It’s quite possible that LSJ will still be consulted when no one uses Brill.
I am sure that in the future there will be a place for both. The advantage the Brill has is that in its on line form at least it will be much easier to update and correct. I wonder whether we should call the Brill dictionary “Montanari”?
I fancy it’s only because LSJ is so very authoritative that commentators voice disagreement with it when they think it’s wrong.
The Brill dictionary is a translation of the Italian one, which is fundamentally based on LSJ (practically to the point of plagiarism) and makes no substantive advance on LSJ’s lexicographical organization. We shouldn’t be taken in by the hype and puffery. Formatting does make it slightly easier to navigate, and it has some other advantages too, but LSJ was compiled by people who really knew Greek, in a way that none of the people involved in the ripoff do. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it a ripoff, but I do feel it should acknowledge its indebtness to LSJ. It follows a well-known formula: conceal its origin, do a bit of fiddling with it, and flog it as a wholly new and superior product. And while some of LSJ’s English is rather old-fashioned, LSJ can’t fairly be called outdated, when the revised supplement (cross-referenced in the main Lexicon) was issued in 1996. Ancient Greek has not stood still over the last twenty years, but it can’t be said to have changed a whole lot.
Forgive what’s turned out to be a bit of a rant. I hope you’ll keep us informed of your experience with it, seneca2008. It will be interesting to see how it holds up as it gets more use.
As Hylander hints, for most people the Intermediate L&S is perfectly adequate for most purposes, and much more straightforward.
PS I wrote the above a day or two ago but didn’t post it. Montanari would be delighted if the English translation were dubbed “Montanari.” It was something of a vanity project. But I’m not denying its value.
The Brill dictionary is a translation of the Italian one
If you look at my post on the Brill dictionary thread you will see that the preface explicitly states that this is not so.
All dictionaries of course take account of their predecessors. LSJ was based on Passow which in turn was based on Schneider.
Perhaps you might find the following extract from the preface interesting:
An enormous effort would be required for the revising of a dictionary like the LSJ. Although supplemented, to general acclaim, by P.G.W. Glare in 1996, the current LSJ has not undergone a major revision since the 9th edition by Jones and McKenzie in 1940. That revision took 15 years. And, needless to say, the funding as well as the time necessary for compiling a new dictionary for a language as complex as ancient Greek both in its breadth and in its chronological span is daunting. An instructive comparandum is the monumental Oxford Latin Dictionary, compiled without basing itself on any previous work. That project was originally planned for publication in twelve years but in fact took from 1933 to 1982 (granted, the project was prolonged when World War II interrupted the work for a number of years), with the first set of 256 pages published in 1968 and an addition published every other year until the entire volume was completed in 1982, almost half a century after the ambitious work was begun. Also, though its scope is more monumental and vast even compared to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, another comparandum is the Diccionario Griego-Español, overseen by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados since 1980. It now awaits its eighth volume, which will comprise the latter half of the letter Epsilon. In the absence of a revision of the main body of LSJ, especially in the light of the recent advances made in scholarship on the ancient Greek world, another Greek-English lexicon that incorporates such new knowledge is surely a most welcome addition.
This Greek-English project is presented as an enhancement of lexicog- raphy, which is an intuitive procedure, not an exact science - a fact that sometimes eludes even the most advanced students of Greek. As John Chadwick points out in the introduction to his pathfinding Lexicographica Graeca: Contributions to the lexicography of Ancient Greek (1995), modern lexicographers have tended to treat “as a positive fact” the opinions of an- cient lexicographers, which, as useful and necessary as they are, must be considered merely a starting point for understanding the semantics of a given lemma, that is, of any word to be defined. This Greek-English dictio- nary, following the lead of Franco Montanari, presents a critical approach to lexicography in and of itself. But of course even a critical approach must by necessity present interpretations, however valid, of the existing evi- dence for the semantics of any given lemma. And interpretations are not simply a matter of “positive fact.” The editors of this new lexicon, as pre- sented in English, are keenly aware of this reality as they aim to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the full range of surviving ancient Greek. The editing of this volume has been for us a task that was both exhilarating and humbling for these reasons. Our objective was an accurate elucidation of each Greek lemma in English, and, accordingly, it is to be emphasized that the lexicon is not a translation of the Italian definitions in and of themselves. Also, as noted in Franco Montanari’s preface, the English version includes a not insignificant number of new lemmata. Incorporated are the corrections stemming from the Italian third edition, which came out in May 2013. While our edition also incorporates other corrections discovered during the translating and editing, and although we have double-checked citations when questions arose, we have not done a systematic revision of the definitions or citations of the Italian third edition. Finally, we must note that the first edition of any lexicon, and certainly one originally based on another language, is bound to contain not only some infelicities in idiom and clarity but also outright errors. Still, we have tried our best to render 132,884 lemmata into as clear and idiomatic modern American English as possible in the span of four years.
In addition to the updated language of our definitions, the strengths of this volume include the incorporation of new evidence, especially from epigraphical sources and papyri. Our methodology relies on the application of historical linguistics to the study of new lemmata, and this reliance at times takes us even beyond the third edition of the Italian version. In continuing to account for ever newer lemmata, we follow the aim of Franco Montanari in seeking to include later Greek, even from patristic sources (for which the users of LSJ, for example, had to consult the dictionary of Lampe). There is also a representative set of lemmata for names of persons and places. In general, our hope is that this lexicon will be a useful tool for specialists in ancient Greek as well as for students at all levels.
As far as I am concerned dictionaries in any language are points of departure not ends in themselves.
I agree that the “Middle Liddell” is an excellent first port of call. A larger dictionary, however, is very useful for example when reading Tragedy as one can see parallel uses.
Everybody has preferences and I am sure when Liddle was first published there were similar exchanges!
Thanks seneca2008. I had read what you wrote about it not being a translation, but Brill’s own preview (http://www.brill.com/sites/default/files/ftp/downloads/34732_Preview.pdf) states right up front that “The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek is the English translation of Franco Montanari’s Vocabolario della Lingua Greca.” I see the actual preface you quote says (indeed, “emphasizes”) that “the lexicon is not a translation of the Italian definitions in and of themselves” (but also that “we have not done a systematic revision of the definitions”). It seems the editors of the American version have (a) translated the Italian dictionary but (b) when it comes to the actual “definitions” have not (or not always) directly translated the Italian. Evidently they (or their army of assistants) used LSJ, just as Montanari (or his army of assistants) did.
I simply wanted to issue a general caution, not launch an attack. It has undeniable advantages over LSJ, as I’ve said. I do sometimes make use of the Italian dictionary, as I said on the Brill thread (http://discourse.textkit.com/t/brills-dictionary/13115/1), but only to check if it has something not in LSJ (which it rarely does, apart from patristic Greek taken over from Lampe). I’ve never done a systematic comparison with LSJ, but as I look now at the Brill ἀγγέλλω entry (copied by jeidsath at http://discourse.textkit.com/t/brills-dictionary/13115/1) two things stand out:
But others may have a more favorable impression of it.
—This discussion would be better on the Brill thread, don’t you think? But I’ve had my say.
Michael