Wednesday, February 1, 2017

The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek - An upgrade to Liddell-Scott-Jones

I'm catching up a bit here, but The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek (published late 2015) looks to be an important and critical addition to Greek lexical resources. (To keep this separate from BDAG=the Baer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich lexicon, I guess we'll have to abbreviate this one to BrillDAG.) I've not looked at it personally yet, but according to Larry Hurtado, this lexicon effectively supercedes the venerable Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) both by going beyond the 2nd century CE to the the 6th century CE and by including more entries from Christian patristic literature. According to the Brill catalog page:
The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek is the English translation of Franco Montanari’s Vocabolario della Lingua Greca. With an established reputation as the most important modern dictionary for Ancient Greek, it brings together 140,000 headwords taken from the literature, papyri, inscriptions and other sources of the archaic period up to the 6th Century CE, and occasionally beyond.The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek is an invaluable companion for the study of Classics and Ancient Greek, for beginning students and advanced scholars alike. Translated and edited under the auspices of The Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek is based on the completely revised 3rd Italian edition published in 2013 by Loescher Editore, Torino. Features • The principal parts of some 15,000 verbs are listed directly following the entry and its etymology. For each of these forms, the occurrence in the ancient texts has been certified. When found only once, the location is cited. • Nearly all entries include citations from the texts with careful mention of the source. • The dictionary is especially rich in personal names re-checked against the sources for the 3rd Italian edition, and in scientific terms, which have been categorized according to discipline. • Each entry has a clear structure and typography making it easy to navigate.
There is a 28-page preview available, and it certainly is attractively laid out and presented.
A quick survey of some of the entries indicates that there are many more lemmata included as compared to either LSJ or BDAG, but one may still wish to consult those for some citations not included in BrillDAG. Considering that it is from Brill and is 2431 pages long (there is also a 2-volume edition), €99,00 / USD$125.00 seems to be quite a fair price. It's also available as an online resource, but that's going to cost you €1.975,00 / USD $2,590.00 per year!
It will be interesting to see if any of the major Bible software publishers will be able to obtain digital rights to include it within their packages.

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