Græcissare: Ancient Greek Loanwords in the LiLa Knowledge Base of Linguistic Resources for Latin
Authors: Greta Franzini, Marco Carlo Passarotti, Francesco Mambrini, Giovanni Moretti, Federica Zampedri (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Università di Pavia, 2020)
Topic: Latin Resources

Abstract
This paper describes the addition of an index of 1,763 Ancient Greek loanwords to the collection of Latin lemmas of the LiLa: Linking Latin Knowledge Base of interoperable linguistic resources. This lexical resource increases LiLa's lemma count and tunes its underlying data model to etymological borrowing.

Introduction
Boasting over two thousand years' worth of written attestation, Latin's evolutionary history is among the longest in existence. The diachronic and geographical reach of the Roman Empire exposed Latin, an Indo-European Italic language, to many regional dialects and languages, including Ancient Greek. The mutually profitable linguistic contact between Latin and Ancient Greek, facilitated by their similar morphosyntactic structures and characteristic syntheticity (Ledgeway, 2012, pp. 10-28), is most evident in their vocabulary, chiefly calques and loanwords. Both lexemes presuppose a certain knowledge of the donor language, but while the former takes from the donor with translation, the latter does not AUTHOR. Examples of Latin words calqued from Ancient Greek are unicornuus ``unicorn'' (unus ``one'' + cornu ``horn'') from mon'okerws (m'onos ``one'' + k'eras ``horn''), and infans ``infant'' (in- ``not'' + fans ``speaking'') from n'hpios (negative prefix nh- + >'epos ``speech''). Calques can also involve affixes, as is the case of Latin's suffix -us being substituted for the Greek -os AUTHOR. The adjective ``dramatic'', for instance, is attested as both dramaticos and dramaticus. Example loanwords in Latin are crocodilus ``crocodile'', imported from the Ancient Greek krok'odeilos, and liquiritia ``liquorice'' from gluk'urriza. Adams identifies three categories of Greek loans in Latin AUTHOR: (1) words for which there existed a Latin equivalent; the writer was so familiar with the local Greek term that he adopted it in response to local conditions; (2) local Greek technical terms for which it might have been difficult to find a Latin equivalent; and (3) transfers determined by a writer's lack of fluency in Latin, as a result of which he either adopted Greek words because he was unaware of their Latin equivalents, or did so unconsciously because of his poor command of Latin. For each category, Adams provides a handful of examples, including (1) (h)amaxa from <'amaxa ``wagon'', (2) buneurum from bo'uneuron ``whip of oxhide'' and (3) arura from >'aroura ``land''. Over the course of its long history, Latin lexicography has produced a plethora of lexical resources, notably dictionaries, thesauri and lexica. Many are available in machine-readable form but their differing annotation schemes and formats are seldom interoperable. In an effort to offset the issue, the LiLa: Linking Latin project is leveraging Linked Data technology to dovetail a wide range of Latin resources into an interoperable whole, producing an ever-growing lexically-based data model capable of accommodating etymological, morphological, syntactic and semantic information, and more besides AUTHOR. In LiLa, glossaries, lexica, treebanks, textual resources and tools intersect and interact through their common denominator, the lemma (itself, incidentally, a loanword from the Ancient Greek lemma). Indeed, the LiLa Knowledge Base hinges on a lemma bank of approximately 130,000 lemmas largely derived from the lexical basis of AUTHOR. As textual and lexical resources are added to the Knowledge Base, LiLa's lemma bank and coverage of the Latin lexicon grow in size. Though chiefly targeting readily available lemmatised resources on the web, LiLa also creates linguistic resources in-house as a means of further developing its underlying data model. Examples of these are the Index Thomisticus Treebank AUTHOR and Latin AUTHOR. Here, we describe the addition of a new homegrown lexical resource, the Index Graecorum Vocabulorum in Linguam Latinam AUTHOR, to the LiLa Knowledge Base of Linguistic Resources for Latin.

Conclusion
This paper describes the preparation and integration of Saalfeld’s Index Graecorum Vocabulorum in Linguam Latinam (1874) in the LiLa Knowledge Base of Linguistic Resources for Latin. This first list of 1, 763 Latin loans from Ancient Greek adds 68 new Latin lemmas to LiLa, stretches its data model to include borrowing and has been mapped to the digitised Greek-English LiddellScott-Jones lexicon. Beyond LiLa, this linguistic resource might be integrated in other resources, such as dictionaries (Bowers and Romary, 2016) or digital scholarly editions. Future improvements might acquire a list of calques (Detreville, 2015; Fruyt, 2011) and the extended edition of Saalfeld’s Index (1884).