The Greek-Spanish Dictionary (DGE)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Greek-Spanish Dictionary (DGE) is the last link in the long chain of European lexicographical tradition of general dictionaries of Ancient Greek, the first of which could be considered Henricus Stephanus's Thesaurus Graecae Linguae (Paris 1572). The Greek-Spanish Dictionary resumes this tradition at the level reached by its immediate predecessor, Liddell-Scott-Jones's (LSJ) dictionary in its ninth edition (Oxford 1925–1940). Through many years, this project, which is carried out in the Department of Classics of the Institute of Philology at the CSIC (Madrid), has received funds from the Spanish Ministry of Education in several ways, lately through Acciones Especiales. It also has been supported at several times by worthy foundations, such as the March Foundation or the A.G. Leventis Foundation.
In the beginning the goals that were aimed for were not as ambitious as today. Having in mind an audience of university students, they basically attempted to adapt into Spanish the best existing Greek dictionaries. They also intended to supplement them in neglected fields, replace their editions, frequently very old, with new, better ones; also, to correct eventual mistakes.
Nevertheless, at the very beginning of the work, they already noticed the necessity felt in the field of classical philology for a new bilingual dictionary from Ancient Greek into a modern language. Such a dictionary necessarily had to be based on a wider collection of materials, as well as on a new careful study and organization of those materials according to modern lexicographical criteria, taking advantage of recent advances in linguistics. LSJ's splendid dictionary, which our daily work makes us praise, was — regrettably enough — in many senses out of date, in spite of its supplements. Greek lexicon was thus in need of a thorough revision.
That revision involved, first, incorporating Mycenaean Greek and Patristic lexicon, as well as personal and place names, which were all absent from the LSJ. Besides the increasing mass of words showing up in new literary and documentary texts, new critical editions of well-known texts, and the necessary revision of their interpretation in the light of the current state of the art necessitated writing a dictionary with newly-renovated foundations. As for the etymological element, the tremendous development of Indo-European linguistics all through the 20th century had also to be taken into account.
