Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG)The TLG is a concordance to ancient Greek literature. It was originally based on Estienne's work Thesaurus graecae linguae. It contains virtually all extant Greek literary texts from Homer (eight century B.C.E.) to 800 C.E. as well as the texts of many historiographical, lexicographical, and scholastic writers. The goal is to eventually include literary texts from antiquity to the present.
Consult a Tutorial by clicking on "more" below.
Tutorial:
From the Text Search option, you can choose Simple (one word or phrase) or Proximity (Boolean, a combination of up to three words or phrases) searches.
You can search using Greek, Beta, Transliteration fonts from the drop down menu.
If you choose Greek, you can click on each letter in the keyboard icon. Note that there is no difference between regular and final sigma in the search box and you can ignore aspirations unless you wish to search on specific inflected forms or gain more precision in your word or phrase searches, and the iota subscript can be added by clicking on it following the letter; for example, clicking on the omega with iota subscript or other diphthong.
However, instead of clicking on the individual Greek letters, you may want to go to Settings on your computer and choose Language, Keyboard, Greek, Polytonic if you wish to facilitate the inputting of ancient Greek words and phrases. Once you have added Polytonic, you can click on the flag, usually in the upper right hand corner on Mac computers or “ΕΛ,” usually in the lower right hand corner on PC’s and start typing. Unless you have an actual Greek keyboard, you need to check the configuration chart or simply through trial and error find the corresponding letters, e.g., v for ω, h for η, u for θ, y for υ, etc.
If you choose Beta or Transliteration make sure to check the transliteration chart used in the TLG – w for ω, h for η, q for θ, etc.
You can also choose the distance between the combined words in Proximity searches, from changing the default of 15 words in the box to up to 50 words.
You can either decide to search the Full Author Corpus, which is the default, or a single author or a number of authors by choosing Author, e.g., Euripides.
In the results you can view the larger context of the passages by clicking on the rectangle with a right pointing arrow (the browser window) to read the entire text by moving backwards or forward in the text, and in the case of links to Translations, such as those in Perseus, read a translation. You can also click on the exact Citation of the edition you are consulting.
Note: You do not have to use diacritics, but you can, if you desire more precision. Wildcards can also be used by tagging this option which offers you inflected (declined, conjugated, derived, dialectical) forms of the word(s) or phrase(s) searched.
For morphological analysis choose a Lemma (dictionary form) search. For word forms choose a Word Index search from a list of words.
In the corpus of Euripides, for example, if you search on πόνος or the stem πον using the Word Index, you will find that there are 18 instances of this word. Once here you could choose to expand your search by clicking on Full Author Corpus which then will give all the instances in the corpus of Greek texts/authors in the TLG for comparative analysis.
If you choose Text Search, you will be taken to the texts in which this word is found. When you perform a Proximity search in the Euripides corpus on, for example, πόνος and βίος within a range of, let us say, 30 words, you will find three instances of this word "combination," in the Fragmenta and in the Hippolytus.
There are many other features to explore such as geographic and chronological distributions of words or phrases under Statistics. The N-Grams option allows you to compare similarities in phrases, for example, in the parallel Intertextual Phrase Matching comparing passages in all or individual works by two authors such as Sophocles and Euripides in order to identify common phrases to both or in general use at the time (chronological distribution) in Athens (geographic distribution), for example, or unique words and phrases in each author compared to parts or the full corpus of authors in the TLG.
