When I’m learning new vocabulary, I always look it up on the English wiktionary to find out if there’s an etymology that will help me to remember it, or if there are words that are cognate that will help. In quite a few cases there’s an etymology, but it’s not helpful for this purpose. In some cases there isn’t any etymological information in wiktionary, which may mean that the etymology isn’t known, but it may be known and just not in wiktionary. For this reason, I’m thinking of buying a paper etymological dictionary for ancient Greek. I’m mainly interested in Homer, but having koine and Attic would be a bonus. Can anyone recommend something affordable of this type? It seems like it would have to be a fairly comprehensive dictionary in order to have many words that aren’t in wiktionary.
One thing that I do really love about wiktionary is that it makes it easy to click around and look for cognates, e.g., LSJ tells me that εἴλω has one meaning that is to roll up, and an etymological dictionary might tell me that it comes from the PIE *welH- , but wiktionary made it really easy to discover that it was cognate with helix.
Thanks for the suggestion. Brill also seems to have an online version of Beekes that they’ll let you use through a search form if you pay.
Chantraine is available for free on the internet archive.
As a random test, I tried looking up the word ἐρείδω in Chantraine. This is a word that has no etymology on wiktionary. Chantraine says its etymology is unknown.
Wow, that must have been a massive undertaking to scan and then hand-correct that huge document! (I’m puzzled by the copyright issues.)
As a random test, I checked for the word ἔτλην (lemmatized as the unattested τλάω in some dictionaries). English wiktionary has its etymology, but Frisk doesn’t. I’m surprised that Chantraine also doesn’t have this word. It’s common enough to be in Owen and Goodspeed’s list of common Homeric verbs, which is why I made a flashcard for it. It seems to occur 39 times in the Iliad. Conceivably the wiktionary etymology is just wrong or speculative, and Chantraine and Frisk just left it out because they didn’t have enough evidence. Or maybe it’s Homeric, and that’s not their focus. The wiktionary entry doesn’t cite a source for the etymology. Frisk does discuss τάλαντα, but I would never have figured out to look there if I hadn’t already seen the wiktionary entry.
The whole website is somehow related to the big academic project Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (IEED; Leiden University). All their dictionaries were available for free (and still can be seen in the Web Archive).
The resulting series of dictionaries was published by BRILL under the supervising of Alexander Lubotsky. He is mentioned in the header of Frisk (“corrected by Alexander Lubotsky”), so I believe he is aware of this website.
Anyway, the legal status of this online dictionary is dubious, but it is not a piracy.
I’d recommend Chantraine (French, second-hand paperbacks available, free online). It’s not fully up to date but I’m not alone in finding it more congenial and more useful than Frisk (German, also free online), which is a good resource but very badly out of date, especially with regard to the Linear B decipherment. It may be a disadvantage for you that neither of them concerns itself with cognates in later languages. Remember that English is only a distant bastard relation.
Beekes (in English) is more recent and much touted but is essentially a translation of Frisk with linguistic updates by Beekes that have been heavily criticized for his idiosyncratic and dogmatic views on the preGreek substrate. It’s now very much more affordable than when it first come out, and I think it’s variously available in paperback.
Despite revisions and supplements, these are the main choices: Chantraine or (Frisk-)Beekes. Or both, if you’re a glutton for punishment.
There’s earlier textkit discussion (Timothée’s contributions especially knowledgeable).
Ancient monolingual Greek dictionaries such as Apollonius Sophista’s Homer Lexicon (1st cent. CE, much used by readers in antiquity), reveal how the Homeric vocabulary was understood. They’re full of linguistically wild etymologies. I find them fascinating.