For anyone interested I have ported the complete LSJ to the Kindle.
here is the link.
Warning: 70MB and that’s compressed…still it’s FAST
removed for redevelopment see below
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The ninth edition of Liddell & Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ) has been freely available in electronic form since 2007, having been released by the Perseus Project under the Creative Commons Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 license. In addition Handheldclassics.com has added all known Greek word-forms, corresponding grammatical parsings and headwords to the lexicon. This allows direct look-up of any poly-tonic Greek word-form within a given text. Search can also be performed within the lexicon by typing the headword using the Kindle keyboard and Beta-code transliteration. The LSJ is a must have for any serious student of Greek and the Kindle edition works wonderfully fast.
It seems I can make the lexicon my primary dictionary on the kindle, however, the automatic look up still doesn’t work. Does anyone else have this working? I am using two different editions of the Odyssey found on Mobile read.com…
The kindle Touch products are the only ones that display dictionary short form definitions when touching on a word (in the LSJ). They also allow two Greek lexicon’s at once and will find a word in each automatically without setting one to default. The remainder of the Kindle “hardware based” products will take you to the dictionary entry only if you perform the look-up using the 5 way navigator. Software based Kindle products will not allow use of optional dictionaries at this time. This includes the Kindle Fire.
John
Do I need to format my own Greek ebook in a particular way for the Kindle Touch to look something up in this dictionary and not the default (English) one? I downloaded it and tried a word in my self-baked Odyssey ebook, but no luck yet.
Nope, not working. I even set the language in my epub to “Greek, Ancient” and converted to mobi, but not working. Re-downloaded the ditionary, not working. And I do have a Kindle Touch. It should work, as stated by the OP. But it doesn’t yet.
The book does say “for use with works by HandHeldClassics.com”. So perhaps we can’t use it with random Greek ebooks.
And I did find that it has “Greek, Modern” set as language … But changing that didn’t make a difference.
OK, so I set my own Greek ebook to “Greek, Modern”, like the LSJ. Now it does see the dictionary. And recognizes some words, like ἑρκος or ἔπος. But many aren’t, θυγάτερ for example. And most inflected words aren’t found either.
John, I bought this via Amazon, could there be something wrong with the version they have?
I don’t think it’s a problem with the Amazon content, I downloaded the one from John above and have the same issue. It doesn’t recognize about 70 percent of what I’ve tried and when I’ve tried it on what I recognize, it seems only to parse it. For example (alla), I’m a total newb so I don’t know how to enter greek for you here, I just get the part of speech. Same thing (pollus) part of speech showing various forms (declensions?) but no definition. I’d love to hear that I’m doing it wrong! Thank you for all your work John!
After hearing complaints that the LSJ lexicon had a low hit ratio I started testing on texts other than my own and found the complaints to have merit. This is because Greek texts are not consistent when it comes to how unicode for polytonic Greek is applied. A unicode text can be encoded using composing diacritics, or precomposed diacritics. The consensus today favors precomposed diacritics but within this subset, due to faulty duplication, we again have two choices. Vowels can be represented using acute or tonos with the consensus being in favor of the tonos. Most computer operating can disambiguate these variations but devices like the Kindle and Android based systems do not.
I have re-encoded all of my texts including the LSJ to follow this consensus.
Search of the LSJ from Xenophon Anabasis yields a 95% hit ratio excluding words with two accents (these must be typed in using beta code transliteration).
I would be happy to help anyone re encode texts to get them to work with the LSJ.
I have also updated the LSJ reducing its size to 50MB (Amazon limit). To do this I had to remove the grammatical parsing information within the inflection section that had been added to the lexicon. At the same time I have substantially increased the inflection database.
For those confused when search on inflected forms brings up only the headword, please continue by searching on the headword. This was the the only solution to the problem of multiple headwords branching from an single inflection and had to be applied universally.
Please note that I have oversimplified the extremely important topic of text encoding and expect “disagreement” about what constitutes a “consensus”. Below are a few websites on the subject and I strongly urge all become familiar with this important topic.
I’ve got the kindle version and can search for headwords. However, it will give me ONLY headwords (no full entries) when going through the search option. Does anyone else have this problem? Thanks!
If you are searching for a term using Betacode follow these steps
Example searching for λόγος
1: Type in “lo/gos” in the search field.
2: Touch on “lo/gos” as displayed (the first word in the index).
3: That will bring up lo/gos with λόγος underneath
4: Touch λόγος not lo/gos
5: Touch “Show Full Definition”
If searching from a text:
1: Touch on word within the text.
2: Touch “Show Full Definition”
3: Follow steps 4 & 5 above
If word selected from a text is the dictionary headword not an inflected form you will get straight to the definition, otherwise you must touch the “headword” shown underneath the inflected form. Of course some inflected forms have multiple headwords.
Hi John, I have a question about the Liddell and Scott Lexicon. First of all, I am very grateful for your work in making this available for Kindle. I just bought it from Amazon for $2.99. However, I’m wondering if you can give me a little guidance. What I’d like to do is read a Greek text (the one I’m currently on is the SBL Greek New Testament, Michael W. Holmes, from OSNOVA), highlight a word (I’m on Kindle Paperwhite, so I press on a word until it highlights), and then get an English gloss or brief definition. Currently, that’s not happening – it takes me to a page that contains two Greek forms, but no English definition. What I need is to be able to quickly get the English gloss for rarer words that are unfamiliar to me. Is this possible?
(it takes me to a page that contains two Greek forms) All you have to do at this point is press on the dictionary (one of the forms) headword and it will show the definition.
Okay, great, thanks!
My second question: the other thing I’d like to be able to do is click/tap on a word and see the word’s mood/tense/voice/gender/number/etc. In other words, now that you helped me the first time, I can see the meaning of the word’s root/stem. But I still cannot tell what tense/voice/etc the form indicates. Is this possible?
Thanks again!
but there is no show full definition option. It only shows the dictionary form of the inflected word, but it does not give the english translation of the word. How should I proceed?
