[B-Greek] Greek Etymology Resource

John McChesney-Young panis at pacbell.net
Mon Jun 14 10:37:35 EDT 2004


Karyn Traphagen <karyn at birchbarkstudio.com> had written:

>>  I am trying to find a good resource (print or online) for Greek
>>  etymology. Does anyone have some suggestions?

And at 12:09 AM -0400 6/14/04, Richard Ghilardi wrote:

>You could try
>
>http://iiasnt.leidenuniv.nl/cgi-bin/startq.cgi?flags=endnnnl&root=leiden&basename=%5Cdata%5Cie%5Cfrisk
>
>but I could never get the search engine to yield any results.

The Leiden IE site is even more finicky about input than Perseus (as 
well as frequently inaccessible, apparently due to server problems), 
and in my experience unless I've got the encoding down exactly right 
I'm liable to get no results with entire words. However, I've also 
found that if I truncate my words the search engine is likelier to 
turn up something usable. So, for example, putting in _agaph_ 
produces no hits, but putting in _ag_ gets 52, and _agaph_ is treated 
in the last entry (s.v. _agapao_) of the first page of results.

The other tricky thing about the site is the encoding of the results; 
you may have to play around with the settings (especially by 
switching from the default "Eng" in the upper right frame to 
"Utf-eng") or try different browsers to get one that displays the 
text as they intended you to see it.

Frisk is very terse, and if you'd prefer a more discursive reference 
work, an _histoire des mots_ rather than a standard etymological 
dictionary, the other authoritative Greek etymology is P. 
Chantraine's _Dictionnaire e/tymologique de la langue grecque_ 
(latest ed. 1999) and its supplement, described here with a link to 
an index of entries to the latter:

http://perso.club-internet.fr/flo.blanc/CEG/

Also worth noting is the bibliographical supplement to Boned's 
_Diccionario Griego-Espan~ol_:

http://www.filol.csic.es/dge/blg/2blg-s.htm

John
-- 


*** John McChesney-Young  **  panis at pacbell.net  **   Berkeley, 
California, U.S.A.  ***



More information about the B-Greek mailing list