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- Title
Lucus a non lucendo: Enantiosemy in Ancient Latin Lexicography.
- Authors
Gitner, Adam
- Abstract
Enantiosemes, words which express opposed meanings (also called auto-antonyms; e.g. altus, which can mean "high" or "low", or the English "cleave", which can mean "cut" or "stick together"), present a practical problem for the lexicographer. My paper surveys enantiosemes as they are explicitly discussed by ancient Roman lexicographers and provides a descriptive typology. Roman scholars distinguish between genuine auto-antonyms, which they sometimes call voces mediae (e.g. valetudo for "health" or "sickness"), and cases of etymology by antiphrasis (e.g. lucus a non lucendo), whereby a name is given through some kind of opposition. This latter group of etymologies-by-antiphrasis can be further subdivided between cases of euphemism and irony. The paper concludes with a short lexicon of Latin enantiosemes explicitly discussed by ancient sources.
- Subjects
LEXICOGRAPHY; ENGLISH language; ETYMOLOGY; LEXICON; EUPHEMISM; ANCIENT (Literary period)
- Publication
Trends in Classics, 2023, Vol 15, Issue 1, p79
- ISSN
1866-7473
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/tc-2023-0005