Papias's Elementarium: The Method and Practice of a Lexicographer

This is a contribution delivered at the Encuentro Internacional sobre Lexico Latino (International Meeting on Latin Lexicon), held in Salamanca, Spain, 18-20 November, 1999. Papias's Elementarium (The Rudiments), dated to the 11th century, is presented as a precursor of the genre of encyclopedic dictionary, while its author is acknowledged as the founder of modern lexicography. Papias's programmatic statements made in the introductory paragraphs of his work are examined as outlines of the rationale for the lexicon, the methodology applied in its compilation, & the application of technical apparatus (eg, the use of diacritics or abbreviations giving morphological information about the lemma). It is observed that these statements are also intended as specifications for future copyists how to exactly organize the page when transcribing the Elementarium. The rigorous alphabetic arrangement of lemmas in Papias's lexicon is illustrated with examples, & selected lemma articles are scrutinized to determine whether Papias followed his own methodological precepts. The divergent presence of diacritics in two stemmata of manuscripts is utilized to formulate some theses on their relationship to the final version of the original. Z. Dubiel