[B-Greek] Comprehensive 1c Bilingual Koine Greek Dictionary [*Webster's]

Kimmo Huovila kimmo.huovila at helsinki.fi
Fri Aug 22 06:30:18 EDT 2008


On Friday Aug 22, Randall Buth wrote:
> Greek-Greek dictionaries would both help and speed up your
> learning of synonyms and their relationships.
> bi-lingual is OK for a start, but you/we need Greek-Greek for
> arriving.

I am not sure I understand the whole rationale here.

You can make a bilingual dictionary and organize it around target language 
usage (good for translation), or you can analyze the source language in its 
own terms and express that analysis in the target language (closer to the 
monolingual dictionary). If the dictionary is of the latter type, I don't see 
what difference it makes whether it is monolingual or bilingual, other than 
in accessibility. A monolingual one requires a greater fluency in the 
language, but does not require any ability in a second language.

A Greek-English dictionary can include all the same info on synonyms and word 
relations that you might expect of a monolingual dictionary.

The more important decision (perhaps) than whether to make a monolingual or 
bilingual dictionary is whether the dictionary tries to reflect the analysis 
of Greek as Greek or Greek translation equivalents in another language. In 
other words, is English or some other language used as an organizing 
principle, or is it an expression of Greek definitions in another language. 
Both are good, but for different purposes.

This is not to deny that a good bilingual dictionary will have to analyze the 
target language carefully and that it will have a great influence on the 
dictionary (naturally), but rather to note that that info can be presented 
separate from the source language analysis.

Kimmo Huovila



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