Just received an email with updated information regarding today’s talk:
The Cambridge Greek Lexicon
Prof. James Diggles’s seminar is proving extremely popular and we are anticipating demand for the available places, so log on early to guarantee a spot!
That said, if the Zoom meeting is full, you will still be able to view the seminar. We are live-streaming, as usual, on YouTube and Facebook. The links are:
YouTube - > https://studio.youtube.com/video/uv78gmE_pwA/livestreaming
Facebook - > https://www.facebook.com/camcengreek/live/
If you wish to ask questions via these platforms, simply type your question into the comments/chat sections and one of our moderators will capture it and read it to Prof. Diggle.
Monday 15th March 2021 at 18:30h GMT.
For access details visit Greek Dialogues Online - The Cambridge Greek Lexicon: a twenty-four year odyssey.
Okay, just listened to the presentation. Very informative honest (and entertaining), and clearly marked the purpose, advantages and limitations of the dictionary. Anybody else have any comments?
Well that was a fun way to spend an hour - the last time I saw Diggle I was holding his little finger at graduation. Can’t believe he said s*** but drew the line at f***, though! (Apologies for my own Victorian schoolmarmishness, I assume we’re not allowed to drop the F bomb on Textkit)
He made a good case for the scope of it as a student dictionary I thought and it’s definitely clearer than the print LSJ, but then I wonder how many students use print copies when nicely-formatted entries are so easily available online? I’ll definitely pick up a copy though and the CUP bindings tend to be good so I’m looking forward to it.
Sorry your question got dodged Barry! I did, however, enjoy the relish with which Tim Whitmarsh pronounced your name, rightly or wrongly.
I found it deeply disappointing, and in response to your question Barry quite shocking that the concept of semantic domains appeared to be new to him (though in fact he operates with it empirically through his various groupings).
I earlier called the organizational principles retrograde, and I stand by that and my other earlier criticisms. The dictionary is not only one-dimensional but uni-directional, with no interaction between entries. And so much of it is arbitrary. On καλος he said nothing to justify his separation of the word’s applications to “the natural world” from “created objects.” Etc. etc. etc. A questioner well asked why he privileged the physical senses of εχω.
A recognition of metonymy does not go nearly far enough. Nothing of ambiguity or multivalence, for example. All his categories are mutually separate and exclusive. The urge to pin things down may suit prose well enough but does not serve high lyric well.
It was good to have my previous criticisms of the Brill/Montanari dictionary confirmed. He could have been even harsher.
He has a dismayingly narrow idea of “literature.” Even Polybius is almost excluded (“boring"—hear hear, but still …), and as for the novelists, forget it.
And he’s given dismayingly little thought to database access and use. It may come “in the fullness of time.” (Did he really say that?) He acknowledged Perseus but that was all. And how many students these days will want to buy a print dictionary anyway?
But this risks turning into a rant. I should say that no-one has greater respect for Diggle’s textual scholarship and editorial expertise than me, but he quite failed to comprehend the magnitude of the task he set himself.
— Joel, Could something be done to unite these two threads, preferably on the Learning Greek board?
Sean, He may not have spoken the f-word but he said it was in the dictionary, and a good thing too. I hope the κινεω entry crossreferences βινεω.
It sounds like he was asked about the choice of texts? The one thing that worried me about the dictionary, from my entry comparison in the other thread, was that the narrow corpus of authors was going to lead to some distortions. I thought that the λυσσάω lost something from it, rather than simply becoming trimmer.
I defer to Michael’s experience when it comes to the value of the different methodologies for grouping meaning - speaking in my capacity as a member of the lumpenconsumeriat expected to buy these things to muddle through a Greek text it looks uncluttered, easy to access and written in good modern English from the entries Diggle put on screen, which works for me.
Joel, if you haven’t had a chance to watch the presentation he said there were 90-odd writers included up to Plutarch (Lives only) and there seems to have been a general principle that if a particular work was going to introduce a lot of specialist terminology then it was excluded. Michael’s right that his idea of literature seems to be almost exclusively limited, like with the works selected for OCT editions, to those writers who are likely to appear in an undergraduate classics course in British universities - I suppose we’ll see when a full list is released, but it’s a shame that there isn’t a more egalitarian attitude to these things over here. Presumably it was justified as focusing on what students will need, but then that seems a bit circular (and probably out of date at the moment of publication given that there’s a Cambridge Green & Yellow edition of Longus not long out).
The most interesting part of the presentation for me was an inside look at how time-consuming and exhausting it is to prepare a dictionary. The overwhelming impression I got from Diggle when he was asked about the potential to expand the dictionary is that the current method has reached the end of its natural life now that you can’t pay 500 people sixpence a week to write out and organise thousands of slips. I wonder whether the next big Greek dictionary will be online-only, made through a mixture of machine learning and a distributed, volunteer-based (wiki?) system for generating slips, with specialist editors coming in at the end.
I see on amazon’s site that the date hasn’t been updated yet. Also noticed that the price has almost doubled from when I placed my order back in October of last year.
Brill lies neglected in a dusty pile of books. I’m not going to shell out for this one. I’ll continue to turn to my dog-eared sexagenarian Intermediate L&S for immediate help and haul out the big LSJ when I need something more.
Hi, yes I know what you mean: my Bailly gets as much attention as your Brill (I don’t have Brill). However I’m hoping that there will still be lots of new things to learn in this new lexicon (since James Diggle spent so much personal time on it) even for advanced scholars such as yourself… as Budé said at the beginning of his own work on the subject (even less logically organised: page 1 jumps straight into forensic vocabulary!?), Et quoniam usus scribentium est multiplex, ego quae in mentem mihi uenient, in hos commentarios quam potero explicatissime referam, ita … ut si iam forte prouectiores eos legerint, nonnulla inuenturi sint (nisi fallor) ob quae nec omnem operam lusisse se dictitent, nec nos in rebus translatitiis tantum laboris exhausisse.
Chad, I’m a reader, not a scholar, and at this point I’m being crowded out of my living space by too many books. Yes, maybe Diggle and crew will offer some nuggets of information not available elsewhere, but I feel I already have more than enough sources of illumination for the texts I engage with. I’m not disparaging the new dictionary, which I haven’t seen, but I just feel the marginal help it’s likely to provide doesn’t justify the cost for me. If I were younger, I might, though. I purchased both editions of the Oxford Latin Dictionary – I was younger and more acquisitive then – and something like that for Greek, comprehensive and with very well organized entries, might interest me as a successor to LSJ, though I suspect it would require more than two large, heavy volumes and many more drachmas – or probably talents.
Join us at 6pm on Thursday 6 May 2021 as we celebrate this significant milestone. Editor-in-Chief Professor James Diggle will detail the background and highlights of the project. James will be joined by five colleagues who will take an in-depth look at the resonance for their work of five individual Greek words. This event will be hosted on Zoom webinar.
Amazon have just emailed to say they are delivering the new Lexicon tomorrow. They have charged me £26.40 which is the price at which it was offered last September. Pleased they have kept their price promise.
Thanks, Seneca!
Mine hasn’t shipped yet, but I did notice that the price has dropped back down to the preorder price I committed to in March. As in Ahab’s experience, my price reached $90.00 US! It has now dropped down to $54.00. I suspect that Amazon increase the price as the publishing date approaches.
Mine, ordered from Amazon, still hasn’t shipped, but they have also kept the preorder price. Regardless of how critical we may be over other aspects, it looks beautiful, just the thing to have on the shelf to put students and non-initiates in their place…
