[B-Greek] What about Thayer's Lexicon?

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Feb 28 14:29:13 EST 2004


At 1:52 AM +0900 2/29/04, Raymond Regalado wrote:
>On 2004.2.28, at 01:15  PM, Raymond Regalado wrote:
>
>> Perhaps this has been discussed on the list before, but I just wanted
>> to ask for opinions on Thayer's Lexicon
>
>I should've done a search for "Thayer" in the archives before I asked
>this question.  Mea culpa!  Anyway, I've just read a whole bunch of
>previous posts on Thayer's lexicon, and found comments ranging from
>"use it with joy" to "hopeless".  I guess I'll just use it with joy
>until I feel it to be hopelessly inadequate. ;-)

Raymond, you may find a few matters upon which list-members hold some
common standard view, but you won't find many. Indeed there are some
matters about which I get the impression those who pose a question are
looking for someone to agree with a perspective they've already adopted.

With regard to Thayer, on looking at the archives, I find this citation
from Paul Wendland in December of 2001 about as fine a statement on the
question as could be made; it may be that you're actually citing from it
yourself:

>Does Thayer err?  Well, let's put it this way: if you don't have BAGD or
>BDAG, you won't be aware of some possible meanings that are out there.
>And you might, at times, be led into believing something wonderful about a
>word through Thayer's etymologizing, which nevertheless might not be true.
>Still, it all depends what you want from a dictionary, and how precise and
>complete you want it to be.  My guess is that 99 times out of a 100,
>Thayer will be just fine.  And if Thayer is all you have, and you like him
>(familiarity with a dictionary is also no mean thing), well then: use him
>with joy.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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