[B-Greek] Etymological Dictionaries on-line

John McChesney-Young panis at pacbell.net
Thu Jan 13 10:41:08 EST 2005


>At 9:16 AM -0500 1/6/05, Andrew Haas wrote in part:
>>Dear Professor Conrad,
>>I recently saw your comments on Frisk's Greek Etymology online, but have
>>been unable for some reason to use it. I am trying to find out the origin
>>of the word "phos," as in "man," "ho phos." And to see if has any
>>connection to "phaos," which LSJ gives in its contracted form as "to phos."

and on 1/6/05, Dr. Conrad responded in part:

>Quite frankly, I've not been able to get the Frisk to work either 
>... I think you do have to have the right font installed in your
system (is it Titus?). >>

I apologize for the delay in responding, but the IEED database was 
down when I tried it shortly after the above messages were posted and 
then went out of town until a couple of days ago.

The Leiden Frisk does seem to be quite tricky to use - those who 
understand its way of encoding or who have more experience with it 
might not have trouble, but I certainly do. I've had the best luck 
using one of two techniques. The first is searching with partial 
strings (e.g., Latin transcription "pho") and then wading through the 
results; in this particular example there were 14 pages of hits, but 
by going to the last page and then back one I found the section of 
the alphabet including both words in question.

The other technique is to use the Meaning (i.e., Translation) field 
at the search page (for these words, _Licht_ and _Mann_ work).

If your results are unreadable because of encoding issues, try going 
to the "Change viewing parameters" link at the top of every page and 
select the Utf-8 radio button. The IEED has their own font available 
for free download, Starling (see the link in the left frame at the 
URL below), but even without it the display is understandable; 
diacriticals might not work properly, but they're present and at 
worse adjacent to where they ought to be. Downloading and installing 
the Starling font and changing my browser (Firefox for Mac OS X) 
preferences took about a minute, generously.

For the sake of convenience, here's the link again:

http://www.ieed.nl/%5Cindex2.html

John
-- 


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



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