With the publication of Emiliano Caruso’s Monolingual Dictionary of Ancient Greek, on the Greek side of things, this is no longer an either/or. Anyone who is serious about reading him is likely to be serious about supplementing him. Caruso’s 5000 entries will need to be increased to at least 20,000, and this is likely to be done by his readers. His book includes lots of white space between the entries, and I have already started adding my own monolingual definitions as I encounter new words not found in his book. At some point, these can be posted on line, and then his lexicon can either be reissued with reader’s contributions or a supplement produced.
Caruso (p. 60) distinguishes between αὐξάνω and αὐξάνομαι with ποιῶ (τι) μέγα versus γίγνομαι μέγας, thus avoiding the L1 meta-language “transitive versus intransitive.” I had always thought of Greek verbs in terms of the latter; Caruso has gotten me to write definitions in terms of the former. He also has introduced me to the concept of defining words this way: εἰ ἱμάτιον οὐκ ἔχω, γυμνός εἰμι. (my own supplement to his entry.) He’s not just an monolingual lexicographer, that is, but someone who encourages all of us to become monolingual lexicographers. It now makes sense for his book to be the focus of the sort of project that Nesrad has desired for Latin.
On the Latin side, there may be less of a need of a pioneer like Caruso, since it sounds like Latin monolingual lexicography is already well established; is it just a matter of editing it into a user friendly edition?
In my opinion a Reader’s lexicon should not include the top 500-1000 most frequent words in the language. Those words I think are best learned by simple translation into the L1. For instance, I’m teaching my 7-year old daughter Latin with LLPSI and some conversational use and simply telling her that deus means “G/god” and et means “and” is much easier than anything else. This would include all the prepositions, conjunctions, demonstratives, pronouns, interrogatives, etc. The lexicon would include the words from there up (the less frequent words), and define those words in simple, concise, yet very good Latin/Greek by using the top 1000 words as much as possible. This would save a lot of space because the less frequent a word is the more specific its meaning becomes and the fewer idioms it has. I don’t see the pedagogical value in having a full Latin/Greek version of something like this: http://logeion.uchicago.edu/index.html#facio or this: http://logeion.uchicago.edu/index.html#ποιέω Such words that are very common and have loads of idiomatic uses are best left to the great “D-L” dictionaries like OLD, L&S, LSJ in my opinion. But something like this: http://logeion.uchicago.edu/index.html#mitiscus can be read and understood by my 7-year old daughter (I only had to explain that caballus est equus since we haven’t seen that word yet).
Well, there is a latin-Latin Orbis pictus latinus: Lateinisches Bildlexikon (click ‘Blick ins Buch’ for sample pages… such a preview is not available on the corresponding page at the English Amazon site).
I’ve been using the LSK for months and I would say that, in conjunction with Caruso’s lexicon, we now have on the Greek side about 85% of what we need.
So, in an ideal world, it would not be necessary to translate the LSJ into Ancient Greek, but only to revise the LSK. (and maybe add pictures.)
I have a Latin-Latin dictionary 1 made of Appleton’s schoolbooks. This lexicon is limited and intended for beginners, but I find it useful. So, if one transcribes Chickering’s “Beginners’ Latin by the direct method” 2 (55 pages) I could convert it into a computer dictionary.
Currently, number of the articles is almost 70000, but it should be reduced to 40000, because some of them are not independent articles but sub-definitions and should be joined. So, it’s a real-size dictionary, even though some lexis is Medieval.