Looking for lexicons for Greek dialects

Greek Learning Greek
1

I’m trying to find lexicons for various dialects of Ancient Greek, for a computational linguistics project I’m working on. For example, a list of all the words that occur in documents written in the Aeolic dialect. Ideally they’d be in an electronic format, but I need them in whatever format I can get them in.

I’ve got a list of Mycenaean words (although it would be better if it were in an electronic format), and I think I know where to find a list of Arcadian words, but I’m still looking for the others.

Any advice on where to find these resources, or how to extract this information from other sources, would be greatly appreciated.

Can I assume the words in Liddell-Scott are Attic unless otherwise noted?

2

hi, yes these exist. e.g. for aeolic, see pages 18 and 22 of my composing aeolic notes: i give references there to two different aeolic word lists I’ve found in the back of hamm’s grammar and page’s study of the aeolic poets (remove spaces):

www . freewebs . com / mhninaeide / writingsapphics . pdf

a doric dictionary here:

books.google.com/books?id=dKQPAAAAQAAJ&hl=fr&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

cheers, chad :slight_smile:

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Thanks a bunch, Chad, that’s great! :smiley:

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I thought I’d bump this and see if any one else could help me, if I gave a more complete description of what I’m looking for.

What the project is, is using computational methods to draw the family trees for how the dialects are related to each other. (See here for a similar project: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/). As my data, I’ll have a list of word meanings and the words all of the dialects use for those concepts. For example, all of the words for “we”, or “hand”, or whatever.

The dialects I’m currently looking at are: Attic, Ionic, Euboean, Eretrian, Arcadian, Cypriot, Pamphylian, Lesbian, Thessalian, Boeotian, Phocian, Locrian, Elean, Laconian, Heraclean, Argolic, Corinthian, Megarian, Rhodian, Coan, Theran/Cyrenaean, Cretan, Mycenaean, Homeric, Koine.

Now, when I started this project I was sure that lexicons must exist for all of these dialects, since people have been studying Greek for so long. But I can’t find them, and the dictionaries don’t seem to specify what dialects a word occurs in. So, given a particular word I don’t know how to answer questions such as “Does this word also occur in Pamphylian”?

Any advice at all on this would be appreciated. How to get the word lists, people I might contact about it, suggestions for alternate methods, whatever. I’ve emailed some people already in academia but none of them replied.

5

I’m not absolutely certain how much corpus studies would help you here. If I understood your post correctly, you want to take all the texts from a particular region, compile word lists for them, and then use them to determine how the dialects are related to each other.

There is something of a difficulty with this, I think. Forgive the question, but have you studied any classical Greek? The literary language was to some degree artificial, by which I mean that particular dialects became associated by convention with specific genres of literature (epic, lyric, drama, etc). The language of Homer was itself something of a composite, combining forms from multiple dialects. Some poets deliberately used mixtures of dialects for effect. And there’s a diachronic aspect (the works of Homer date from several hundred years before, say, someone writing in Koine). All of this would need to be taken into account for your project, unless you intend to restrict yourself solely to inscriptions or something.

The standard (if dated) work on Greek dialects is by C.D. Buck. More recently, there’s Geoffrey Horrocks’ history of the Greek language. You also might take a look at William Annis’ short guide to the Greek dialects, which explains some of the issues with dialect usage.