One of the many current things occupying my overfull plate is trawling through betacode entries of LSJ headwords to sort out things that are ‘odd’. And LSJ has some odd things. Like

pe/dijos

Why is there a j there? That ain’t no Greek letter. So off we go to the print version.

The print version of LSJ is a host of mysteries, and mystery resolution. Most mysteries are far less interesting than this one. Lo and behold, there is a j in the entry. It’s not a typo in LSJ, and it’s not a typo in the data-entry.

So next we look at the entry.

= πεδιεινός

Now, if you happen to look up the page, you see πεδινός is also listed as equivalent to πεδιεινός. So it’s also worth looking at πεδιεινός, which finally yields an actual gloss and meaning: flat, level, of the plain.

But back to πέδιjος. We clearly need to look at the source:

E. Schwyzer, Dialectorum Graecarum exempla epigraphica potiora, Leipzig 1923. 679.18 (Cyprus).

Sadly this doesn’t appear available online. A copy resides in my erstwhile institutional library, controlled by robots. But in this case an easier alternative is at hand, a more recent collection of Cypriot inscriptions (Les Inscriptions chypriotes syllabiques, O. Masson, Paris 1964 [1985 with Addenda nova]. And we are after 217, the Tablet of Idalion, B side, line 18, and this can be accessed online! (This last sleuthing by none other than J. Tauber again).

So 217 B18 gives us the syllabic transcription pe-ti-ja-i, and the alphabetic transcription πεδίjαι

And so the j represents a consonantal iota preserved in Cypriot epigraphy, and there’s no mistake in the betacode headword anyway. Thus we carry on. In my next installment of LSJ adventures, we shall discuss the mystery of the upside-down smiley face.