one is so much handier, and faster to use when looking up words. I spent much of the last semester doing readings together with a friend. I used the Little Liddel, and he used the slightly larger one. Never did my dictionary come up short, and even once the Middle Liddel actually did not have a word that appeared in the smaller version. At times neither dictionary had the word and we had to go poring through the Great Scott, but this very seldom happened.<br /><br />(3) The flexible plastic covered Langenscheidt: Vincent, how well I understand what you are saying you cannot imagine. I finally got to the point in my studies where I could not bear having to open the dictionary another time. I began underlining the words that I wasn't sure of and just tried to read the text figuring out their meaning through context. This was actually a good thing to try to do, but it wasn't my original intention. I had just been killed by the dictionary. I didn't want to read sitting at a desk any more. If you ever had to read sitting with your neck inclined looking down at a book on your desk for 16 hours a day, months on end, you can imagine what I am talking about. So eventually I would only read while lying on my back on the couch or on the floor, and using any dictionary in such a position is practically impossible...UNLESS, you have the pocket sized plastic covered Langenscheidt, which happens to be great for this and for travelling too.<br /><br />A note on these pocket sized dictionaries: I have the Latin one as well, the print is very small, and one person who saw that I had it asked to see it and claimed that it was a complete waste of money, but the truth is that it is quite excellent and practical so long as you are sticking to the beginner's cannonical texts: Cicero, Caesar, Ovid, Vergil. I'm not sure who else, but the thing will come up short on more advanced authors. So, not bad at all. <br /><br />(4) Marinone Guala handbook of all the Greek verbs: It's just as William has described it. It is also something you will not need if you take care to learn all the principal parts of each verb you learn, because then you recognise the forms without such assistance. However, for those who jump into reading real Greek texts right away, without bothering to learn the alternative forms in the optative of contract verbs or whatever, the book is extremely useful. However, you will later come to a point where you never need it. In my first year of graduate school I only went to it once. Did I need to? Not really; I could have figured it out on my own, but when you have to read 60 pages of Greek and 50 more of Latin per week, if you take the time to figure everything out, you will not finish the readings. So, it could be a help there too, and come to think of it I did check it twice this year.<br /><br />Those are the only ones of which I know, and my recommendation to anyone, beginner, intermediate, or advanced, would be to have the Little Liddel. However, I do not know about this new dictionary which Oxford has apparently put out, and reading the BMCR (Bryn Mawr Classical Review) of the dictionary is probably a good idea.<br /><br />-S.
<br /><br />So, M&G may be vital for those of us who are of necessity taking a more erratic approach to Greek, though eventually it will spend most of the time on the shelf.<br />
