Χαίρετε, πάντες ! After having finished the wonderful Athenaze book, I have been going mad trying to figure out the long vowels ᾱ ῑ ῡ in ambiguous situations since almost no dictionaries seem to mark these (and the vocabulary in the back of the Athenaze, though useful, is comparatively limited). Is there a reliable online dictionary I can turn to?
I have read in a different thread in this forum that the LSJ at Perseus does this, but I just searched for οἰκίᾱ and it didn’t mark the long alpha.
Thanks for the suggestion! I also use it, but LOGEION doesn’t even mark οἰκίᾱ — very frustrating! I hope there is a solution out there. I’d also gladly purchase a paper dictionary for a reasonable price if you all recommend a good one.
In most cases LSJ gives information about vowel length if it is known, although not for case endings and such, since you can look that up in any grammar.
The LSJ, which Logion and Perseus use, mentions “Ion. οἰκίη”, which indicates that the α will be long. There are first declension endings with short α. (γέφυρα, μοῖρα, θάλασσα).
There’s no dictionary I can think of (maybe somebody else can) that shows the macron or breve, as the case may be, on the final α in first-declension nouns. As you undoubtedly know, the great majority of them are long, and the handful that are short, like the ones Joel gives, are (usually?) recognized as being short by the rules of accentuation.
(If you find a paperback ancient Greek dictionary of any worth for “a reasonable price,” be sure to let me know! Though actually, I have the paperback “little Liddell” {Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon} which I see is going for $26.20 now on Amazon, which I’d say is quite reasonable. It passes my “πῡρός test,” but not your οἰκίᾱ desideratum .)
Menge’s Griechisches Wörterbuch uses macra and brevia quite extensively (as does the author’s Lateinisches Wörterbuch). In its use the dictionary is quite comparable to the “Middle Liddell”. Totally unexpectedly ἑλληνιστί doesn’t have a breve on the final -ι, but Ῥωμαϊστί does. One would think, though, that had the -ι been long, Menge would have marked it with a macron. Still potentially disconcerting.
Assuming that the nominative singular is known, the only potential stumbling blocks will be nouns ending in -έα, -ία and -ρα. Some of the lengths of these -α’s are actually unknown. Obviously a properispomenon will immediately show how it is, as will the paroxytonon when the vowel is a diphthong or else known as long. Are there any 1st declension feminines ending in short -ᾰ but which have oxytonon?
Nouns in short-α are always recessive. (Probert 141. Chandler 28). Of course, this will not help you with a word like τόλμα. Chandler 64 gives more than a half dozen rules for length of the final α.
Thanks. I thought as much, but wasn’t quite sure. I also thought I had seen feminine words ending in -εῖα, but that may have been just a half-forgotten daydream.
Well of course there’s words like εργαλεῖα, but they’re neut.pl. The number of times I’ve seen βασίλεια and βασιλεία confused, and not only by students, is beyond counting.
Wouldn’t a reverse dictionary reveal any –εῖα fem.nouns? (I’m thinking of Kretschmer-Locker Rückläufiges Wörterbuch, but I forget exactly how it’s organized and there may be better, digital tools now. I remember Peter Walcot being rightly scornful of a reverse index to Hesiod.) I’d be surprised if there are any.
As for οικία, even a little morphology goes a long way. Failing that there’s Smyth or simpler grammars, as polemistes pointed out.
I did a text search in the text file of the LSJ (in addition to the poor man’s reverse dictionary, it’s also the poor man’s English-Greek dictionary). There are εῖα feminine adjectives, and what seem to be some derived nouns:
ἀμβλεῖα, ἡ
εὐθεῖα, ἡ
ὀξεῖα, ἡ
πλατεῖα, ἡ
ὑγεῖα, ἡ
While Probert said that there are “no exceptions” to 141, Chandler mentioned that there were a number of exceptions to his rules in 28.
These are not nouns but adjectves, all but the last the feminine form of an –ύς adjective, with a particular noun “understood” (e.g. ἡ ευθεια [γραμμη] a straight line).
Whose final ᾰ is short, as indicated by the accent.
So, Lucus Eques, it seems in sum, LSJ (and perhaps other dictionaries) give the vowel length (when known), with the exception at least of the final α of feminine first-declension nouns and adjectives, since its length can almost always be determined by a handful of “rules”. So far so good (or bad)?
I think I must have mixed them up with some adjectives, even though I thought I was careful. Polysyllabic nouns of the 1st declension with short -ᾰ must all be proparoxytona. Already the analogy against properispomena is much too heavy. Thus also οἰκία must have -ᾱ, even if nothing else whatever (such as the Ionian οἰκίη) is known about it.
This is all good news, of course. The number of 1st declension feminine nouns the length of -α of which isn’t directly clear becomes quite small. It will include dissyllabic words such as θύρα. And that’s only when the vowel of the penult is either known short or its length is unknown.
EDIT: However, another search shows that the LSJ does not record any oxytone words with short terminal alpha. I suppose that compounds with short second (from end) syllable might be misleading though.
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