Preposition definitions - which to memorize?

Greek Learning Greek
1

I’ve been having trouble making sense of the prepositions; I’m going ahead and memorizing those from chapters 6 and 10 of Mastronarde’s “Introduction”, and I noticed not only do definitions share prepositions, prepositions share definitions…this is not an issue when it comes to translating from Attic, but in translating to Attic, methinks it would be helpful to know which preposition is the most prevalent for a given definition.

Is there a webpage or anything on Google Books that would resolve this, if it cannot be resolved here?

2

Have you downloaded or looked at any of the Greek Prose Composition books available online? Many of these have an appendix on prepositions which include good examples and idiomatic peculiarities of the prepositions.

Spending time with the big LSJ dictionary will also be useful, especially if you take the time to study the examples.

3

What does LSJ stand for?

4

It is the Liddell Scott Greek-English Lexicon.

5

It’s a monster book (sometimes called the “Great Scott,” or Biggell by those funny classicists), which, fortunately, you can find free online in several formats:

Perseus site - A nice, but at times painfully-slow, interactive version, it can be accessed either through the Look up a dictionary headword page or the Morphological analysis page. It tends to want input in betacode, but it can be configured for different kinds of output.

Diogenes - My new favorite. This is a tool that was written to help people access a fairly expensive (bought separately) collection of Greek and Latin writings, but the tool itself is wonderful even if you don’t own the database, because it includes, among other things, the LSJ data from the Perseus site. This is a particularly nice program because (1) you actually run the program on your own computer, so it’s blazingly fast and there are no issues with internet connectivity, (2) it takes unicode input, which I much prefer to betacode and (3) it is, of course, free. You can get it from the Diogenes Home Page

PDF versions - It can be nice to have a pdf version around, even though it’s not interactive at all. You can get a good free copy from the Internet Archive at LSJ in PDF. You pretty much need to download the pdf, though, since the “view online” version is too poor to be readable.

If you want something a little smaller, there are two abridged versions available. The larger of the two abridged versions is called the Intermediate Greek Lexicon (also called “Middle Liddell,” or Middell ) and the smaller is called Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (also called “Little Liddell,” or Littell ).