Monolingual Ancient Greek Lexicon from 16th century

Greek Learning Greek
1

Hey all,

Thanks to the great folks at Vivarium Novum, (indirectly thanks to Carolus Raeticus’s thread which got a reply linking to their resource list", I have found a lexicon of Ancient Greek compiled by an Italian named Varino Favorino in the 16th century, with all definitions in the language, with nary even a trace of Katharevousa to be found (something which deflates my enthusiasm whenever I discover a new “monolingual” lexicon on the internet).

You can download the 100mb PDF from here: https://ia601506.us.archive.org/12/items/lexiconvarinou/downloaded(12).pdf

I’ve looked through it, and although it sometimes gives somewhat dubious etymologies like τραῦμα supposedly from αἷμα and ῥεῖ, it is definitely not just a glossary, providing synonyms willy-nilly with no explanations.

For instance, here is the entry for βασιλεύς:

Βασιλεύς· κυρίως, ὁ πατρόθεν ἤ ἄλλως ἀπὸ γένους ἔχων τὴν ἀρχήν.

καὶ βασιλεύς, τοῦ λαοῦ. κοίρανος δέ, ὁ πρὸς καιρὸν τὸ τοῦ βασιλέως ἔργον ποιῶν.

ἡγεμών, ὁ τάξεως στρατιωτικῆς ἐχόμενος.

τὸ δὲ ἄρχων, ἐπὶ τριῶν λαμβάνεται. τὸ μὲν κρατῶν, ἐπὶ μόνου τοῦ βασιλεύοντος. δεσπότης, τοῦ δούλου. κύριος, τῶν αὐτοῦ πραγμάτων.

τὰ ἐξουσιαστικὰ ὀνοματα πρὸς γενικὴν συντάστονται. τοῦ βασιλεὺς τὸ θηλυκόν, οὐ μόνον βασίλεια, ὡς ἱέρεια, ἀλλὰ καὶ βασίλισσα, κατὰ Αἴλιον Διονύσιον Ἀττικῶς.

Βασιλίνναν δέ φησι Μένανδρος. ἐλέγοντο δὲ καὶ ὑποδήματά τινα βασιλίδες, καί τι μύρου εἶδος, ἑπταβασίλειαν. καὶ βασιλίνδα, παιδιάτις, βασιλέας τινὰς ἀποδεικνύουσα.

Καὶ βασιλειᾶν, καὶ διαβασιλίζεσθαι, τὸ βασιλείας ἀντιποιεῖσθαι [σημαίνει]. τὴν δέ φασι καὶ βασιλεύς, ἀρχή τις Ἀθήνησι, καὶ ἡ ἐκείνου βασιλίς. καὶ βασίλειος ἐκεῖ στοά, πλησίον τῆς τοῦ ἐλευθέριου Διὸς στοᾶς.

Big caveat, though, is the ligatures. There are many, and you will need to learn them to use this lexicon (until my transcription finishes - I have finished the ΑΑ words). However, if you have a good grounding in Greek already, you’ll be able to work out progressively what each ligature represents.


Anyway, hope people here will find this useful.

2

I’m excited for this, I’m currently trying to write the majority of my Greek flashcards with Greek definitions. Unfortunately, the URL doesn’t seem to work for me, it just tells me that the website cannot be reached.

3

@Amplaos can you upload this to archive.org?

4

Yes, the link isn’t working for me either at the moment. I tried the archived version, but it keeps telling me that the captcha solution I enter in order to download the file is wrong, even though it isn’t.

@Jeidsath: I will do so presently.

5

Wow, Amplaos, what a tremendous find! This looks like a wonderful supplement to Λ.Σ.Κ. and Caruso, although, if the other entries are as good as this one, it’s probably the other way around. Can’t wait to see your transcription. χάριν δώσομέν σοι!

6

It’s up on archive.org now, https://archive.org/details/lexiconvarinou, though no preview yet.

I’ve learned a few new words just now from it, for instance· γλίχομαι, apparently a synonym of ἐπιθυμῶ and ἱμερευῶ.

7

Thanks. It does depend on your level of Greek as well- just now I was testing the lexicon with some Lucian, and I encountered the word ὕπτιος. Favorino defines it as ὁ ἐπὶ νῶτον κεῖμενον. I misinterpreted νῶτον as νότος, which led to some confusion. On the bright side, I now know how to say “my back hurts” in Greek! (με λυπεῖ ὁ νῶτος)

8

(emphasis added.)

I think we are ἐπὶ τῇ αὐτῇ σελίδι.

L1 resources eliminate confusion. That’s what they are designed to do. With a good L1 lexicon, you can determine precisely what something means. With L2 resources, for several reasons, there will always remain a certain confusion, a slight (at least) fog that hangs over everything. I saw that when I did my pure monolingual reading of the Ajax with Doukas et al. But there is a bright side, a certain joy in staying in the Greek, where even the confusion is okay, and sometimes even fun.

Speaking of which, didn’t Lincoln say μὲ λυπεῖ ὁ νότος? :laughing:

9

Such renaissance productions derive from lexica and glossaries compiled in post-classical antiquity, such as Apollonius Sophista’s Homer lexicon, which I’ve touted before. They’re interesting for their historical cultural significance and more particularly for the linguistic and lexicographical principles they exemplify, which are often at variance with one another.
Here for instance in one entry we have κυρίως, “properly” or “literally,” often used to identify a core meaning as distinct from extended or “metaphorical” ones, while the ἄρχων entry is a polysemic one, assigning three unhierarchically differentiated meanings to a single word. They stand at lexicographically opposite poles.
Many definitions, as Amplaos discovered, are informed by false and linguistically preposterous etymologies, e.g. here κοίρανος seems to be taken as cognate with καιρός. That is typical of ancient lexica.
There were also dictionaries devoted to semantically distinguishing “synonyms" from one another. We see traces of that kind of approach here, but only at a very elementary level, in the inclusion of entries for κοιρανος, ἡγεμων, and αρχων.
Then there were collections of hapax legomena, words attested only once, such as διαβασιλίζεσθαι—the sort of extremely rare words that bring joy to Markos’ heart (and to mine, I must admit), but need their context to make real sense of them, and the context is usually lost.

So the conglomerated entries here are a mish-mash of miscellaneous odds and ends pulled from here there and everywhere and variously cut down and garbled. They have very little authority and very limited utility. And they require mastery of grammatical metalanguage. Of course they do have the advantage, if it really is an advantage, of being in Greek (of a kind), but that’s all. For some that’s enough, I know, but not for anyone who really wants to learn Greek, who will depend on more reliable resources.

10

I’ll be adding a glossary of grammatical terms to my transcription, as well as cutting out irrelevant discussions of “etymology”, and expanding entries I feel are lacking.

11

I tested it with some Aesop.





There’s even a separate entry for σὺν Ἀθηνῷ καὶ χεῖρα κινεῖ, the punch line to one of this week’s fables.

I think Favorino would have liked that. I know we will.

Here’s a question maybe for Montaigne and his cat: When we use Favorino to speak the language of a dead people, how do we know that it is not the other way around? :wink:

12

as well as cutting out irrelevant discussions of “etymology”, and expanding entries I feel are lacking.

I would have thought the discussions about etymology were a valuable part of this text from a cultural point of view. I can see that you want to aid the unwary but surely this could be achieved by some kind of note at the beginning. I hope that you make clear what it is you are adding although I am not sure what the point of making additions is. if you wanted a “practical” monolingual Greek dictionary would this text be the best place to start?

13

A lot of the etymologies are, as mwh noted, preposterous, and don’t add much, except perhaps as mnemonics (since many of them seem to come from coincidental similarities in sound). I’ll be mostly adding clear definitions to very common words, since often the entry is far more concerned with the various forms of the word in different writers than its actual meaning.

Theoretically we could also take one of the old dictionaries in Katharevousa and archaize the language, but I’d rather use them as supplements to this work which already uses the archaic language. I’d use Caruso, but I don’t have a copy and it’s not in the public domain.

I’d like to add pictures as well to common, concrete nouns and verbs, but I think I’ll leave that to when the transcription is done.

14

Hi, Seneca,

I think, so, yes. Since the project would largely involve combining this text with the Λ.Σ.Κ and Caruso, I don’t think it really matters where one starts. I guess I’d be a little curious to see what Chad has to say, since he has given this question a lot of thought

http://discourse.textkit.com/t/plan-of-action/67/1

but I am much more curious to see what Amplaos comes up, since he has actually started the project. :smiley: Next, I am interested in giving him whatever help he needs. :smiley: :smiley:

Actually, did you see the movie Field of Dreams? If they come, it will have been built. :smiley:

15

Markos

have you read “Redeeming the text” by Charles Martindale? Chapter 4 on translation is very illuminating. Alternatively Gadamer truth and method might be helpful if you want to get to grips with the philosophical problems which this kind of project faces.

I think this dictionary looks like an important item in the reception of Greek in the 16th century but mixing it up with later dictionaries which you are going to further edit (or have been edited ("translated into Katharevousa) seems to produce a hybrid which must necessarily take you further away from where you wish to go. (Always assuming that your goal is actually attainable.)

I havent seen the field of dreams. But as fas as I can see the premise of that film was that a wished for object could be achieved if only a framework could be provided. The problem here is that you dont have a well defined framework.

I was intrigued by your remarks about a “pure monolingual reading of the Ajax with Doukas et al”. I wonder what that can mean? Surely only one problem in understanding a greek text is to understand (interpret?) the words. What can “pure” mean in this context? How can your readings or anyone elses remain unaffected by everything that has been written between Sophocles and the present (regardless of whether you have actually read any of it yourself)?

When the early music movement started great claims were made for its “authenticity” and the stipping away of centuries of misunderstanding. Certainly many important discoveries were made about “how” to read the music and much work was done on publishing playing treatises from the 18th century. We now have a clearer idea than we had 40 years ago about baroque performance practice, which turns out to be much freer and less subject to rules than the early pioneers thought. I now play Bach on a c 1770s violin with all of its 19th century conversions removed, using gut strings and a modern bow based on a model in the Ashmolean (there are very few playable 18th century baroque bows). Although it is pleasant to imagine previous owners playing baroque music on my violin I realise I am indulging in a fantasy. What I am doing is reflecting the most modern approach there is. Moreover I cant unlisten to everything that has happened since Bach, who remains simultaneously old and timeless and as modern as Stockhausen or Messiaen or Birtwistle or Ades.

I offer this story not to dissuade you from this enterprise but to ask whether you have really thought through what you are doing.

16

Seneca,

The idea here is not so much to reproduce the same experience a 5th century Athenian would have had seeing Oedipus Rex at its first performance (impossible), but rather to facilitate Greek language learning by being able to keep the student immersed in the language even when they don’t know a word and have to look it up. I don’t see what the harm would be in attempting that. Again, as a non scholar, I won’t be claiming it has any kind of scientific authority, and I wouldn’t dream of using an entry in it as proof of anything. It is intended for personal use, whatever one can get out of it

I think what Markos meant by “pure” is reading only in the original language, with the original text and a paraphrase in the same language. Obviously this doesn’t mean that his reading isn’t colored by the 2000 years between text and paraphrase, and the centuries more from the paraphrase to the present day.

Markos, I don’t have a copy of Caruso, and even if I did, it’s not in the public domain (unlike Favorino, LSK and old LSJ editions), so we couldn’t integrate his stuff wholesale.

17

Thanks Amplaos.

I can see the attraction of immersion. The main difficulty is that at some point some kind of translation has to happen and I dont see any way round that. I think that the statement “reading only in the original language, with the original text and a paraphrase in the same language” needs a bit of unpacking. Is “Doukas” actually writing in the “same language” as “Sophocles”? The very use of the word “paraphrase” must mean that some kind of “translation” has happened and as we are not responsible for it how can we guess what assumptions or decisions were made unless we make a further translation of both texts and then compare them. Of course this introduces a whole new set of assumptions and is the start of a mise en abyme. It also seems like a lot of work and while it may be very interesting and shine a lot of light on Doukas (and indeed Sophocles) what help can that be to a beginner (presumably at whom immersion methods are aimed)?

I hope you find this project helpful and I will be interested to see what results it yields.

18

I’m trying to locate the whole thing, but judging from a snippet Markos quoted in a thread about Ajax 1140, I would say no less, and perhaps more than “No Fear Shakespeare” is writing the same language as the Bard.

Compare:



with:



19

I had never heard of “No Fear Shakespeare” so thanks for that. I have looked at the opening (at random ) of Anthony and Cleopatra and that exemplifies what I have been talking about. The paraphrase is very far from Shakespeare and although its recognisable its not at all how I understand the play. Nor can I think it would be any help to someone trying to study it. Anyone learning English would not start with Shakespeare of course.


The paraphrase of the Ajax is here

I realise that you are keen on this approach and I dont want to add a sour note but I think this project is fraught with methodological problems which would need to be addressed before any meaningful progress could be made.

EDIT I am sorry I had not read the end of your post with the examples. I think maybe the Anthony and Cleopatra comparison I looked at is a fairer test because what is lost in paraphrase is the poetic language. This is a very stark contrast in A&C.

20

hi markos, i saw above you were curious about my view on this. sorry i can’t visit here as often as i’d like…

my view is at the end, but let me give the lead-up first - like most people i assume, i use lexical resources in two ways:

  1. to get an overall understanding of a word (outside the context of reading a specific text)
  2. to understand the meaning of a word in a specific sentence

for use 1 - the general one - i personally think the classic references LSJ and OLD (and cunliffe say for homer) are necessary but not sufficient. by necessary i really mean that i don’t see monolingual or other resources as replacing them now or later. however my personal experience is that they are not sufficient in various ways, and monolingual lexica are among the other resources that can help top-up what you don’t get from LSJ, OLD etc alone.

probably the best e.g. for me of the insufficiency of the classic lexica are for very common words like prepositions. i think if you read the specialist books on prepositions, you get a much better sense of the different meanings and how they interrelate, compared with only relying on say the LSJ entries.

building up your mental semantic networks, in particular, usually requires more than LSJ, OLD etc alone. take a concrete e.g - crito begins:

“τί τηνικάδε ἀφῖξαι, ὦ κρίτων; ἢ οὐ πρῲ ἔτι ἐστίν;
πάνυ μὲν οὖν.
πηνίκα μάλιστα;
ὄρθρος βαθύς.”

probably the words in here that wouldn’t figure on a typical beginners greek vocab list would be τηνικάδε, πηνίκα, ὄρθρος and maybe also πρώι. if you looked up say τηνικάδε and πηνίκα in LSJ only, i think what you wouldn’t get is how the τηνικάδε / πηνίκα (and ἡνίκα) set are closer in their semantic network to the word ὥρα than other similar time-related sets (e.g. τότε / πότε / ὅτε), whereas the monolingual entry for πηνίκα linked above (which i’ve seen before, it must come from an ancient lexicographer) brings this out better. once you’ve made that connection through ὥρα, this means that when you conversely see ὥρα used, e.g. phaedrus 229a “ῥᾷστον οὖν ἡμῖν κατὰ τὸ ὑδάτιον βρέχουσι τοὺς πόδας ἰέναι, καὶ οὐκ ἀηδές, ἄλλως τε καὶ τήνδε τὴν ὥραν τοῦ ἔτους τε καὶ τῆς ἡμέρας”., it reinforces the semantic network you’ve mentally built up and calls to mind the τηνικάδε / πηνίκα / ἡνίκα set again as correlating well over to τήνδε τὴν ὥραν τῆς ἡμέρας - you have a constantly reinforcing feedback loop the more you read, here through the node ὥρα that you get from the monolingual but not necessarily from the LSJ.

on the other hand, the monolingual dictionary is clearly not sufficient on its own. if you looked up ὄρθρος there alone, you wouldn’t get the right sense and how it relates to other time periods - i forgot that i actually discussed this on an earlier post (http://discourse.textkit.com/t/the-greek-equivalent-for-the-latin-prima-luce/9796/1 ).

nor even are monolingual lexica necessary to understand semantic networks of words – currently they are useful resources but you could imagine a more systematically mapped out semantic network of πηνίκα say. you can always try to envisage what would be the optimal learning resources for future generations - but for now, since that work hasn’t been done, i think the approach “LSJ+” is better than “LSJ alone” (i doubt anyone would disagree with that) and that monolingual resources can have a place in the “+” if used with caution and if you spend a bit of time with them (e.g. in the above linked work, you actually get a better sense of τηνικάδε from the πηνίκα entry than from its own entry).

for use 2 however- i.e. reading a word in a specific context - i think LSJ, OLD etc are usually sufficient, but not actually necessary. the clearest example for me is when reading works with ancient scholia – my favourite work for reading is joshua barnes’ iliad, with scholia picked out and printed on the same page to make it easier to read without consulting cunliffe or LSJ. if i have come into reading a work prepared, having learnt in advance the general sense of all words used in the work (something i’ve recommended before), then often scholia can be sufficient to point you in the right direction when you have a mental blank looking at a word, and you feel your semantic network for the word being developed through another feedback loop. it’s not so much monolingual lexica that i am recommending for this use (i.e. collections of definitions taken out of context and arranged alphabetically) but monolingual scholia on the same page of a text.

cheers, chad