Month: May 2017

Prof. Montanari about The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek

When we published the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek (BDAG) in 2015, we were often asked if a new dictionary on Greek was really necessary. This was a valid question, of course, but we would not have made the considerable investment in the translation of Franco Montanari’s Vocabolario della lingua Greca if we did not think that a new, modern dictionary would not be a useful tool for scholars of Greek at all levels. We asked professor Montanari to write a guest post on this subject.

By Franco Montanari

Dictionaries of ancient languages, founded as they are on the written testimony of the literature and other documents, certainly undergo a slower process of aging than dictionaries based on the living usage of modern languages. Dictionaries of modern languages reflect the current spoken forms, and these are undergoing constant and rapid evolution, but even dictionaries of ancient languages require updating, revision and additions. In our case, the need for a new dictionary of Ancient Greek, profoundly renewed in comparison to its predecessors, derives essentially from three factors: 1) the language to be interpreted and translated itself, namely Ancient Greek; 2) the modern language that provides the translations, the glosses and all explanations, i.e. the language spoken by the users of the dictionary; 3) the graphic layout. Let’s look at these factors one by one.

Consideration of the first factor, Ancient Greek, implies taking into account the enormous progress achieved in the study of the literature and the language in all its aspects during the last decades. The data at our disposal are being constantly enriched by the increase of lexical and grammatical knowledge, the in-depth reappraisal and updating of the interpretation of all the written evidence, new or even first critical editions of texts, the discovery of new words (actually not as rare as you might think!), new attestations in previously unknown genres or periods – for instance evidence that a term previously known only from prose texts was also used in poetry –  or the finding of an archaic occurrence of a word that had so far been thought to reflect more recent usage.

Progress of this kind is also based on a more extended and in-depth evaluation of the full range of the written evidence. Accordingly, the use of electronic databases (first and foremost the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae of Irvine, California) constitutes an essential aid and – let me add a phrase I often repeat –  the ancient languages walk effortlessly on modern legs! I’ll give you an example I regard as highly significant. When I was working on the first Italian edition, which came out in 1995, a search performed with my desktop Mac on the entire TLG database took hours to complete. So I used to launch the search the night before and then go off to bed, and I would find it ready the next morning. Now, the same search takes one minute or even less. Very simply stated, this means that a far greater number of searches can be performed on the Greek literature database, with an enormous advantage in terms of results. Technological progress thus leads to important progress in the scientific quality of the outcome.

Moreover, in the case of our dictionary, I would like to add that first of all it is important to underline that focus was not restricted to language material dating from the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic eras. Significant consideration and noteworthy attention have also been awarded to later forms of Greek, in particular Greek of the imperial age and of the first centuries of Greek Judaic-Christian literature (Old and New Testament, Patristics, etc.), up to the VIth century and with sporadic later examples (this is a period on which the great LSJ is notoriously weak, especially after the IInd century AD). Let me underline this latter aspect. The Patristic Greek Lexicon of G.W.H. Lampe, which was published more than half a century ago (Oxford 1961), is specifically devoted to Christian Greek of the early centuries: but it is well-known that the ancient Greek dictionaries with a generalist structure and target (namely those dictionaries dedicated to the Greek language in its entirety and not to particular periods or particular linguistic-lexical subject areas) do not normally allow room for the Greek of the latest Imperial age and, above all, to the one of the first (let us say) 6-7 centuries of the Greek Christian Literature. This is also why we tried to differ as much as possible, and the room dedicated in the BDAG to the lexicon of the Greek Judaic and Christian literature is indeed in a larger percentage in comparison with other ancient Greek generalist dictionaries, even though we had to leave out, for this reason, some examples or quotations from other periods and subject areas.

Furthermore, our dictionary makes substantial use of papyri and inscriptions, and includes a wealth of proper names, which have been systematically checked and revised for the new edition, on which the English edition is based.

Another important point becomes clear in this context. A glance at the lemmata of a new dictionary of Ancient Greek that is based on a re-examination of the language materials from the literature, and also from other sources such as papyri and inscriptions, suggests that the word count is considerably greater than in the past. For instance, previously unknown words are constantly being discovered, deriving either from first editions of hitherto unpublished texts or from new editions of already known texts. Nevertheless, a new dictionary of ancient Greek may actually have lost some words that were present in previous editions. This may come about, for example, because earlier versions of the dictionary contained words that were the result of misreadings of a manuscript or of conjectures later judged to be unacceptable: but in the meantime they had found their way into dictionaries, sometimes even as early as the Stephanus, or possibly later in some cases, and by the sheer force of inertia they were left in the dictionary, in the absence of any revision of the lemmas. In the BDAG, such ghost-words have been eliminated whenever new checks on the material have shown that they actually do not exist at all, although one cannot rule out the possibility that other ghost words may still be lurking on some pages, awaiting their unmasking.

This kind of progress is of course also based on more extensive and in-depth examination of the overall body of the written evidence, and it is precisely for this reason that the above-mentioned electronic database is of great help. It becomes absolutely crucial not so much in the case of the most frequently used words, but above all for poorly attested words supported by rather problematic evidence, or in cases where the evidence for a word relies on its occurrence in a single author or in specific groups of authors.

When working on a new dictionary of Ancient Greek, we face the constant problem of how to deal with this considerable increase in knowledge and material. The main difficulty lies in finding a balance between, on the one hand, the requirements of scientific and methodological rigour, and on the other the constraints of a dictionary in its own right. A few words have, therefore, to be spent on practical questions. In publishing a new dictionary, there are obvious limitations on space and production time (there comes a point when a dictionary has to be closed and published: continuing ad infinitum is but a pipedream). Furthermore, certain requirements concerning clarity and ease of consultation must also be taken into consideration. Finding the ideal balance between these needs is far from easy and can never be established once and for all. The case of the ghost-words is simple: once they have been acknowledged as such, they simply have to be eliminated, and therefore you should not be surprised if a lemma that was present in the earlier dictionaries now no longer appears. In contrast, the considerable increase in the amount of material that can be used raises considerable problems. It is quite obvious that the material will have to be carefully sifted so that the enormous mass of information can be cut down to acceptable limits, but without impoverishing a tool which, by virtue of its indisputable wealth of information, lends itself to a multiplicity of uses on various levels.

The second factor is the modern language used for the translation and interpretation. A language that is in active use is undergoing constant evolution and rapid change. This is a very important aspect which cannot be ignored: the language that is utilized to explain and translate must not be too remote from current everyday use. In other words, it must not constitute an additional stumbling block, chiefly for the student. If the working tools available for studying the ancient language are too old and are written in an outmoded style of presentation, then they become difficult to use and discourage students from exploring the subject in greater depth. A dictionary (like a history of literature, a grammar book, or any other tool) must speak to the user in an easily understandable manner and in a language that is as close as possible to the user’s everyday mode of speech.

This idea of a “user-friendly” tool also includes the third factor prefigured earlier, namely the graphic layout and the way the material is set out on the printed page (and conceivably also the screen view for an electronic version, similar to that of the English version). The graphic layout, which makes an essential and crucial contribution to the process of consultation, is another element that has undergone substantial change over the past century, and has made great progress. Anyone who has had more than a brief experience will certainly recollect how different the available tools looked no more than a few decades ago, even from this point of view. It is clear that not only for students taking their first steps in the study of Ancient Greek but also for scholars and a broad range of users, the graphic layout of their books must be suited to their tastes and must not represent an obstacle.

The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek made Choice magazine’s 2016 list of Outstanding Academic Titles

Character Amnesia

By Min Xu
From Brill’s Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (online and in print)

Character amnesia (in Chinese: tíbǐwàngzì 提筆忘字 ‘lifting one’s pen but forgetting the characters’) is the name for the phenomenon that people forget how to write Chinese characters which they previously were able to write. In most cases, the characters are not forgotten completely. Some people may remember the shape of the characters, but cannot remember the exact strokes to write them. Some may write the characters incorrectly, such as placing the components within a character in the wrong positions or missing some strokes (Huáng 2012:12–13). The phenomenon of character amnesia is common in China and Japan. According to a survey conducted by the China Youth Daily, 83% of the 2,072 respondents reported having forgotten how to write some characters (Hú and Wáng 2010). Another survey targeting college students in China found nearly 90% of respondents having encountered the embarrassment of character amnesia (Móu 2012:16–19). In Japan, a national survey conducted in 2011 showed that about 66.5% of the 2,069 respondents reported that they were losing their ability to correctly handwrite Japanese characters (kanji), and the figure has increased 25% in the last 10 years (Japan Today, 2012).

The high prevalence of character amnesia has been largely attributed to constant use of computers and mobile phones, which allow users to enter Chinese characters using their phonetic transcription. The Hànyǔ pīnyīn 漢語拼音 input method, for example, is used by over 97% of users in Mainland China (Chen and Lee 2000). It allows users to input a Chinese character (e.g., mā 媽 ‘mother’) by typing its pīnyīn spelling, a phonetic transcription of the character’s pronunciation (in this example, ‘ma’, but without tone), and then selecting the desired character from a list of characters sharing the same toneless pīnyīn spelling (e.g., (1) ma 嗎 ‘morphine; (question tag)’, ‘(question tag)’; (2) mǎ 碼 ‘a weight; number; yard; stack’; (3) mā 媽 ‘mother’; (4) mǎ 馬 ‘horse; a surname’; (5) mà 罵 ‘scold; abuse’; (6) má 麻 ‘(to have) pins and needles; tingling; hemp; numb; to bother’. In this example, we can enter the character 媽 by pressing the key ‘3’. The pīnyīn input method does not require the users to construct the characters by combining strokes, as one would do in writing Chinese characters by hand (Zhū et al. 2009).

The properties of Chinese characters can explain why learners are susceptible to character amnesia. The Chinese writing system is a logographic system, in the sense that the graphic units (the characters) generally correspond to words or morphemes (Coulmas 2003:50–60). A character is a salient visual unit, formed with different types of strokes which are grouped into identifiable stroke patterns or components, which are arranged in appropriate positions relative to one another to form a square character. Moreover, Chinese characters map onto whole syllables. This means that there is no stroke or component in a character (e.g., mā 媽) that is pronounced as a specific phoneme (e.g., /m/) in the syllable. As a result, writing in Chinese requires thousands of characters, and it takes pupils six to seven years to master 3,000 characters (DeFrancis 1984:152–153). In Japan, children are taught about 1,000 kanji during six years of primary school (Gottlieb 2005:81–86). A prevalent strategy for learning Chinese characters in China and Japan is writing them by hand repeatedly. Through writing, the learners learn how to deconstruct characters into strokes and stroke patterns and then regroup these stroke patterns into a square unit, and form long-term motor memory of Chinese characters (Tan, Spinks et al. 2005). Indeed, neuroimaging studies have shown that relative to alphabetic languages, the processing of logographic characters more systematically engages brain regions that may support the motoric representation of characters, including the premotor cortex and the left middle frontal gyrus that is spatially close to the premotor cortex (Kuo et al. 2004; Nakamura et al. 2012; Tan, Laird et al. 2005).

Writing characters by drawing the strokes one by one is much more troublesome and complicated than typing pīnyīn on electronic devices. Chinese children in primary school are taught pīnyīn to help them read Chinese characters, and thus they can rapidly learn to use the pīnyīn input method for text-messaging, instant chat, email and so on. The prolonged and extensive use of computers and mobile phones has led people to spend far more time on typing pīnyīn than writing characters. According to the survey conducted by the China Youth Daily, only 25.7% of respondents reported that they frequently wrote characters by hand (Hú and Wáng 2010). As a result, people forget how to write some of the Chinese characters, particularly those that are complicated and rare. A recent study of 4,908 primary school children in China demonstrated that children’s reading performance significantly decreases with their utilization of the pīnyīn input method, but increases with their time spent on handwriting, suggesting that pīnyīn typing may hinder Chinese reading development, whereas handwriting enhances their reading ability (Tan et al. 2013).

To counteract the problem of character amnesia and improve writing ability among Chinese children, the Ministry of Education of China has initiated programs to encourage more handwriting (Ministry of Education of China 2013). Schools are instructed to increase calligraphy classes for younger students to once a week and offer optional lessons and after-school activities for older students. In addition, people are advised to switch input methods from pīnyīn to handwriting or shape-based input methods such as the five-stroke input method (Wǔbǐ zìxíng shūrùfǎ 五筆字型輸入法, sometimes translated as the ‘Wǔbǐ method’; Fāng and Zhāng 2013) or the double-stroke input method (Shuāngbǐ huàhànzì biānmǎ shūrùfǎ 雙筆劃漢字編碼輸入法; Chén et al. 2013). However, it remains unclear as what extent the shape-based input methods can help people to improve their ability of writing and reading Chinese characters.

Min Xu

Bibliography

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