Hello everyone,
This might sound too weird, but I have thought of composing a little book in Ancient Greek, but my idea would be to write in Ionic Greek, but I do not know if that is possible. (My referent is Herodotus)
Not because we do not have texts in that dialect, but because there are no dictionaries about that specific variety of the Greek language.
What do you think?
Thanks a lot!
Enoch Powell’s
A Lexicon to Herodotus
will be useful. Good luck!
Update
Testing it just now, that dictionary in that digital form suffers from the problem that it displays the line of the reference, rather than the section. In other words, after clicking the reference in the dictionary, one needs to scroll down if the expected word is not in the selection.
@hmederos22 I admire your drive, and wish you all the best with this.
Besides Herodotus, another good source of Ionian vocabulary from the fifth century are the various treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus. The Budé editions (at least the ones I’ve worked with) have excellent Indices Verborum, and there is also a comprehensive Index Hippocraticusto the entire corpus from Kühn & Fleischer and later editors.
Randy Gibbons
Any example of modern composition in Ionic?
John Beazley, of Greek vases fame, won the Gaisford prize in the 1930s for “Herodotus at the Zoo.” It’s in print, or at least on the internet. I can send you a copy if you can’t find it.
Here is a scan of Herodotus at the Zoo. Several other compositions in Ionic are listed as winners of the Gaisford Prize.
There are also plenty of later imitations of Herodotean Ionic: off the top of my head - Arrian Indica, Lucian De Dea Syria, De Astrologia, parts of Quomodo Historia Conscribenda Sit and Vitarum Auctio, and the Life of Homer by ‘Pseudo-Herodotus’. If anyone has any to add it might start becoming worthwhile to form a list.
I would counsel the student of Herodotean Greek composition to pay even closer attention to these works than to Hippocrates and Aretaeus.
Thanks for the finds, jcabraham & bedwere.