A correspondent wrote (apropos of this post) wondering if I knew about “Logeion, an online Greek & Latin dictionary-searching site put together by the Chicago Classics department (I think mainly Helma Dik). It is more comprehensive in terms of having a lot of words, and less comprehensive in terms of spanning a lot of different resources (relying heavily, for instance, on your ‘outmoded’ Lewis & Short…). It allows its user to compare different dictionary definitions, which I find valuable, and also offers a list of the classical authors who use the word in question most frequently.” I told her I didn’t, and thanked her for the valuable tip, which I now pass on to you; I’ll add that if you type in “logos,” you get a pull-down menu offering λόγος as well as the Latin-alphabet version. (Also, as I wrote her, “I shouldn’t get so snippy about L&S, which is, after all, still a useful book, but it irritates me that people still cite it as if it were the last word in Latin lexicography, completely ignoring the OLD — presumably because it’s expensive and they don’t own a copy, which is perfectly understandable, but still.”)
“If L&S weren’t ‘at a disadvantage,’ why would Oxford have expended so much time and effort on producing another dictionary?”
If L&S is thoroughly outmoded, why does Oxford not only continue to publish it? And not just publish it but charge a stratospheric price for a book that was typeset 134 years ago?
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Reference/LanguageLearningInstruction/Latin/?view=usa&ci=9780198642015
It’s part of Oxford’s (and Cambridge’s) project to price the study of Greek and Latin out of existence.
Very possibly!
Of course, at least in the U.S. L&S ought to be public domain, so someone else could put out a cheaper edition if they thought the market was there for it.
So they can sell two instead of one. That’s how capitalism works. 😐
If a book is too expensive for its would-be users to afford, does it really exist?
If a book is too expensive for its would-be users to afford, does it really exist?
It exists, but the scholarship it represents is incomplete. It’s essentially still at the “rattling around the author’s head and shared with a few friends” stage. If such work is overlooked in favor of technically inferior work which is actually available, I don’t have much sympathy. It’s 2013; inaccessibility is a choice.
(There are some authors who I suspect of intentionally using knowledge-hating rentier academic publishers specifically because that allows them to avoid any scrutiny, editorial or otherwise, of their half-baked and slapdash work, while still getting a publication to list on their CV, but that’s a different issue altogether.)