[B-Greek] old Greek dictionaries

John McChesney-Young panis at pacbell.net
Sun Sep 24 10:12:03 EDT 2006


At 11:07 PM -0400 9/23/06, Edward Foley wrote:

>  ... I am in possession of a Lexicon Graecolatinum
>printed by Ioannes Valderus in Basel Switzerland in September 1537.  It has
>a Greek-Latin lexicon portion of 1,910 numbered pages ...  I am 
>searching for information about the book
>and its source ...

To quote Barry, "Cool!"

It's the work of Conrad Gessner (1516-1565), an amazingly prolific 
scholar of broad interests better known today as a naturalist than as 
a philologist. Oddly, this dictionary isn't mentioned in his 
Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_von_Gesner

but if you check the on-line _Historical Dictionary of Switzerland_ 
linked at the bottom of that page you'll find reference to it. Note 
that he was 20 or 21 when it was published!

There's a longer article on Gessner in German in Herbert Jaumann's 
_Handbuch Gelehrtenkultur der Fruhen Neuzeit_ (Berlin : W. de 
Gruyter, 2004-), Bd. 1. Bio-bibliographisches Repertorium:

http://tinyurl.com/r4syr (Google Books page view; free but may 
require signing in)

That 1537 edition of the dictionary is available for download from Gallica:

http://gallica.bnf.fr/Catalogue/noticesInd/FRBNF37285764.htm

Some of Gallica's books digitized from film aren't very good, but I 
hope that the relatively recent date of the fiches they used means 
the page images are at least usable.

John
-- 


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



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