[B-Greek] best general purpose lexicon?
George F Somsel
gfsomsel at yahoo.com
Sat Nov 28 15:45:57 EST 2009
I'll challenge you on that. I open my "Great Scott" and enter the word I want and voila, it appears. Heh, heh. The advantage of electronic texts.
george
gfsomsel
… search for truth, hear truth,
learn truth, love truth, speak the truth, hold the truth,
defend the truth till death.
- Jan Hus
_________
----- Original Message ----
From: Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com>
To: b-Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>; Mike Noel <mike at vnoel.com>
Sent: Sat, November 28, 2009 1:35:11 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] best general purpose lexicon?
Once you decide on the LSJ, you then have to decide if you should get
the abridged version (the Little Liddell) or the intermediate version (the
Middle Liddell) or the unabridged version (the Great Scott.)
For rapid reading you cannot beat the Middle Liddell. It takes
roughly twice as much time to FIND the word in the unabridged
version, not to mention the extra time it takes you to read the
entry. If you are curious about a word, or if you keep forgetting
what it means, look it up it the Great Scott. But the Middle will
nine times out of ten give you 95% of the info. There are very few
words not found in the Middle that are in the Great Scott.
Also, the Middle quickly refers you to the root word. For this
reason, I prefer it even to the two lexicons meant specifically for
Homer. It also lists some hard forms in alphabetical order.
Mark L
FWSFOROS MARKOS
--- On Fri, 11/27/09, Mike Noel <mike at vnoel.com> wrote:
From: Mike Noel <mike at vnoel.com>
Subject: [B-Greek] best general purpose lexicon?
To: "b-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Friday, November 27, 2009, 9:49 PM
My purpose in learning Greek is to be able to read it. That's all. I
don't care to do detailed word studies of NT texts. I want to be able
to pick up any ancient Greek text and be able to read it with a fairly
good sense of comprehension. I guess you could say I aspire to be a
non-academic Greek reader.
In light of that, I am looking for a general purpose lexicon that will
cover the vast majority of texts. If possible I would like to avoid
having different lexicons for Homer, Xenophon, GNT, LXX, Aesop, etc.
Is such a resource available? For my purposes precise definitions are
not as important as just providing the general idea. I would expect
to be able to learn the nuances of new words by reading them in
context. For example, I recently came across the English word
"hight". Never having seen that word before I had no idea what it
meant but after seeing it in context a dozen times or so I started to
guess its meaning. Eventually I went to a dictionary and confirmed my
basic idea of what the words means. I would expect to develop enough
critical mass in Greek to be able to do that as well. A general
purpose lexicon (or dictionary) should be sufficient to guide me in
the right direction for a word and then I would refine it based on
usage.
Maybe I'm living in a fantasy world...
_M_
---
B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
B-Greek mailing list
B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
---
B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
B-Greek mailing list
B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list