21st Century Classical Greek -- perfective!

Book I 3.3 is another long section to parse out.

τεκμηριοῖ δὲ μάλιστα Ὅμηρος: “the best evidence is Homer” (notice that this is an equational clause with no verb for the copula)

πολλῷ γὰρ ὕστερον ἔτι καὶ τῶν Τρωικῶν γενόμενος  “for much later yet, the Trojan [War] happening…”

οὐδαμοῦ τοὺς ξύμπαντας ὠνόμασεν, οὐδ᾽ ἄλλους ἢ τοὺς μετ᾽ Ἀχιλλέως ἐκ τῆς Φθιώτιδος,

οἵπερ καὶ πρῶτοι Ἕλληνες ἦσαν, “the whole had no name, except that those with Achilleos from Phthiotis, who were the first Hellenes…”

Δαναοὺς δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔπεσι καὶ Ἀργείους καὶ Ἀχαιοὺς ἀνακαλεῖ. “Danaans in the epics and Argives and Achaeans was the name…”

οὐ μὴν οὐδὲ βαρβάρους εἴρηκε διὰ τὸ μηδὲ Ἕλληνάς πω,  “not truly [that there] was no barbarian but because there was no Hellene yet…”

ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ, ἀντίπαλον ἐς ἓν ὄνομα ἀποκεκρίσθαι. “as it seems to me, oppositely by name to be set apart.”

Yes, that’s Homer in that first line. Thucydides knows that his audience of educated men have Homer at their fingertips. Nowadays we would cite to Herodotus, if he said anything about the Trojan war that we could use at a place like this, but for Mr T, Herodotus was not hallowed by time, being only a couple of decades older than Thucydides. Herodotus also drew on Homer so Thucydides, even if he had read Herodotus, would have gone for the writer both of them accepted as an authority.

Learn polus from which we get pollo here; see White, page 230, section  753. You might as well learn megas while you’re there.

Click on apokekristhai. Just from inspection you know it’s an impersonal gerundive in base voice. The word tool will tell you it’s “perfect tense”; that means it goes in our perfective conceptual slot in our aspect table. The -ke- is the reduplication used in Attic Greek in perfective aspect. It does not appear in any other Greek dialect.

The use of perfective aspect is to talk about something with permanent results. In this case, the distinction between Greek and barbarian persisted to Thucydides’ time. He regards the distinction as something that simply came about, instead of being deliberately adopted.

Modern archaeology tells us that “Achaeans” is a version of Ahiyyawa, the Hittite name for the people who were not autochthonous Cretans but lived in the Palace Culture and went a-viking around 1200 BCE. To the Egyptians, this same people were known as Peleshet, and they are listed on Ramses III’s Medinet Habu inscription about the Sea Peoples. If you’re wondering why that looks so much like Pelishtim in Biblical Hebrew, well, yes, they are the same people. Their immersion in Kretan culture led to Linear B being their writing system, until they settled on the west coast of the Mediterranean and learned Ugaritic cuneiform. About 1180 BCE, they helped destroy Ugarit.

“Danaans”, on the other hand, refers to an element of the Sea Peoples listed as Denyen on Ramses III’s inscription. Other elements were the Sikila, the Sherden (Sardinians), Weshesh (Oscians), and Teresh (Etruscans). The Sikila and Sherden settled north of the Pelishtim and, with the indigenous people, formed the Phoenicians.

Argos was inhabited by “Pelasgians”, showing that the Peloponnese adopted and adapted the Egyptian Peleshet. By Homer’s time, the term “Cretan Iaones” was also used and invocations are made to Pelasgian Zeus in the Iliad. The original god of the Peleshet/Ahiyyawa, however, was Apaliunas (Apollo), according to a reference in one of the Hittite letters that dates before the destruction of Wilusa (Ilion, Troy) by the Sea Peoples.

21st Century Classical Greek -- partitive genitive?

Let’s look at this phrase which does not use noun cases quite as you might expect.

Ἕλληνος δὲ καὶ τῶν παίδων αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ Φθιώτιδι ἰσχυσάντων, καὶ ἐπαγομένων αὐτοὺς ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ ἐς τὰς ἄλλας πόλεις…

Why do we have ton paidon in the -on case? This is a compound subject and in most languages the whole thing would be in nominative case.

I don’t have a serious answer for you but I am guessing that this is something very familiar in French and Russian: the partitive. French has a very sketchy declension structure and does the partitive periphrastically; Russian has a special -u suffix for partitive.

Goodwin calls it the partitive genitive and the notion is that it’s a part taken out of a mass. So possibly not all of the sons of Hellen, but part of them, had their strength in Phthiotis.

You couldn’t prove it by Greek mythology. One of Hellenos’ sons was the ancestor of the “Dorians” about whom I’ll say something later. Another was Aeolus, who gets credit for another ethnic people that contributed to Greek stock. The third was the father of the “Achaeans” whom I discussed a couple of weeks ago, and the Ionians – which is actually another version of “Achaean” according to Linear B texts found in Krete. But the king of Phthiotis was the grandson of Zeus and his father was the king of Aegina. Keep that in mind for next week.

Now notice that iskhusanton is labeled an executive voice personal gerundive. When you look at the dictionary definition, it’s descriptive, which ought to be intransitive. Remember that personal gerundives describe an action happening. So this is almost doubly descriptive. Its antecedent is ton paidon, as you can tell from the identical adjectival endings.

Epagomenon also has ton paidon as its antecedent and now the problem is that there’s an object to this participles, autous. But autous doesn’t agree with epagomenon in case; it’s the -ous case. Why? I don’t know. None of the grammars discuss this. Nobody looked at it closely enough. If I had more examples of it, I would make a suggestion. If any Greek geeks are reading this blog, go back over any material you have read carefully (like to write a thesis) and see what you come up with.

21st Century Classical Greek -- impersonal gerundives

Thucydides Book I 3.2. has two phrases ending with impersonal gerundives, and this lets me give you a list of things to watch out for with impersonal gerundives.

δοκεῖ δέ μοι, οὐδὲ τοὔνομα τοῦτο ξύμπασά πω εἶχεν, ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν πρὸ Ἕλληνος τοῦ Δευκαλίωνος καὶ πάνυ οὐδὲ εἶναι ἡ ἐπίκλησις αὕτη, κατὰ ἔθνη δὲ ἄλλα τε καὶ τὸ Πελασγικὸν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν παρέχεσθαι,

Ἕλληνος δὲ καὶ τῶν παίδων αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ Φθιώτιδι ἰσχυσάντων, καὶ ἐπαγομένων αὐτοὺς ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ ἐς τὰς ἄλλας πόλεις, καθ᾽ ἑκάστους μὲν ἤδη τῇ ὁμιλίᾳ μᾶλλον καλεῖσθαι Ἕλληνας,

οὐ μέντοι πολλοῦ γε χρόνου [ἐδύνατο] καὶ ἅπασιν ἐκνικῆσαι.

The old grammars give a number of uses for impersonal gerundives.

1.                  To substitute for conjugated verbs as the name of an action.

2.                  Complement of verbs in contexts that mean purpose, intent, and other uncompleted actions, especially the imperfective conceptual i.g.

3.                  Complement of:

a.                    Dunamai – able

b.                  Dei – possible

c.                   Khri – necessary

d.                  Dei or khri -- obligatory

4.                  Instead of an imperative when an action is due and owing based on specified considerations. Avoids issuing an ultimatum.

5.                  Quoted speech and question in the same aspect as in the original question, sometimes using the imperfective conceptual for a promise.

6.                  In a result clause starting with hos[te]. Goodwin claims it expresses a tendency and not an actual result.

7.                  In purpose clauses. The i.g. may be negated using mi to express “so that X [out of the possible and possibly alternative actions] does not happen”.

Do not confuse (7) with a purpose clause introduced by some particle such as ina, hos, hopos or ofra, which the old grammars confusingly call “final” or “object” clauses. We’ll look for (7) clauses soon.

Two more issues I have to take exception with, claims made about quoted speech:

            With an, the progressive conceptual i.g. represents a progressive eventive i.g.

            With an, the imperfective eventive i.g. is a quote of something said in imperfective eventive uncertainty epistemic OR an i.e. indicative.

You can make claims like this when your verb system has fuzzy grammatical definitions, as well as saying things that the data contradicts, like “imperfect tense is for something interrupted by another action”.

The other way this claim arises is if you analyze the text incorrectly. I will show in a later lesson that claims made about purpose clauses fail when you analyze the sentence properly.

In our more objective verbal definitions based on aspect, you can’t convert one form to the use belonging to another form. And aspectual usage only seems to overlap. Imperfective may seem to involve repeated action, but that’s only because the effects of an action wear off or are reversed. The repetition of progressive aspect creates a habit or situation.

You can keep your eyes open for reported speech that has an plus an i.g. to test what I say. But on the face of it we have more evidence that the sources our existing grammars relied on, are fundamentally incorrect.

21st Century Classical Greek -- epistemic

 I told you to learn eknikao last week. Now I’m going to deal with the Word Tool  issues.

δοκεῖ δέ μοι, οὐδὲ τοὔνομα τοῦτο ξύμπασά πω εἶχεν, ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν πρὸ Ἕλληνος τοῦ Δευκαλίωνος καὶ πάνυ οὐδὲ εἶναι ἡ ἐπίκλησις αὕτη, κατὰ ἔθνη δὲ ἄλλα τε καὶ τὸ Πελασγικὸν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν παρέχεσθαι,

Ἕλληνος δὲ καὶ τῶν παίδων αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ Φθιώτιδι ἰσχυσάντων, καὶ ἐπαγομένων αὐτοὺς ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ ἐς τὰς ἄλλας πόλεις, καθ᾽ ἑκάστους μὲν ἤδη τῇ ὁμιλίᾳ μᾶλλον καλεῖσθαι Ἕλληνας, 

οὐ μέντοι πολλοῦ γε χρόνου [ἐδύνατο] καὶ ἅπασιν ἐκνικῆσαι.

The Word Tool says this could be an imperative, but the context shows it can’t be that.

Or it could be an i.g. As a habit of using the name Hellene, it ought to be a progressive i.g., but the Word Tool says it’s imperfective eventive if it’s an i.g. So I don’t think that works.

The conjugated progressive conceptual would be 2nd person and that doesn’t work here.

We’re left with a 3rd singular (appropriate person and number) imperfective eventive in “optative”.

This is our third modality. It lies on the certainty vector, and its real name is epistemic. Epistemics are about the speaker’s investment in the truth of what he is saying. If he is fully invested, he uses indicative; if he’s not, he uses the epistemic. In Biblical Hebrew there are forms different from the indicative for each of certainty and uncertainty. In Greek there’s just indicative and epistemic.

Thucydides uses the epistemic for things that are possible but not probable, so this is weaker in certainty than the oblique. In some upcoming material, he will use it as a spoiler for something that turns out not to happen. 

Knowing that “Hellenes” eventually did equal “Greeks”, what is the uncertainty about the name being used for all of them? Well, look at the rest of the subsection. All the verbs after alla are gerundives. Thucydides is indefinite about all the actions, but he can be definite about what happened with the name Hellenes. He can’t be certain about all the facts however. The epistemic here closes the subsection on the same note of uncertainty as the dokei de moi that starts it. Thucydides won’t always do this, but he does it here.

21st Century Classical Greek -- textual structure and cultural background

I 3.2. is long and involved so let’s parse it out.

δοκεῖ δέ μοι,

οὐδὲ τοὔνομα τοῦτο ξύμπασά πω εἶχεν,

ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν πρὸ Ἕλληνος τοῦ Δευκαλίωνος καὶ πάνυ οὐδὲ εἶναι ἡ ἐπίκλησις αὕτη,

κατὰ ἔθνη δὲ ἄλλα τε καὶ τὸ Πελασγικὸν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν παρέχεσθαι,

Ἕλληνος δὲ καὶ τῶν παίδων αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ Φθιώτιδι ἰσχυσάντων,

καὶ ἐπαγομένων αὐτοὺς ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ ἐς τὰς ἄλλας πόλεις,

καθ᾽ ἑκάστους μὲν ἤδη τῇ ὁμιλίᾳ μᾶλλον καλεῖσθαι Ἕλληνας,

οὐ μέντοι πολλοῦ γε χρόνου [ἐδύνατο] καὶ ἅπασιν ἐκνικῆσαι.

Tounoma is an example of how an article can stick to (agglutinate with) the noun it modifies. It refers back to Hellas which, according to Mr. T, was not the name of the entire region “yet”, po.

Learn ἀλλὰ as “but, on the other hand” and άλλος, “other”.

Tou + a name in -on case is “son of.” You’ll see it a lot later when Thucydides starts naming military officers.

Learn ἐκνικάω. You may know of the goddess of Victory, Nike. You’ll see this verb a lot later to show who won what battles. I’m going to talk about it next week because of all the options in Word Tool.

If you know Greek mythology, you know who Deukalion is. In fact he unites the pre-Hellenic ethnic groups because each of them claims he landed in their turf: Mount Parnassus, Mount Athos in Chalkidiki 40 miles NW of Parnassus, Mount Othrys in Thessaly barely 20 miles north of Parnassus, or Mount Etna in Sicily, over 60 miles from Parnassus.

Mount Parnassus was sacred to Dionysus, a fitting legend for the landing place of the ancestor of the man who started making wine in Greece and who came from the wine-producing Indo-European homeland in Anatolia. Parnassus overhangs Delphi, the oracle sacred to Apollo, patron of the Pelishtim/Ahiyyawa. (This is the landing spot in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a product of the Roman Empire that nevertheless seems to have drawn on oral narratives.)  Parnassus is supposed to be where Apollo met the son of one of the nine muses and taught Orpheus to sing and play.

The Pelasgians are pre-Hellenic settlers in Greece and that makes them cognate to the Pelishet, which was their Egyptian name; they are the Pelisthim of the Hebrew Bible. The Hittites called them Ahiyyawa, the equivalent of Achaean. They were a part of the Sea Peoples, living in Krete and using Linear B for their Indo-European language which has some strong resemblances to Latin such as eko for horse (equus). This later turned into Greek hippos through something called a q/p conversion that also distinguishes Welsh from Irish.

Another part of the Sea Peoples, the Sikila, gave their name to Sicily. They and the Sherden settled around Tyre and Sidon and merged with the K’naani inhabitants to become the Phoenicians, famous in ancient times for their travels to Spain and Wales.

21st Century Classical Greek -- ergazomai

Thucydides I 3:1 has an important verb, ergazomai. Get the conjugation in Wikipedia and learn it.

δηλοῖ δέ μοι καὶ τόδε τῶν παλαιῶν ἀσθένειαν οὐχ ἥκιστα: πρὸ γὰρ τῶν Τρωικῶν οὐδὲν φαίνεται πρότερον κοινῇ ἐργασαμένη ἡ Ἑλλάς:

The reason it’s important is that it can mean “do”, while I already had you memorize poeio which also means “do”. These are a mai/non-mai pair like age and higeomai.

The point of using ergasameni is the word right before it, koine. You may know this as the term for late Greek, used in Christian scripture. It grew from Macedonian Greek in the reign of Alexander and was the common (koine) language of his empire. Here it means more like “jointly”.

Once again we have a -mai verb used for an evaluation: common, cross-Greece coordinate action was apparently unknown.

Thucydides is speaking of this action in a personal geruundive, without definiteness, and looking at it as something not done deliberately in base voice. He is concentrating on its nature, its commonality across all Greece, something that did not happen deliberately.

What Mr T is definite about is that this commonality ouden fainetai did not make itself obvious, at least in the pro ton Troikon, pre-Trojan War, phase of history. What he is going by is that Homer gives a catalog of ships, for one thing, each with its own leader, as the first joint action recorded in Greek literature.

Second, Thucydides is going by something he will say explicitly in the next couple of subsections:  Homer knows of the Achaean combatants as different ethnic groups with different names.

Knitting -- bottom up proof of concept

So in a previous post I said that bottom up or top down, a raglan is a good way to use up leftovers. And in the photo album I listed the post you are reading now, as Taking My Own Advice. So here I used up some old Wool of the Andes worsted. All the motifs are from Mary McGregor's edition of Robert Williamson's collections of patterns he copied from his customers in the 1920s.

Here we are with the body and sleeves all on one needle. It's 358 stitches in worsted yarn and very heavy.

The yellows at the bottom are leftovers from my first Fair Isle; the bright orange is leftover from a jumper that wore out over the last 10 years. The dark gray is from a jumper I still have, and the black from a replacement for a worn-out jumper. White you always have with you. The lightest gray was left from my houndstooth vest. The other 3 colors were bought to carry out the pattern.

The third band up from the bottom is what you might call subtle if you were being kind, and muddy iif you were being critical. I knew that from the spreadsheet planner but I went ahead because a) the yarn vendor didn't have another gray to fit between the darkest and lightest grays and b) it was a different level of contrast compared to the yellows at the bottom, one in the black and a different one in the darkest gray. The two top grays both have "pumpkin" for a contrasting color. In the one case, the background borrows some of the warmth of the pumpkin and looks more like taupe than like gray. In the other, there's higher contrast plus it also is limited to the same  motifs as the two bottom  bands.

So here is the underarm with pumpkin colored yarn holding the stitches. When I finish I'll turn it inside out and knit these stitches together.

Here it is with the yoke on. I tried to follow that strong center line the whole way up to the neck but the decreases made it hard. Also in case you can't tell, the orange sparkles don't line up the way they did on the first Fair Isle jumper.

This is the back view. Two things. First, there's more white under the neck than there is on the front, because I did a mid-back elevation. Second, on the right side, notice the dark gray blob before the X. That's because of increases that widened the sleeve but didn't leave room for another X next to the underarm "seam". I showed you examples of this waaay back with the first Fair Isle jumper.

I still have some yarn left and I will remake the sleeves, adding the circular motifs. 

There is one more advantage to raglan. When you knit in the round you want to do steeking at the armholes so you can keep knitting in the round. That works for wool because it hackles, and when you cut the steeking it doesn't unravel. That doesn't work with silk, cotton, or linen. (or acrylic) If you work these fibers in raglan, you can work in the round bottom up.  The yarn in this top is merino, cotton, and polyamide, and it is not spun like typical yarns; it looks as if the strands were knitted! It would not work with steeking. It has a lovely hand, and it's the first peach-colored yarn I've seen in years. It's also fairly cool and would be good for late spring tops.  While Yarn.com tags Alta Moda Cotolana as worsted, do your swatch; it actually works more like a DK. 

I have a replacement jumper to knit and some socks to work. Then I can do the bottom up raglan in brioche that I was talking about.