F.R. Adrados - E. Gangutia
The Lexicography of Ancient, Medieval and Modern Greek Literature. Present State and Prospects of Current Major Projects. Proceedings of an International Conference (Thessaloniki, 9 November 1997), Ed. J.N. Kazazis, Salónica 2003, pp. 177-185


The Greek-Spanish Dictionary. Its present state

The Greek-Spanish Dictionary (Diccionario Griego-Español, DGE) is getting well known in the philological world: we are now particularly glad that the scholars of Greece are being more and more aware of it, specially since it got the international "Aristotelis" award of the Onassis Foundation, and that we may offer here in Thessaloniki a few facts on our plans, results and problems, telling also something about our decided way on the path of informatics.

By the moment, five volumes have been published, and a sixth is in the making, which puts an end to letter delta and goes well through the middle of letter epsilon. Even when it may sound strange, when letter epsilon shall be finished, it means that we are near the first half of the whole work.

The DGE as you may well know is a comprehensive lexicon of ancient Greek translated to Spanish. Even when it is a Greek Spanish bilingual, it is meant for the whole international community of classical scholars. Some people have told us that it might be better for such a Dictionary to have been, let us say, a Greek-English bilingual. When we started we tried to meet the demand of a real boom of classical philology in Spain in the last thirty years. But the work took a dynamic by itself and has became a real instrumentum studiorum of universal value. Right now it would be difficult to pass the Spanish translations of ancient Greek words to English because the semantic nuances of this language would require a wholly different internal organization of the entries. Besides, we think Spanish is not a difficult language for a classical philologist or a cultivated person in any part of the world.

Conscious that we are only a link in the lexicographical tradition starting in antiquity and which has had such eminent international scholars until modern times, we thought that at a certain moment this tradition needed actualization. This actualization was needed first of all because there is now an enormous amount of words and documentation coming from new editions, inscriptions, papyri, which only in recent years have reached the knowledge of scholars. Of course supplements to great lexica such as Liddell-Scott-Jones exist (there is the very recent of P. Glare) and also in periodicals it is possible to find additions and appendixes, etc. But supplementation is only partially enough and sometimes clumsy for the user. It was needed to integrate facts known from old and new ones together in a new work with up to date criteria.

Our initial lists (or "Canon Lists") are a proof of this. It took great effort to make the initial lists for the DGE I, published in 1980, including also Greek patristic and Byzantine authors until the VI A.C., as well as philological terms of later ages. This lists comprise 2.488 Greek authors, 250 and 161 entries of Papyrological and epigraphical collections.

But when we got to publish vol. III, we decided to make a supplementary effort and we edited a revised canon list. Besides our own personal and constant attention to new editions in all fields, important repertories had appeared in the meantime: the Canon List of the TLG, whose staff had got in contact with us very soon; two of our collaborators had published a Repertorium litterarum Graeacarum; also the Clavis Patrum and the Papyrus Check List had been published, etc. These initial lists of vol. III, and its second edition in DGE III are a real tool for philologists in general and for papyrologists and epigraphists in particular. But already in vol. IV and V it has been necessary to offer supplementary lists. Vol V has for supplementary List I (authors and works) 209 entries of which 37 are wholly new authors and works; for List II (Papyri) 45 (new 24); for list III (Inscriptions) 53 (42 new). In a future we contemplate a third complete edition of these initial lists. They are essential as we quote always every author and work by the edition included in our lists (exceptionally we may add uariae lectiones or from codices).

As you may see, the Dictionary tries to be the most up to date in its very copious data. Every translation is documented with quotations, which go from Mycenaean Greek and Homer to the VI a.C, that is to say, 20 centuries of a language in which we find the seeds of the intellectual vocabulary of the Western and not Western world. In relation to Mycenaean Greek, we must say that in 1994 it was published the II and last vol. of the Diccionario MicénicoMicénico of Aura Jorro, the only global dictionary of Mycenaean today. It is conceived as an annex to DGE, and related to it by a system of cross references.

When facing this amount of documentation, our attitude had to be one of critical exclusion: it was impossible to write up a thesaurus of all known testimonia of every word and word form. It is impossible even now, when we have the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae collected at Irvine, Univ. of California, a data bank, not a dictionary. There is room for a dictionary of the size of ours; a dictionary, which attempts to provide as exhaustively as possible all meanings and acceptions, but not all occurrences. It is approximately three times larger than LSJ.

Making a lexicon is not only getting lots of documentation, but translating and processing it. That is why we have made an effort to structure this material inside each lemma with different translations, following a modern methodology, derived from structural theory, never losing sight of formal facts and the distribution of every meaning inside the lemmata. This is what reveals the semantic clues that allow translation, in this case, to Spanish.

With these trends we worked for many years in the first phases of the Dictionary since 1962 and we published two volumes in 1980 and 1986. That process, even when naturally slow, helped to create a staff specialized in several aspects of lexicography and prepared for the greater commitment of the Dictionary, its actual writing and editing, that is the meaningful processing of many facts from many different origins.

It was in 1989, when writing the third volume, that we decided to attempt integral managing of the dictionary with the help of computers.

Time ago we had approached computers for our work in the Dictionary, but this almost pioneering activity affected, let us say, only peripheral sections of our work, mainly the collection of new materials. Even when we had an early relation with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae of California, there was not in the market any specific software which would achieve, as we wanted, the integral manage of the project.

Previously, when a DGE editor sat down to write an entry, he or she had in front of them a pasted paper with a lemma and a lot of quotations cut off from other lexica such as, for instance, the LSJ, and also documentations of that word product of many people of our staff having read old and recent publications of texts and studies. We thought for many reasons and still think, by the moment, that it would be a loss of time to put all this information of past years in the computer. We keep it in our files whereas the new documentation is introduced in a data base.

Now when an editor of the staff of the DGE V (and onwards) sits down to write a Dictionary entry, he has not only this old documentation kept in our rich files, but, besides, he retrieves on the computer screen a huge amount of data. His first task is to discriminate which is relevant and what is not for building that Dictionary entry.

First of all, he has now at his reach, as we have said above, an auxiliary data base with all kinds of new materials being read lately by members of our staff on new editions of authors, inscriptions, papyri, different lexica, etc. Many of them, specially papyri and inscriptions have yet not been included in any electronic repertory. The data base where all this documentation is being stored and whose name is MATERIAL has got now an input of almost 100.000 entries and is being constantly increased. It also stores lexicological bibliography of studies on words.

In this sense, we may profit now of another work which will be published as an annex of DGE: it is the Repertorio bibliográfico de la lexicografía griega, by Pilar Boned and J. Rodríguez Somolinos. This work collects in one hand all total or partial lexica and indexes of greek classical authors: with its 600 entries it quite completes Riesenfeld's , by Pilar Boned and J. Rodríguez Somolinos. This work collects in one hand all total or partial lexica and indexes of Greek classical authors: with its 600 entries it quite completes Riesenfeld's Repertorium lexicographicum graecum. In the other hand it also contains more than 3000 entries of complexive books and articles, and more than 60.000 bibliographic references to studies of single Greek words.

Our interest in lexicological studies has developed another important line in the difficult fields of technical terminology, as it may be seen in R.Adrados y D. Lara «El vocabulario técnico en el Diccionario Griego-EspañolEspañol», and other papers.

Besides, the members of our staff are able to document the Greek words they work on with quotations taken from the CDROM disks which contain most of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and other related projects. Of course he may look directly in the disk, but as in entries of medium and big size he might be overwhelmed by an immensity of quotations, we are devising a series of selective indexes of certain authors and fields. We try also to get a better documentation of words of low frequency.

In the first case, elaboration of selective indexes, we have devised what we call ISCAPLIG o Indice selectivo de los cien autores principales de la literatura griega (selective index of the hundred most important authors of Greek literature). It collects from the TLG CDROM (almost the fourth part of it), authors that forcibly must appear in any great lexicon of ancient Greek (Homer, archaic poetry, drama, history, philosophy, rhetoric, medical writers such as Hippocrates, etc.).

In the other case, documentation of low frequency words, the editor has in front of him or her a printed paper with the (not lemmatized) Index of the TLG CDROM, where he can easily look at the frequency of forms, and discover, for instance, that words that traditionally were hapax or had few quotations, actually may be better documented. So now, only in the five initial pages of DGE V, we find that almost 20 previous hapax in LSJ, have now 2, 3 or more quotations (we must acknowledge that some of them are also in the Revised Supplement of LSJ). As we have said in other place, we are vanishing most of the hapax legomena. More details are given in F.R. Adrados and J. Rodríguez Somolinos, ). As we have said in other place, we are vanishing most of the hapax legomena. More details are given in F.R. Adrados and J. Rodríguez Somolinos, «Diccionario Griego-Español Griego-Español, vol. V».

From this previous selection, we make a second one trying to document authors and epochs. Then, we must apply the semantic methods which shall make the entry really meaningful. First of all we have to verify the contexts and classify them formally, one of the keys of translation and distribution in different blocks. Still, this previous task of formal classifying has to be done, let us say, in an artisanal way, using computers only as auxiliary.

So in a word which could be defined as short, but complex, as we shall see, ἐθελούσιος, an editor finds in front of him the entry in LSJ made on 9 quotations; besides, he finds other 8 from readings by our collaborators in MATERIAL Data Base and other 19 from from TLG, via ISCAPLIG y via index. This is just a short, not extremely complex word but just think of the process when applied to some of the words appearing in vol. V such as preposition διά and the very long series of verbs, nouns and adjectives composed with it, many of them still with a weight in modern languages. We want to remark in this series the great amount of important technical terms: botany, medicine (διαβήτης, διαλύω); geometry (διάμετρος), architecture, engineering, as war and water engines or devices (διωρυγή); grammar and rhetoric (διαίρεσις, διαλέγω), juridical, institutional, financial terms (διαγραφή); Christian and patristic words which become a special term from remote origins, as for instance διάκονος. But also think of numerals such as δεκα-, δευτερ-; verbs as δείκνυμι, δέχομαι, δέω (both verbs) δίδωμι, διώκω; adjectives such as δεινός and δῆλος; substantives of a real compromising quality such as δῆμος and δίκη; and the most difficult particles δέ and δή. The very large number of quotations from every data, literary gender and level of the Greek language, as well as the semantic study, turn some of the articles into meaningful contributions to the knowledge of Greek language and culture.

Also, as you may know, the dictionary includes proper nouns: in this vol. V besides theonyms as Δημήτηρ and Διόνυσος which collect under its lemmata 134 and 250 quotations each, we have their derived anthroponyms Δημήτριος and Διονύσιος which collect 77 and 111 mythical and historical persons.

Besides taking into consideration the grammatical context, the editor must study the contexts in relation to word classes and subclasses (person / thing / abstracts names, and so on); to use an example from a word just mentioned, it is not the same to apply ἐθελούσιος to a person or assimilated (god, city) than to an abstract: in the first case, the translation is voluntario, in the second, opcional, libremente elegido, for instance κίνδυνος. Other of these classifications of contexts may be animated / not animated; collective / not collective; local / temporal; words of special, technical languages, politico-administrative circumstances; we include also the existence of opposition, synonymy. Very important in the creation of the conceptual world until our days is the opposition concrete, material, corporeal in relation to the field of spirit, life / death. Part of this methodology was published time ago in our Introducción a la lexicografía griega (Madrid 1977) and in many articles; lately Dr. Dolores Lara has published an Iniciación a la lexicografía griega (Madrid 1997) with a methodological and practical outlook.

So syntactic and lexical context must be always taken into consideration to create some kind of a tree structure organized in function of the output language, in our case Spanish. For instance, let's take a word as δίκη which is organized so: First we have a general, that is to say over all meaning; we mark it with a capital A, inside which we have a a paragraph marked with roman I with a formal feature, its tendency to appear in nominal clauses. Inside this paragraph, there are three blocks designed with arabic cyphers 1, 2 and 3, with the meanings 1 manera, modo de ser natural o propio, regla, ley: this last has a pre juridical meaning, in the sense of general law; 2 curso general de las cosas, which may develop a sense of nature, almost reality understood as a system of reparations or retributions; 3 manera de obrar, comportamiento, sort of a general behaviour. Then there is another paragraph signalled with II characterized also with a formal mark, it acts as an adverb or preposition of genitive and it means a la manera de. After the general A we descend to a more restricted block signalled with a capital B: it has a semantic restriction, as it is produced only in social reality, still pre juridical. This capital B has inside a I parallel to the divisions inside A in the sense that it is understood as retribution or reparation, meaning 1 in a positive sense lo debido, justa compensacióncompensación etc., and 2 in a negative sense lo merecido como castigo, punishment. Then we comes a II where appears justice defined as an abstract concept. And then we have a capital C which collects the institutional and actual senses of previous divisions: I justicia, derecho, legalidad manifest in II as veredicto, dictamen, sentencia and in III in the many ways of judicial procedure.

When he has all the data and has made a planning, the editor starts to write the entry; he shall not have any more to write draft after draft as before, but he does it on the computer with a well proved, standard word processor. I must mention that he shall have already solved a great problem which in passed years exacted great effort and time. That is the typing of Greek classical script to appear on screen and print and which can be used also in our data bases. They have been designed by us covering Greek types and those for the transcription of reconstructed Indo-European and other etymologies.

Afterwards, the whole dictionary is introduced in a great data base called LABRIS, where the input is done according to two points of view: first, after lexicographic semantic theory and experience explained above, it is hierarchically organized in four fields or areas (general area; specific area and translated area, which would fit roughly in the capital letter, Roman number, Arabic cypher (see the structure we just expounded in relation to Δίκη) and also what we call a "nuance" area. Second, from a formal point of view, the program accepts one after the other all abbreviations and complete names of ancient Greek authors and works; it program recognizes wether the abbreviation written is the correct one. Once introduced the whole volume in a data base, the possibilities to manage the text are enormous: for instance it shall be possible to make an inventory, (partial, by the moment) of the semantic marks of the structure of the lexicon, in relation to Spanish.

An easier fact to be expounded here is a bit of statistics: DGE V has 6773 lemmata introduced; 1105 of them are proper nouns; 388 are cross references. The number of quotations is 53.370 corresponding to 1396 authors and 2111 works. But we must say that we contemplate also several "conventional" authors. Indeed, for the computer, "Inscription" and "Papyrus" are conventional authors, with several "works", such as Inscriptiones Graecae, Supplementum epigraphicum graecum, etc., Oxyrrhynchus papyri, Papiri della Societa Italiana, etc. So the conventional "author" Inscription is now the most quoted (2900) and Papyrus 2700. The same system has been applied to "Septuaginta" (950 instances), "New Testament" and others such as "Periodical", or ancient lexica. The most quoted single author for Vol V is Plutarch with 2230 quotations, then comes Plato (1950 occurrences), Aristoteles ( 1650) and Homer (1550), who was in vol IV the most quoted single author, with a surprising Hippocrates in second position: he is now in seventh position.

The statistics of the most quoted authors in vol. V are quite revealing of the part of the Greek Lexicon included in it: the many words composed with διά pertain to a somewhat late stage of the language. Also in F.R. Adrados and J. Rodríguez Somolinos, «The Diccionario Griego-EspañolEspañol and Byzantine Lexicography»; it is possible to have a hint of the weight of Byzantine new words in the DGE. That shall be without any doubt interesting for Greek scholars.

Other fields in the LABRIS data base, show wether the Greek word being written is attested in Mycenaean, has a recognized etymology, etc. The data base puts the lemmata in alphabetic order, writes automatically the punctuation, numbers and letters inside divisions, as well as different printing styles. Until now it was needed to write again the text almost manually in this data base. Now we have devised an automatic module of inclusion of the whole entries of the DGE in LABRIS data base, which we shall start using experimentally next Autumn.

As you may suppose, one of the most important results of this data base is that it enables us to make lists of all quotations of authors and works in the Dictionary and verify and index them in the order of apparition in the original text: that is to say we may revise for instance, the verses of Aeschylus from the first to last in each tragedy. This is an enormous help in correcting and unifying, tasks that have to be done if we want to maintain the exigent level of the dictionary.

At this point, we must make a reflection about how such a lap in quantity and quality as has meant the introduction of computers affects the general work only in a positive way or may have a negative incidence. Volume IV was made only partway with computers; DGE V has been made using all computerized documentation and programs. Our data base shows that if vol. IV had 35.000 quotations, the fifth has more than 55.000 which had to be revised and demanded a great effort from many people for more than one year. It also demands a very good library at our reach, which with great effort we have got. Better computer implements save time, but generate such an amount of data that sometimes may overwhelm the editors. This only with more critical acumen can be managed, as we heard from Prof. L. Koenen at the FIEC congress at Pisa. It means that with computers there is not so much need of less qualified personnel, but in a work as ours, the demand for well trained experts is greater than ever.

All this process together with the final preparation of the text for printing used to take us almost as much time as its actual writing. Let's remember that the first volume was for nine years in the press. Afterwards we have been cutting down this process and for the fifth volume, we have achieved desktop publishing with a system designed in our team. We not only have designed Greek and phonetical transcription scripts, but also have aimed at a quality almost as good as exhibited in previous volumes and which has been appreciated in reviews. It has exerted great effort, mainly from our collaborators J.R. Somolinos and C. Gil, but it can be used now also for future volumes.

From now on, editing the manuscript, and its correction is not such a strenuous and long work which as I said took almost as much time as the actual writing of the entries. Besides, the task of proof correction has been enormously lessened, because the printing house has to do only an automatic reproduction of the diskettes sent to them by us, instead of composing the book.

In a short time, our main aim is to reduce the time of the making of our lexicon, increase its reliability and productivity. But actually we hope that the result of this ambitious program is to settle the basis of a new lexicography in the future, believing it is an achievement not only for ancient Greek lexicography but also for any other bilingual and authors dictionary.

Another important task we are working on is the revision and reedition of the early volumes of the dictionary. We have introduced vol I in the computer and are preparing a new edition with the help of members our staff, mainly J.A. Berenguer. We hope to publish next year this edition, about a 30 per cent larger than the previous one and our idea is to do the same with the second volume.