Month: October 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”?

The question and the question details are asking different things, and I’ll address them separately.

It is the doom of /k/ in front of a front vowel (i, e) to be palatalised, to be pronounced as [kʲ] > [c]. The palate is a notoriously difficult place to articulate a stop (too much surface area). So [c] more often than not ends up become (a) an affricate and (b) palatoalveolar: [tʃ] (moving forward in the tongue root, to where there is a more well defined articulator). It can move even further, and become an alveolar affricate: [ts].

That’s what’s happened to Latin <ci> throughout Romance. Caelum would have started as [cielu]; then [tʃielo] in Italian, then [tsiel] in French, which then simplified further to [siel].

The same change has happened in the Cretan and Cypriot dialects of Greek: /kokina/ ‘red’ > [kotʃina]. Standard Greek, on the other hand, stops at [c]: [kocina]. Both Crete and Cyprus spent time ruled by Venetians. Did they get [tʃ] from the Venetians?

No need to: this is a linguistic commonplace, and it has happened in dialects of Greek with no contact with Italian: Tsakonian, for instance (/kairos/ > [tɕere]), or Cappadocian (/kelyfos/ > /tʃefos/). In fact, Peloponnesian–Heptanesian, the base dialects of Standard Modern Greek, are outliers in not having palatoalveolars.

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The question details throw some words:

Latin Aretium > Italian Arezzo

Darıca, a town in Turkey whose Greek name was Aretsou, and whose ancient name may have been Arethusa (though its classicising name was Rhysion).

Now, alveolars also palatalise cross-linguistically: Latin <ti> has indeed been through a bunch of changes, moving it towards the roof of the mouth, although it typically does not go further than affrication: [ti] > [tsi]. So Latin natione > Italian nazione [natsione] > French [natsion] > [nasion]. English in turn palatalised [sj] to [ʃ].

The corresponding palatalisation of /ti/ in Greek is rarer, but it has happened, and when it has happened, it’s been spectacular: /ti/ goes all the way back to [ci], in Tsakonian and Lesbian.

So. What about Aretsou?

I found out only today that [θθ] > [ts] was a thing in Finnish: Joonas Vakkilainen’s answer to What did your language sound like 500 years ago? (thanks, Joonas). But I’ve gotta say, I’ve never seen the equivalent in Greek. There is what <θ> pronounced as <σ> in Laconian, which appears backed up as rare instances of /θ/ > /s/ in Tsakonian. But that change was ancient, and likelier Laconian pronouncing /tʰ/ as /θ/ much earlier.

Aretsou is in Bithynia, so I was going to say “forget it, Bithynia was resettled by Greek-speakers in the 16th century from Epirus, there can’t have been any continuity from ancient Arethusa”. (Bithynia was the Ottoman heartland, so it was Turkicised early.) But Darıca is only 40km from Istanbul, so it’s plausible that it remained Greek–speaking after the Ottoman conquest.

Still, because I haven’t seen [θ] > [ts] elsewhere in Greece, I think Arethusa > Aretsou is unlikely. Any connection with Arezzo is also unlikely.

I’ve spoken Esperanto, Lojban, and Klingon. And as I’ve posted elsewhere, I have a soft spot for Interlingua and Interglosa.

There are studies, but the numbers are hazy. The numbers mentioned here though are congruous with what I know. Esperanto would be in the hundreds of thousands; Klingon in the hundreds, Lojban in the much lower hundreds.

Long-term advantage as a world-language? Even Esperanto has pretty much given up on that.

Benefit that arises because of widespread use? Of course Esperanto has more usage and literature and community. Though English has even more. And what counts as useful really does depend on what you’re after.

In fact, I remember coming across an argument on Usenet along these lines (yes, I am that old), where someone was saying that you can get much more quality interactions in Esperanto than in English, because it’s a better-quality, self-selected community. Yup: the retort came quickly that the interactions in the Klingon and Lojban community are even better by that metric.

One of the people I’ve been following was accused of that. She did not take kindly to it.

If she sees this, she can answer for herself; I’ll just post my comment to her here:

Even if you did make them up, they’d be communicating a higher truth than the incidentals a security cam would. Those are stories you’re writing, not documentaries.