how many lemmas in lingua latina per se illustrata

It supposedly has 40,000 headwords and would include most accretions from the middle ages and renaissance but not from perhaps the last two centuries.īeyond these putative factoids, there is a huge project at the Vatican which is called something like 'Lexicon recentioris latinitatis'. The other big trove that I know of is on the French site that I cited recently. Once again, nisi fallor, the program contains about all of the words that would have been current in the golden and silver ages of latin letters. This does not count the additional inflected forms that it is capable of generating. The Whitaker's 'Words' program has about 8,000 headword entries (nisi fallor). I will nevertheless restrict my comments to what I've read about two latin online dictionaries. It's difficult to pass by without commenting on the suggestion that some Greeks may have a vocabulary of 50 million words, which on it's face seems ludicrious, or that American college students scrape by on a measly 10,000. And if this editorial cohort were really to perform its task punctually, and if the Association of Academies, which, as is well known, has not a penny of its own, were to raise the ten million marks necessary for the completion of (say) 120 volumes and if scholars were to become so opulent that they could afford to purchase the Thesaurus Graecus for (say) 6,ooo marks-how could one read and use such a monstrosity? At their head there would have to be a general editor, who, however, would be more of a general than an editor. Any one who bears in mind the bulk of Greek literature, which is at least 10 times as great, its dialectical variations, its incredible wealth of forms, the obstinate persistence of the classical speech for thousands of years down to the fall of Constantinople, or, if you will, until the present day: who knows, moreover, that the editions of almost all the Greek classics are entirely unsuited for the purposes of slipping, that for many important writers no critical editions whatever exist: and who considers the state of our collections of fragments and special Lexica, will see that at the present time all the bases upon which a Greek Thesaurus could be erected are lacking.īut even if we were to assume that we possessed such editions and collections from Homer down to Nonnus, or (as Krumbacher proposed in London) down to Apostolius, and further that they had all been worked over, slipped, or excerpted by a gigantic staff of scholars, and that a great house had preserved and stored the thousands of boxes, whence would come the time, money, and power to sift these millions of slips and to bring Nous into this Chaos ? Since the proportion of Latin to Greek Literature is about 1:10, the office work of the Greek Thesaurus would occupy at least 100 scholars.

How many lemmas in lingua latina per se illustrata