LGPN-Ling: Etymology and Semantics of Ancient Greek Personal Names

LGPN-Ling: Etymology and Semantics of Ancient Greek Personal Names

The eight volumes of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN) that have appeared to date record all the persons known in Greece, mainland and islands, Asia Minor and up to the far reaches of the Greek-speaking world from the beginning of the alphabetical period down to late antiquity. A total of 400,000 individuals have been identified up to now, all together bearing 40,000 different names, a small proportion of which only are of non-Greek origin. In both print and online versions, the data provided for every bearer of the name include gender, place, date and source.

In this context, the purpose of our project is twofold:

1. to provide its essential semantical complement to the LGPN Database, which is currently being re-designed to permit such an extension.
2. to extract from it a printed dictionary (Minon et alii, Lexonyme, Genève, Droz, 2023), intended to replace the outdated work of Friedrich Bechtel Die Historischen Personennamen des griechischen bis zur Kaiserzeit (1917, hereafter HPN).

The aim is to elucidate the meaning of Greek names, a task which has never before been undertaken except in sporadic fashion and without argument in the outdated work of W. Pape-G. E. Benseler, Wörterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen (1870; hereafter PB) and, for names known from papyri, in the (Trismegistos database). Justifications of proposed meanings will be given, drawn from the various sources available to us: literature, grammarians, epigraphy and papyri.

• Introduction
• Foreword
  • Reformed alphabet of Ionic-Attic koine
  • Greek lemma vs variants
  • Retained types of Greek hybrid names
  • Translation
  • About compounds
  • List of the Inflectional Suffixes
• Further reading
• Thanks