LSJ and the Diachronic Taxonomy of the Greek Vocabulary

This chapter presents a survey of Greek terms for living beings. The Greek vocabulary is recorded for over a three thousand year time-span, and through reconstruction of the immediate ancestor of Greek, Proto-Indo-European, it is possible to go back further still. Examination of the different classificatory terms in Greek, with their ancestry, thus allows us to test some of the hypotheses proposed by linguistic ethnobotanists. One such hypothesis concerns the effect on the terms for animals made by the development from a hunter-gatherer to a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle: Brown (2000) claims that taxonomies ‘of hunter gatherers tend to only have only one level, consisting entirely of generic classes’, and that over time ‘folk taxonomies have tended to expand up and down, adding more inclusive life-form and less inclusive specific classes to pre-existing generic categories’. The chapter sketches out the sort of contribution Greek can make to such debates.