LSJ:About
Introduction
This project consisted originally in the conversion into mediawiki format of Liddell, Scott, Jones' A Greek–English Lexicon, which is more commonly known as LSJ. The data have been provided by the Perseus Project with a Creative Commons Sharealike / Non-Commercial / Attribution license. And it was launched on February 2013.
Since then a number of other sources (Ancient Greek/Latin to and from other languages) have been added. For example:
- Diccionario Griego-Español (DGE)
DGE is and Ancient Greek to Spanish Dictionary produced at the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo (ILC) of the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CCHS) of the CSIC (Madrid) under the direction of Francisco R. Adrados and Juan Rodríguez Somolinos. The online version (about 60,000 entries) contains lemmata from α through ἔξαυος and is the work of this amazing team. Work on this dictionary has been sponsored by the Greek Leventis Foundation among others and it is offered under a non-commercial creative commons license.
- Grieks/Nederlands woordenboek offered under a non-commercial creative commons license.
- Anatole Bailly, Dictionnaire Grec-Français abrégé as digitized by Chaeréphon (André Charbonnet)
- Gaffiot 2016, Dictionnaire Illustré Latin-Français; the data in this dictionary come from Gaffiot 2016 compiled under the direction of Gérard Gréco, with the assistance of Mark De Wilde, Bernard Maréchal and Katsuhiko Okubo. The database used is gaffiot-a-z-komarov-1.1-20160502.tex.
- Excerpts from Wikipedia and Wiktionary articles
Objective
Apart from making accessible a variety of sources, the objective is to improve upon them. Many of the works are old and apart from antiquated language they contain numerous errors. Hence the work being carried out on editing those sources and producing reverse language versions; for example, from English, German, French, Italian, Russian to Ancient Greek.
People
Spiros Doikas
Spiros Doikas is the founder and chief editor of lsj.gr. You can read below some of his papers regarding the work carried out on lsj.gr.
Spiros read English at Manchester Metropolitan University. His postgraduate studies include Machine Translation at UMIST and IoL's Diploma in Translation. He has been working as a translator since 1995, initially as a literary translator and then as a technical translator specializing in software and IT.
He has a keen interest in translation technologies and has been teaching translation tools and localization in meta|φραση School of Translation Studies since 2003. His research interests and skills include multilingual web site development, online terminology management systems, wiki and forum software. In 2001 he created translatum.gr, a Greek translation portal providing, among other things, terminological assistance in a customized version of an open source forum platform. He is a member of the Hellenic Society of Terminology. He is passionate about QA and improving lexicographical resources, so LSJ did seem to fit the bill. As did IATE. And Woodhouse. And...
William Berg
William "Bill" Berg (Wikipedia, Academia.edu) was the site's Classics Consultant until the very last days of his life. He sadly passed away in May 16, 2021. LSJ.gr is devoted to his memory.
His help and comments have been instrumental in resolving Ancient Greek lexicographical issues and ambiguities. You can read much of his feedback publicly on the English to Ancient Greek and Ancient Greek to English forum in Translatum.gr where he is moderator for Classics.
William has taught Classics at UCLA, Stanford University and Atenisi University in the Kingdom of Tonga. He has translated widely from ancient, biblical, medieval and modern Greek into English, and from English to Greek. His books include Early Virgil and Philogelos: The Laugh Addict and a translation of Yiannis Ritsos' Romiosini. He has completed a vernacular translation of the New Testament, among other early Christian works.
Attribution Required
According to the above license, if you copy text from this site you are required to provide attribution with a link to the page you used. To be clear as to what attribution means, you have to:
Hyperlink directly to the original page on the source site of the specific article you quote from (e.g. ἀγάπη)
“Directly”, means that each hyperlink must point directly to this domain in standard HTML visible even with JavaScript disabled, and not use a tinyurl or any other form of obfuscation or redirection. Furthermore, the links must not be nofollowed.
Papers
Wikifying the LSJ
2013. A paper (in Greek with an English abstract) has been written regarding the development of this site (in its earlier iteration on lsj.translatum.gr; there have been considerable changes and additions since then) and presented at the 9th Conference "Hellenic Language and Terminology" (Athens, 7-9 November 2013) entitled Wikifying the LSJ (presentation in Greek-English bilingual pdf and Powerpoint format). The Abstract:
This paper relates the implementation of the Ancient Greek to English dictionary Liddell, Scott, Jones (LSJ) in MediaWiki format (https://lsj.gr). The original xml file was processed and converted (using regular expressions) to a file which was appropriate for use in MediaWiki. The main features of this implementation were: a) transcription of headwords in various forms and transliterations (polytonic with vrachy/macron, polytonic without vrachy/macron, monotonic, all caps, Latin characters with accents, Latin characters without accents, greeklish, Beta Code); b) case-insensitive and diacritics-insensitive autocomplete search suggestions for Greek and Latin characters; c) css styles to modify the look and feel; d) collection of ancient Greek quotes and development of a MediaWiki random quote extension; e) fine-tuning MediaWiki in a way that is appropriate for a lexicographic work of this nature; f) creation of an import template that supports Semantic Mediawiki functionality; and g) creation of indexes for each form and transliteration.
Rev(er|i)sing the LSJ
2019. A paper (in English) has been written on the challenges of reversing and revising the LSJ so that an English to Ancient Greek version can be produced and imported in this site. The paper was presented at the 12th Conference "Hellenic Language and Terminology". Download the presentation and full paper. The Abstract:
Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) is a standard lexicographical work of the Ancient Greek language available online in a number of different incarnations. Its directionality is from Ancient Greek to English. What if one wants to search from English to Ancient Greek? The Perseus Project, a seminal and authoritative electronic source, provides a functionality whereby a reverse search is possible, based on a simple term-to-translation(s) logic, devoid of any further processing.
The above approach is a far cry from being satisfactory and is subject to a number of pitfalls which this paper aims to explore and provide a framework for their remediation on a linguistic and computational level. Some of the types of issues identified:
- Missing term elements (“commander of a” for “τελάρχης”)
- Missing Greek-derived equivalents (no “cephalalgia” in “κεφαλαλγία” and no “pankration” in “παγκράτιον”)
- Use of Greek as part of the translation (for example “παρανυμφεύω” rendered as “act as παράνυμφος”)
- Use of anaphora (“σκοτωματικός” as “causing dizziness | suffering from it”)
- Use of Latin instead of English, especially for taboo words (“crepitus ventris” for “τλήμων γαστρὸς ἔριθος”)
- Use of old English (“shew” instead of “show”, “connexion” instead of “connection”)
- Use of dash inbetween words (“to-morrow”)
- Abbreviated forms of the headword in phrases resulting in inflectional ambiguity (“κλυτὰ δ. βένθεσι λίμνης”)
- Incomplete example phrases with mid-phrase ellipsis (“τὸ ὕδωρ… αὐ. μὲν οὔκ ἐστι”)
- Typos and linguistic errors (“ἐντονία” instead of “εὐτονία”)
A script was created to extract the term/translation equivalents from the xml file. Phase I consisted of a) analysis of the output in Ancient Greek to English format b) identification and categorization of the issues and c) a plan for their remediation. Phase II was an analysis and further revision of the reversed material. Phase III was preparation and publication of the output in wiki format as an interactive supplemental resource to LSJ proper.
