A language guide for foreign travellers
XENION LEXICON is aimed at English speakers who visit Greece and Cyprus and want a concise tool, a guide, whereby they can look up the meanings of words and find out how to say some key phrases in Greek. That’s why the XENION LEXICON is constructed in such a way that looking up words and expressions, both of a basic and complex nature, is easy. Useful expressions and two-way indexes help meet these basic communication needs.
In particular:
• Useful expressions (about 630): most of them are conversational and are categorized under thematic groups, such as “about the weather”, “at the restaurant – at the bar”, etc. In this section, the expressions come with a phonetic transcription of Greek to help the user pronounce them.
• Greek ->English and English->Greek index. In these indexes the user may find key lemmas (about 3600) in alphabetical order, along with their phonetic transcription and their meaning in Greek. Moreover, indexes are linked with the Greek ->English dictionary for examples of usage.
Furthermore, XENION LEXICON attempts to meet other needs. It tries for example to cover the needs of those of you who want to go a bit more deeply into the Greek language, either because you are frequent visitors to Greece, you have friends here and want to talk with them, or you work here and want to communicate with your colleagues or simply because you are interested in the language. For these and other reasons, we have tried to provide some additional information about Greek, without, of course, claiming that XENION LEXICON constitutes a method for learning the language.
This additional information comprises:
• Grammar elements: information is included about the pronunciation (the International Phonetic Alphabet and how it is used in XENION), the stress, as well as some key grammar details concerning articles, nouns (and the declension for some of them), adjectives, verbs, everyday verbs etc.
• Greek-English dictionary with examples of usage: it is linked with the two-way indexes. The dictionary contains about 4000 entries and about 4500 meanings. The entries are not organized in alphabetical order (that ‘s what Indexes are for, after all!), but in general thematic groups. So, we have considered some situations, in which the dictionary user might find him/herself. This means, for example, that there are entries with respective examples that belong to the group “Traveling” and the sub-group “Aeroplane”, such as aeroplane, airport, airline, etc. Examples are simple, but they convey the meaning of the entry and often provide some general (cultural, social, etc) information about Greece.
