Says Professor James Diggle, “When I was able to sign off the final proofs … I literally wept with joy.”
Once when I was in high school in New York, my father had a temporary stay at Lenox Hill Hospital, and I trotted over in my green uniform and my monstrous stack of school books to pay him a visit. When the doctor came in, he asked me what I was studying, and my father proudly told him I was learning Ancient Greek. That’s when the doctor burst our bubble. He said he’d studied Greek for five years and never had a use for it.
Well, I ended up studying it for five years, too, and although I can’t say I ever had a practical application for it, I don’t regret it. So I was interested in today’s article about the newest, biggest ever Ancient Greek lexicon. There’s a funny angle to the story that makes me think the book would never have been purchased back in those days by that demure girls school, where the students tittered over Aucassin et Nicolette as if it were Fanny Hill.
Alison Flood reports at the Guardian, “Victorian attempts to veil the meanings of crude ancient Greek words are set to be brushed away by a new dictionary 23 years in the making. It is the first to take a fresh look at the language in almost 200 years and promises to ‘spare no blushes’ for today’s classics students.
“The late scholar John Chadwick first came up with the idea to update HG Liddell and Robert Scott’s 1889 dictionary, the Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, in 1997. An abridged version of a lexicon published in 1843, the Liddell and Scott had never been revised, and is packed with antiquated terms and modestly Victorian translations of the more colourful ancient Greek words. Despite this, it remains the most commonly used reference work for students in English schools and universities.
“It was initially thought that Chadwick’s project would take five years, but Cambridge professor James Diggle, who was then chair of the advisory committee, said it soon became clear that the Intermediate Lexicon was ‘too antiquated in concept, design and content,’ and the team would need to start afresh.
“Diggle and his fellow editors then set out on the ‘Herculean task’ of rereading most examples of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to the early second century AD. They then worked through the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet to create a modern guide for today’s students to the meanings of ancient Greek words and their development through the years. The lexicon is the first to be based on an entirely new reading of the Greek texts since 1843.
‘At the outset of the project I undertook to read everything which the editors wrote. I soon realized that if we were ever to finish I had better start to write entries myself,’ said Diggle.
“ ‘The moment of greatest relief and joy was when I was able to sign off the final proofs and say to the publisher, “It’s finished. You can print it.” You can’t imagine what it was like, to realize that we had finally got there. I literally wept with joy.’
“The completed Cambridge Greek Lexicon, which is being published by Cambridge University Press, runs to two volumes and features around 37,000 Greek words, drawn from 90 authors and set out across 1,500 pages.
“The new dictionary’s editors ‘spare no blushes,’ Diggle said, when it comes to the words that ‘brought a blush to Victorian cheeks.’ The verb χέζω (chezo), translated by Liddell and Scott as ‘ease oneself, do one’s need,’ is defined in the new dictionary as ‘to defecate’ and translated as ‘to shit.’ …
“Antiquated and offensive language also gets a makeover. While Liddell and Scott defined βλαύτη (blaute) as ‘a kind of slipper worn by fops,’ in the Cambridge Greek Lexicon it is described as ‘a kind of simple footwear, slipper.’ …
“The Cambridge Greek Lexicon also begins each entry with the root meaning of a word, a fundamentally different approach to the 19th-century lexicon, which started entries with a word’s earliest appearance in literature.
” ‘Take a word like πόλις, which will be familiar to many in its English form “polis,” ‘ said Diggle. “Our article shows the variety of senses which the word can have: in its earliest usage “citadel, acropolis”; then, more generally, “city, town” and also “territory, land”; and, more specifically, in the classical period, “city as a political entity, city-state”; also, with reference to the occupants of a city, “community, citizen body.” ‘ “
More at the Guardian, here.
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