Volume 15, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Lexicographer and Lexicography Critical Studies and New Perspectives from Antiquity to the Present Issue Editor: Nicoletta Bruno

The papers gathered in this Special Issue cover different phases of ancient, medieval, and modern Greek and Latin and explore an array of issues and trends dealing with historical aspects of Greek and Latin lexicography. The articles have been organized into three thematic units following chronological order: (i) ancient Greek and Latin lexicography; (ii) Greco-Latin lexicography in late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern world; and (iii) uses, perspectives, and ongoing projects in Greco-Latin lexicography. Some papers address more formal issues (linguistic, morphological, semantic, and syntactic) relevant to the study of Greek and Latin lexicography, while other contributions deal with ongoing lexicographical projects, offering fresh perspectives on the future of lexicography.

This study aims to analyse how Atticist lexicographers used ancient sources to problematize their lack of sensitivity to literary contexts. This article focuses on comic passages that are interpreted according to the prescriptive outlook of Atticist lexicographers. I will show how lexicographers’ notes on linguistic correctness betray a general indifference towards the stylistic registers and complex variety of the language of comedy. Two case studies will be investigated: (a) the backdating of koine words and (b) the misinterpretation of comic corrections. The analysis of these two cases shows that lexicographers very often interpreted comic attestations as evidence of regular Greek expressions if this reading served the purpose of censoring or supporting a specific usage, regardless of whether or not the comedians were using a word metaphorically or in a jocular way.

This paper discusses Greek and Latin lexicography and its literary and socio-cultural manifestations during the second century CE. I argue that Imperial lexicography had an actualized social existence that went beyond the recording of lemmata. More specifically, I maintain that lexicographers used their works not only as technical records and manuals but to legitimize (or not) linguistic forms alongside social phenomena. Additionally, other authors of the High Empire modulated the essence of linguistic idiosyncrasies and incorporated them into literary genres beyond lexica; they thus considered issues of identity and belonging against the backdrop of lexical propriety. This contribution closely studies Moeris and Phrynichus as well as Lucian and Aulus Gellius to show how lexicography transcended literary genre to become a modus dicendi vivendique .

This paper examines some notable words of both Latin and Greek origin in a second-century Latin account from Tebtynis ( ChLA V 304). In light of new data, it aims to clarify the linguistic status of these words (especially those of Greek origin) and their meaning, updating and extending Adams’ (2003, 445, 519, 628) analysis, and to offer a more detailed view of the use of Latin and its contacts with Greek in second-century Tebtynis.

Enantiosemes, words which express opposed meanings (also called auto-antonyms; e.g. altus , which can mean “high” or “low”, or the English “cleave”, which can mean “cut” or “stick together”), present a practical problem for the lexicographer. My paper surveys enantiosemes as they are explicitly discussed by ancient Roman lexicographers and provides a descriptive typology. Roman scholars distinguish between genuine auto-antonyms, which they sometimes call voces mediae (e.g. valetudo for “health” or “sickness”), and cases of etymology by antiphrasis (e.g. lucus a non lucendo ), whereby a name is given through some kind of opposition. This latter group of etymologies-by-antiphrasis can be further subdivided between cases of euphemism and irony. The paper concludes with a short lexicon of Latin enantiosemes explicitly discussed by ancient sources.

Several late antique Latin grammatical works encompass material drawn from the ancient erudite linguistic speculation De Latinitate and De dubio sermone , ultimately dating back to Pliny the Elder. The most prominent formal feature of the concerned texts is their lexicographical structure, i.e. the presence of a series of highlighted lemmata accompanied by examples and explanations. Furthermore, most of the works concerned show traces of the alphabetical arrangement of their common source. This paper presents the results of a preliminary survey of the texts dealing with nominal gender: particular attention is paid to the ways in which each late antique grammarian adapts the common source according to his specific interests. This inquiry comes out of a larger research project, which aims at producing a digital critical collection ( thesaurus ) of grammatical passages dealing with the dubius sermo . This repertory is intended to overcome the limits of the traditional printed collections of grammatical fragments.

The influence of Medieval Latin dictionaries on other genres of Medieval Latin literature was limited by two factors: their tendency to preserve ancient hapaxes that appeared nowhere else, and their creativity, resulting in the formation of words no other writer used. A prime example of the latter attitude are the poems written by a 14th-century Czech lexicographer known as Claretus. After a brief outline of the structure of his last and longest versed dictionary, the Glossarius, Claretus’ knack for word-formation is illustrated by several hundred nouns denoting activities, actions, and persons with selected suffixes. Documents created by municipal administration in the 14th and 15th centuries also contain a goodly number of neologisms, even hapax legomena , and verbal overlaps alone are by no means sufficient to prove their authors were acquainted with Claretus’ poems. Nevertheless, I argue that Claretus’ influence is detectable in a handful of administrative texts from medieval Bohemia.

This paper aims at reconsidering traditional data available for the figure of the hieromonk Stephen the Athenian, purported to be the author of a biographical compilation about famous monks of Mt Athos and of a biography of the Byzantine theologian Nicholas of Methone, published by the Greek forger Costantinos Simonides at the end of the 19th century. The main source for Stephen the Athenian is provided by a lemma of a biographical encyclopedia written by the Phanariot scholar Demetrius Procopius of Moschoupolis (with the title Succincta eruditorum Graecorum superioris et praesentis saeculi recensio ) and published in 1722 by Johann Albert Fabricius at the end of the 11th volume of his Bibliotheca Graeca . The employment of a philological analysis to the extant sources of “Stephen” shows that the figure is indeed to be considered the mere result of the distortion created by Simonides from a lexicographical lemma.

Lexicographical investigation, carried out in the drafting of the verbs renodo and renudo in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae , can be useful for textual criticism by its proposing of new conjectures or its explanation of existing ones, by reconstructing the history and the use of a given word. This paper discusses Harm Marien Poortvliet’s conjecture renudatam pharetris in place of the transmitted renodatam pharetris in Valerius Flaccus 5.380, which helps us better understand the meaning and the use of the verb renudo in the text and the different value of the prefix re- in renodo and renudo , for which we also consider other contexts such as Hor. epod. 11.28.

Greek lexicography is in a state of constant evolution thanks to progress in philological studies and, in a special way, to the contribution offered by papyri, which frequently provides us with new words or new meanings of already known words. In this regard, the online, freely consultable database WiP  – Words in Progress. Supplementary Lexicon of Ancient Greek aims to collect new or rare words and detail corrections and additions in order to record recent progress in the updating and expansion of Ancient and Byzantine Greek. This contribution aims to describe how the database works, and what advantages it offers compared to traditional dictionaries, with a particular focus on the contribution that Greek documentary papyri offer to Greek lexicography.

Since 2010, an international team has been working on the first comprehensive lexicon dedicated to Septuagint Greek, which aims to fill an important gap in the fields of ancient philology and religious studies. The entries include all the relevant word groups used in the translation of the Hebrew Bible, Greek glosses that captured central concepts from classical Hebrew terms and sought to establish suitable expression for certain Realien . This lexicon aims to give a wide perspective on selected lemmas, taking the legacy of classical Greek literature as a starting point and subsequently analyzing the diffusion and usage of the word up through early Christian Literature. This paper will address some of the questions that are being faced by the team and will explore the innovative approach of this lexicographical project through the presentation of samples.

This paper aims to demonstrate that the Thesaurus linguae Latinae , the world’s largest lexicon of ancient Latin and a traditional project rooted in 19th-century philology, makes a significant contribution to today’s intellectual diversity within Classical Studies. By analysing a corpus of 270 lemmas, ranging from r to razīmus , I argue that the TLL ’s quietly revolutionary mode of philological pluralism is realized at three levels of lexicographic content: the selection of primary material (choosing textual passages of ancient Latin to be included in the lexicon); the arrangement of individual lexicographic entries (structuring the presentation of primary text in each article); and the annotation of passages, rubrics, and entire articles (providing metalinguistic description, explanation, and commentary). As a whole, my analysis presents the first-ever account of how the TLL systematically reshapes established lexicographic and scholarly practices.