Posted by languagehat
https://languagehat.com/beyond-lsj/
https://languagehat.com/?p=18661
Bruce Allen sent me a link to an article in Antigone by Harry Tanner, “Beyond LSJ: How to Deepen Your Understanding of Ancient Greek.” It begins by describing how Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott created “one of the world’s most famous ancient Greek dictionaries” using “a team of students who painstakingly recorded words encountered, along with their contexts, on index cards”:
Very little is known about the criteria by which Liddell and Scott decided what each word meant; there is no preface, no introduction, no explanation about the methods by which these scholars arrived at their conclusions and – more to the point – their translations. This lack of explanation perhaps reflects a more generalised self-confidence of scholars in the 19th century: as E.H. Carr said of historians of that era, “they believed [history’s] meaning was implicit and self-evident.”
Tanner proceeds to the meat of the essay, the issue of what we mean by the meaning of words:
One of the key problems with dictionaries lies in how we tend to think about words, not least words in ancient Greek. We tend to think of them as existing somewhere in the mind with a definable, clear meaning — as if a word like “beauty”, or “mellifluous”, or “carrot” had a home, a clear piece of real estate in the mind, a mental dictionary entry. This limiting idea is far from new. In Plato’s Laches, Socrates asks, πειρῶ εἰπεῖν ὃ λέγω, τί ἐστιν ἀνδρεία (try to articulate what I am saying, what is andreía?) (Laches 1[9]0e). What ensues is an attempt to define the word — to say what it properly means. The assumption at the heart of this dialogue, as well as at the heart of LSJ, is that words have true meanings which exist independently of the contexts in which they are found. It’s as if there is some mental catalogue in which we might look up a word and learn all there is to know about its meaning. But, of course, words are never that simple, and to pretend that they are risks missing out on all the polysemy and multivalence inherent in poetic and creative language.
The word andreia, Plato assumes, has a pure, unadulterated meaning outside of context, and it is our job to find it. Similar attempts are made in the Charmides on the word sōphrosunē (σωφροσύνη). Dictionaries seek to capture that idée mère — to describe in sundry words what it means. Following suit, LSJ glosses σωφροσύνη as “soundness of mind” — another attempt to provide a glancing, unified definition which neatly captures all there is to know about the word. Unfortunately, such assumptions tend to deprive us of the chance to appreciate the beauty and poetry of words.
He explains some of the complex uses of σωφροσύνη, and continues:
The tendency to assume words have unifying, homogenous definitions is as intrinsic to Western thought as the mind-body divide. The cover of the much-hailed Cambridge Greek Lexicon promises to show students the “relationships between… senses”. As we have seen, such relationships between senses are enormously helpful in organising complex dictionary entries for students, but they don’t reflect the reality of how the mind processes word meaning. The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is an exciting and welcome contribution to ancient Greek pedagogy. But these unifying definitions come with a very real cost: in excising a word from its context, you remove the complex web of ideas and concepts to which it is attached, and in doing so, you risk losing nuances, subtleties, connotations — in short, the poetry and the richness of the ancient Greek language.
Anthony Burgess compared a word in a dictionary to a car in a showroom: “full of potential, but temporarily inactive.” I am more moved to think of it like a dead, stuffed canary, pinned mercilessly to a display cabinet in the Natural History Museum for the general amusement of sulky schoolchildren. In reality, a word belongs to an ecosystem of other words, ideas, concepts, and it can only be fully appreciated in the wild. But the question is: how can a student of Ancient Greek see a word — so to speak — in the wild? How can they free themselves from the confines of a narrowly-defined dictionary entry?
The approach Rademaker takes in his 2004 study of σωφροσύνη is to group each use of a word into ‘clusters’ in an arbitrarily defined group of texts. For instance, there is a cluster of uses for self-restraint in the historical corpus of the 5th century BC, primarily the works of Thucydides and Herodotus. This echoes the approach taken by cognitive neuroscientists working on language comprehension, who have found that there is no centrally located storage point for a single word’s meaning anywhere in the brain; rather, it is scattered messily across a variety of domains and contexts. […]
In the 31st fragment of Sappho’s works, we are bequeathed a mawkishly vivid image of her physical experience of desire. Most curious is her description of herself as χλωροτέρα… ποίας, which has been variously translated “greener” or “paler” than grass. Is this a simple reference to the pallor of her skin? If so, why compare it to grass? Is she green with envy? A disappointing thumb through LSJ would tell you that it means “pale”. As Burgess said — a word in a dictionary is like a car in a showroom. What if we seek to understand this word in its usual context? What if we take the car for a spin?
In our earliest works, χλωρός captures the emotion of soldiers shaking in terror before the walls of Troy, or the suitors in the presence of Odysseus, or the sailors staring into the mouths of Charybdis and Scylla. It also describes the soft and moist pliability of freshly cut wood, and the fearful, trancelike state induced in unwary drinkers of drugged wine. In light of these clusters of different contexts, Sappho’s phrase seems more nuanced. She’s capturing her fear, as well as the drug-like state that desire imposes upon her, while simultaneously characterising herself as pliable, moist, supple, and delicate — χλωροτέρα ποίας, “more khlōros than grass”. She is at once afraid, and left weak at the knees, soft and pliable like grass. To return to the car showroom, LSJ’s “pale” seems a little paltry by comparison.
He ends by describing the “powerful tools at our disposal now” and suggesting ways to make use of them:
If you encounter a fiendishly common word, you might select a corpus in which you are interested. You might just look at the word’s use in tragedy, or in history, or in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae. That said, the process of a thorough study of a word and all its whole ecosystem is an enormously satisfying undertaking. […] My recommendation would be to use the digital tools to create a small pool of word uses in the period and genre of texts in which you are interested. Then proceed to annotate each of them, loosely describing its meaning and context, without providing a translation or a definition. I recommend either printing out the uses, or exporting them to a PDF and annotating them on an iPad. It’s very important — to my mind — to describe the whole meaning of the sentence and the word’s role in it; don’t try to translate it. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, at line 190, khlōros captures some quality of the fear which took hold of the queen as she looked upon the goddess. This is in many ways more accurate than simply translating it as “pale” or “fresh”: it captures the word in its ecosystem. There is no risk here of foisting meaning onto a context where it does not belong.
In this way, you can imitate the process undertaken by the students and editors of LSJ in previous centuries. Crucially, the difference is that you are not seeking certainty in a clear translation: you are seeking to understand the context, or ecosystem, the word inhabits each time. In short, you are seeking to replicate roughly and imprecisely the process by which modern languages are acquired: a gradual exploration of all the nooks and crannies in which a word can be found.
Key to this process is the understanding with which we began: word definitions are a poor substitute for the rich diversity of meaning which can be found in context. But another key is a constant awareness that our understanding of the meaning of Greek words is filtered through the languages of our dictionaries. By relying wholly on English as the proxy for the meaning of words in ancient Greek, we miss the rich diversity of the contexts to which the Ancient Greek word originally belonged. Thinking of khlōros not as “green” or “yellow” or “pale”, but as belonging to the context of war or the terrors of the sea, or the soft, wet quality of freshly cut wood is a far more vivid image; it brings the text, and its words, alive. Context — not definition — is the key to accessing more of the poetry. It is also key to grasping this slippery and challenging language meaningfully.
He says, usefully, “I think it would be wonderful if students of lexicology and philology who believe they have found an interesting use added it to Wiktionary where it can be reviewed and checked by other members of the community.” The essay is a good reminder that the most important way to understand the lexicon of any language is to read as much as you can in that language without trying to find an English equivalent of each word; you will inevitably end up with a rich understanding of how a word is used (which is, of course, what we should mean by “what it means”). I do have to rap him over the knuckles, though, for that “mawkishly”: mawkish is an inherently negative word (OED: “Imbued with sickly, false, or feeble sentiment; overly sentimental”), and to apply it to one of the greatest poets who ever lived smacks of the condescending attitude that used to be taken to another such poet, Emily Dickinson. Watch your words when you write about words!
https://languagehat.com/beyond-lsj/
https://languagehat.com/?p=18661
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