Day: October 24, 2016

Depends on your criteria.

Biggest & Up to date is not English, but the now online DGE Diccionario Griego-Español . Only goes up to epsilon though, and I don’t see it finishing for another century.

Biggest in English remains Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon — though the online editions don’t include the 1996 Supplement.

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is coming out next year; it’s not meant to be as big as LSJ, but it has been redone from scratch, rather than copypasting previous lexica (a tradition LSJ itself is part of).

The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek came out last year, as a translation of Montanari’s Italian dictionary. I haven’t gone through it; from the headword count, it sounds close to LSJ (more than the original edition, less than original + supplement), and I know that Montanari maintained PAWAG-Poorly attested words in ancient greek, with 1000 words not in LSJ (well, a substantial subset of them, anyway).

It won’t be as comprehensive as DGE, which quite confidently does Proper Names and Early Byzantine texts, an area previous dictionaries have shied away from. But then again, DGE is up to epsilon.

Ex bibl. = Ex bibliotheca. The whole thing is abbreviated:

From the theological library of the Free Church of Aberdeen.

Edit: thinko, I said ex bibliis, but I was getting confused with ex libris, from the books of, which refers to a person’s library.

Muhammad Irfan Perdana and Imre Kovacs are quite right that the art of dictionary-writing is (practical) lexicography.

If you are interested in reflections on past dictionaries, rather than how to write a new one, that is still lexicography. See the references in English lexicology and lexicography – Wikipedia: most of them fall under that category; and in fact any work on how to write a dictionary (practical lexicography) is going to reflect on how dictionaries have been written in the past.

My guess: no.

If anyone would have written articles in an Esperanto psychological journal, that would have been the late Claude Piron, who lectured in psychology, and who also wrote a psychoanalysis of people’s attitude to international languages. (No, I’m not endorsing that kind of thing.)

I’ve looked through his now defunct fan page at Pironejo , Claude Piron: Bibliografio . Not seeing any evidence he published in anything such.

I’m not sure there have been academic journals in Esperanto about anything other than Esperanto (including Esperantologio and Planlingvistiko, which were pretty good).

Cum X (accusative) Y (nominative) esse dicis, quid in mente habes?

EDIT: Sorry, Peter Hansen:

Cum X (accusative) Y (accusative) esse dicis, quid in mente habes?

To elaborate on Joe Devney’s answer to How do you refer to your left foot with languages that only use cardinal directions?

Yes, your South foot, if you’re facing west, and your North foot, if you’re facing east. Just as geographically oriented languages will refer to it as your seaward foot if you’re by the beach, and as your landward foot if you turn around.

That’s the thing about languages with no relative direction. They really have No. Relative. Direction.

Which means, you might ponder, that they don’t refer to their left foot the same way all the time; how they name it depends on which way they’re facing. Yes it does. They know it’s the same foot, they just shrug off the fact that the name for it changes. Just as you shrug off the fact that your left is the opposite of my left.

Thanks to Eutychius Kaimakkamis and Alberto Yagos.

Alberto, you have Andriotis’ etymological dictionary? Awesome!

The Cypriot dictionary I opened up at random confirms caracol/caracollo as the origin of karaolos, and they confirm your etymology as “twisted”. It did not say that the etymology of caracol in turn was ultimately Greek kokhlias via Vulgar Latin *cochlear, which makes karaolos a round-about Rückwanderer: caracol – Wiktionary

And who knew that the Romance words for spoon have the same derivation.

What’s this about patrolling, though? A caracole is a snail-shaped (i.e. spiral) military manoeuvre or move in dressage. Is it as generic as “patrol”?