This book is obviously intended not for beginner students of Greek but for individuals who are already deeply acquainted with the study of the language. Abook about a dictionary is a book intended for the users of that dictionary (or, at least, for some of its readers), which leads us to the very first question: who uses the LSJ?
The dictionary is one of the very first books we hear about when we start to study Classics, and all of us make the same mistake: starting to use it from the very beginning. Later, experience tells us that the only thing we achieve is to immerse ourselves deep in a forest inside which we get lost and that it is much better to start by using the intermediate version of the LSJ (or even the so-called ‘baby version’ for the first steps) rather than this colossal volume that offers an excess of information to students who maybe only want to know what δένδρον means: the simple translation ‘tree’ is all they need; they do not need a treatise on botanical science or a list of authors where this word appears in dialectical variants.
The usage of the adult version of the LSJ should be restricted to advanced levels, when the simple translation of a word is not enough and something else is required: this is the public to which this excellent work by Stray, Clarke and Katz is addressed. Obviously, it is not a manual of instructions that you must read before using the dictionary, but a book addressed to those who may wish to find out something more about that lexicon, not about the Greek language itself.
Avoiding the temptation of making a summary of the book, let’s say that the four parts into which it is divided make perfect sense: history of the lexicon, periods and genres on which it has been formed, methodology followed in its formation and, finally, comparisons with other academic lexica.
After this division into four sections, it should be quite clear to what section one might need to go, depending on one’s interests, for example, how did the dictionary reach its final shape? What authors have been included? But perhaps the best aspect of the book is its combination of the expected with the unexpected, some individual chapters that present very interesting points which most of us will not have considered previously; we might not have been looking for them, but they suddenly appear before our eyes and end up attracting our attention more than the primary subject for which we were looking; let’s mention some of them.
Maybe the very first unexpected chapter that draws our attention is ‘Obscenity: AProblem for the Lexicographer’, by Amy Coker. In this chapter, we are confronted with the question of how the lexicon, composed during other times with specific social rules, dealt with the problem of offering a translation for some obscene words: recourse to Latin versions? periphrases to avoid mentioning the English term directly? This is an unexpected but altogether interesting chapter.
Another chapter that calls our attention appears in the second section, which deals with which authors have been included, is ‘Philosophy and Linguistic Authority: The Problem of Plato’s Greek’, by Christopher Rowe. It attracts our attention because the title may produce some initial false impressions: Plato’s Greek, a problem? Why a problem if his is considered to be the best model of Attic Greek? Aquick glance at this very interesting chapter will reveal that the ‘problem’ is just the qualification that Plato’s language sometimes registers as ‘philosophy language’ rather than standard, ‘normal’ prose. Christopher Rowe deals with the problem brilliantly.
So, this book appears as a mixture of what one expects to find at a highly specialized level (for example, Philomen Probert’s chapter, ‘Greek Dialects in the Lexicon’) and unexpected chapters, the best possible combination; in my opinion, this mixture is what makes this book so valuable and interesting.
Several other chapters offer unexpected information about other points, but maybe Ishould mention also the very last chapter by John Considine, ‘Liddell and Scott and the Oxford English Dictionary’. Considine’s chapter goes a little outside our world of Classics perhaps, but despite this (or maybe because of this?), it is really attractive, joining classical Greek with ‘classical’ English.
In a nutshell: this book helps us to understand much better the voluminous lexicon that all of us have held in our hands so many times since we started to study Classics.
