The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek

Perhaps someone can help me understand these entries in Brill Dictionary.

Unlike other Greek lexicons the Brill has 3 entries under δέω.

Other dictionaries have a completely separate entry under δέομαι.

Under δέομαι Brill simply has ..... δέομαι pres. ind. mid., see δέω.

So δέομαι = to ask, to pray, becomes a small subset of δέω = to tie, to bind.

But the entry is hard to follow.

See the attached pdf file which contains the 3 entries under δέω. I have used colour and indenting to make the entries easier to follow.

See the second entry ..... Why are 1 abcd, 2 abc repeated, but not exactly?

This is not the only entry in which this happens in Brill. Why?

Any thoughts?

Stephen

Australia

Brill.pdf

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Stephen Miller

Other entries that have this (strange) repetition are ...

# νομίζω

# ἵημι

# λόγος

There seems to be no warning that these entries are double.

Stephen

Australia

MJ. Smith

Okay, I'll admit to having deliberately bypassed answering this yesterday because a complete answer would be very long. Plus I don't know Greek so I'm not the best source.

Unlike other Greek lexicons the Brill has 3 entries under δέω.

Other dictionaries have a completely separate entry under δέομαι.

Under δέομαι Brill simply has ..... δέομαι pres. ind. mid., see δέω.

A lemma is an arbitrary unit chosen by those creating the dictionary. In the case of Brill, they choose to consider the Indo-European roots as a means of identifying homographs - words that look the same but are not related as in go the verb and go the Japanese board game. Your clue to this is the Sanskrit reference as Sanskrit has retained a much tighter relationship to the Proto-Indo-European roots than Greek, Latin or Gothic. The tie to PIE roots can either split or combine entries in other dictionaries using different criteria for determining lemmas.

In your case, 1 corresponds to ditá- i.e. «IE *deh1- ‘bind’», 2 corresponds to doṣa- i.e. «IE *deu(s)- ‘miss, want, need’»

Under δέομαι Brill simply has ..... δέομαι pres. ind. mid., see δέω.

My dictionary lists δέομαι as an Ionic-Attic variant of δέω - as a variant it does not get its own entry but is rather folded into the lemma of which it is a variant ... like liter/litre sharing an entry.

.I don't own the resource to which you refer - I own Beekes, Robert. Edited by Alexander Lubotsky. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010..But Brill generally includes something like this in its dictionaries:

Structure of the entry

After the lemma, grammatical information is given between square brackets, for instance, δύρομαι [v.] ‘to lament, bewail’, or ἔγκατα [n.pl.] ‘intestines’. If it is unknown (for instance, in a gloss), this may be indicated with a query.
The grammatical information is followed by the meaning of the word. For most of the glosses, an English translation has been provided. Although this is a major break with tradition in Classical Studies, I consider it to be convenient for specialists in other Indo-European languages than Greek. Of course, in many cases a gloss can be ambiguous, but I hope to have been sufficiently prudent in the translations.
At the end of the first paragraph, I give the origin of the word (in abbreviated form) between two arrowheads. The abbreviations must be understood as follows:

«IE» There is a good Indo-European (IE) etymology. The IE root is reconstructed, and in most cases also the formation represented by the Greek etymon. If there are no cognates, but the Greek word looks Indo-European, a reconstruction has sometimes been proposed, too.
«IE?» An Indo-European etymology exists for the entry concerned, but it is not entirely convincing.
«GR» The word was coined in the more recent (pre)history of Greek, and consists of one or more (possibly) inherited elements; however, the formation as a whole was certainly not inherited from IE.
«PG» The word certainly belongs to the Pre-Greek substrate language. The reason for this decision may be indicated with (V), which means that there are formal variants, or with (S) if the word contains a suffix characteristic for Pre-Greek.
«PG?» The word may be Pre-Greek (see above on (V) and (S)).
«LW» A loanword. The donor language is indicated in abbreviated form, e.g.
«LW Sem.» = a loanword from Semitic.
«EUR» A loanword from (one of) the European substrate language(s). Such words are not reconstructible for PIE, but share similarities with words from other European language families (Germanic, Italo-Celtic, Balto-Slavic) that must be due to substrate influence.
«ONOM» An onomatopoeic word.
«?» No good etymology exists, or the etymology is unknown.

The philological information is subdivided into sections in order to make the presentation more transparent:

•VAR Inflectional forms and phonological variants.
•DIAL Dialectal forms. Mycenaean is mostly given in the (approximate) phonological transcription.
•COMP Compounds (only the most common or etymologically relevant compounds are given).
•DER Derivatives.
•ETYM Etymological discussion.

The Proto-Indo-European reconstructions

The reconstructions in this book follow some conventions which deviate from common usage. Let me mention the most important ones:

a) PIE had no phoneme *a. Whenever *a appears in a reconstruction, the stage of language should always be understood as post-PIE.

b) In IE reconstructions, vocalization of resonants and laryngeals is as a rule not indicated, since the consonantal and vocalic allophones were not phonologized in the proto-language. Thus, for the PIE pre-form of βαίνω, I write *gwm-ie/o-. Whenever vocalization is indicated, i.e. *gwm̥-i̯e/o-, this is understood to be a post-PIE development.

c) I follow Kortlandt’s theory of Balto-Slavic accentuation, and adopted his reconstruction of (pre-)glottalized consonants for PIE (see, for instance, on ἑκατόν and πεντήκοντα).

d) It should be noted that the term ‘prothetic vowel’ is used in this dictionary to indicate the vowel (mostly a-) that may or may not be present in Pre-Greek substrate words. In inherited words, a facultative prothetic vowel is not reconstructed any more since it contradicts the laryngeal theory.

Robert Beekes, ed. Alexander Lubotsky, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010), ix–x.

There should be an equivalent in your resource.

However, from what I see, I would expect that after the active/middle/passive the entries would depend upon what forms are attested to in Ancient Greek . And there appears to be a short form/long form entry distinction at the active/middle/passive level.

Stephen Miller

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1075685#Comment_1075685

MJ,

Deliberately bypassing my post!!

There 2 issues here.

The first came about when I was reading Luke 10:2 and came across δεήθητε. A commentator made a strange point so I thought I would investigate, This is a common word in the NT, but Brill hardly gives it a mention, and makes no comment about it occurring in the NT.

But the entry has a twist. Everything is said TWICE.

The first time is always shorter than the second time, but for what purpose.

There seems to no indication in the entry that the SECOND part is starting, not even a gap in the text.

I have found at least 20 entries where this happens. Not very helpful.

Thx

Stephen

Stephen Miller

I can now (partly) answer my own query.

According to the Brill web site https://brill.com/fileasset/downloads_products/36462_Preview_Sample_Pages.pdf .......

Recapitulatory overview. Especially complexentries (like prepositions, some verbs, pronouns, and conjunctions

begin with are capitulatory overview that aids orientation in the entry’s component parts.

However in the Logos version this "Recapitulatory overview" is not indicated in any way.

So some entries have a summary, then the full article. Most don't.

Stephen

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1076602#Comment_1076602

glad you found the answer. Thanks for letting others know.

Steve Maling

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1076610#Comment_1076610

I suppose there is no way for this to come across as anything but the comment of a grumpy old man[:)] I've found time working through prefaces and introductions of major reference works to be time well spent. That said, I join MJ in commending you for tracking down your answer and in reporting what you found. Shalom, shalom