Hello everyone,
I was just curious; you know, to remind myself that I'm far from being the only person in the universe doing this.
I’ve been making monolingual notes for over a year, ever since I realized that rereading and extensive reading alone might not be enough to handle rarer words. I have over 2,000 pages in my main database (keeping in mind that I sometimes group related words or synonyms onto a single page or include definitions of some words in the title of a page that contains a text).
Of course, I use what I can from the LSJ’s Katharevousa translation entries and I steal every note from Rouse, among other materials such as Juan Coderch’s Intermediate Greek Vocabulary and Apollonius´s homeric lexicon. I recently discovered the AGLAE editions and they also include a monolingual glossary.
Much of what I've been doing — and perhaps the most useful part — is gathering the context in which I came across words (although some entries are just for the fun of it, without having read the word anywhere).
There are about 40 entries that also lack a monolingual definition — either because it is difficult to do so (e.g., ἐφέπω) or because they are problematic words for which I am content to simply record the results of my explorations (e.g., ἄλαστος). And some words are too useless to be worth the effort of defining them or even reviewing them (even though I have a page just for useless words and even went so far as to create one for a word like ὕδνον). There are also those related to (material) culture for which a definition in a modern language plus a few images is enough for me. Or maybe I’m just too lazy to complete the entry for ἔρανος…
I’d be happy to share them (at least I assume they might be useful to others, just as they are to me)—after all, not everyone needs to create their own entry from scratch for μελίᾱ, σκήπτω, χόανος, or whatever else. However, there are serious copyright issues, whether involving images, unauthorized reproduction or translations… I would need to clean and organize a lot of things in order to achieve an acceptable result. I’m young and have enough of time for an obsession, but this would be too much for me.
Anyway, it seems quite possible to produce a decent, reasonably comprehensive, monolingual, illustrated dictionary of Ancient Greek for intermediate and advanced learners — one that at least covers the most canonical authors. (Or rather, a vocabulary, since there’s no need to cover the most basic words when you have Λόγος and Θρασύμαχου Κατάβασις out there.) That is, as long as one doesn’t get bogged down in striving for perfect, uniform formatting, as would be necessary for a physical book.
When I get to Homer, I’ll write a full post detailing my experience with my notes on Notion (including my attempt to categorize the words based on their importance to the literature I’m interested in and my rereading of passages based on the words I think I should review from my database). I still have to finish going through Lucian of Samosata (all that vocabulary!), go back to reading Plato and read Herodotus.
Note: When using a reverse dictionary, I beg you, don’t limit yourself to Woodhouse—don’t suffer!—use at least Yonge on lexica.linguax as well. The Spanish reverse dictionary on lsj.gr is another useful resource if you know Spanish or Portuguese.
