21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 12, syntax 1

Goodwin has a long section on syntax but it is fixed to concepts that aren’t accurate, things like case labels or morphology having intrinsic meaning.

You, however, know that CONTEXT IS KING. The real way to understand how to line things up together (syntax) to get meaning, is to study the expression of Classical authors and see if they share common habits. I’m still reading Thucydides and I am starting to compare him with Xenophon. Study your favorite author to find out what his habits are. If we find common habits among them, that is “Classical Greek syntax”.

Maybe.

Because as I keep pointing out with Thucydides, his expression is strongly reminiscent of the features of a clearly oral tradition, the Tannakh or Jewish Bible, and in that case you can look for a number of things. I’ve already called some of them out.

1.         The association principle. This seems to guide Thucydides more strongly than the other two that apply to the Tannakh. Material is drawn together in Thucydides because it is associated together. This is the source of numerous problems with Jowett’s translation: he transposes material, breaking up the train of thought.

2.         The chronology. I pointed out places where Thucydides clearly edited his work, such as the early Book I reference to the plague that didn’t happen until late in the war. It’s not as extreme as in the Tannakh; I have a blog posting about how the slander stories in Numbers occurred in a different chronology than it would appear from their position in the text. Thucydides has less of a chronology issue than the Tannakh because he was writing at the time of the events he reports, instead of recording an oral tradition that survived up to several millennia.

3.         The frequency principle. This, too, is more a feature of a long-running oral tradition like Tannakh; the clumping together of most sacrificial rituals from Exodus through Leviticus is a sign of their frequency, but some rituals appear toward the end of Numbers and even in Deuteronmy, this being a sign of their rarity. Thucydides does not have this feature.

Those are principles of relatively high-level structure. We tend to think of syntax as a feature of sentences and their component clauses and phrases.

The main feature of Thucydides’ work is the topic order sentence. This is partly the outcome of association; a topic order sentence follows on from material that supplies the topic. Goodwin does not recognize the topic as a different issue from the subject of a sentence nor as a subtopic of subjects. This is one reason Jowett crashes around transposing topics and breaking up the sequence of ideas: nobody recognized the importance of topic.

Topic order sentences are a sign of an oral habit of thought. The disdain of Victorian scholars for oral literature and its records, such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, blinded them to the oral features of their favorite classical literature. Topic order is still ignored in language learning; most efforts aim at helping people write a language and read written material. This could be one reason learning to speak a second language is so difficult: spoken language is de-emphasized and turned into formulaic expressions. Failing to recognize it as primary and the descendant of oral culture in general, teachers can’t help students reproduce the fluidity and flow of somebody immersed in the language.

When you are told that somebody knows a lot of languages, you have a right to be skeptical. Being able to reproduce what you were taught, which often happens in classics, is a far different thing from using a language with fluency inside the culture of that language. And with Classical Greek, the culture of the language has died. But that’s no excuse for clinging to antiquated and incorrect learning material.

Sooo history -- Martin Luther and the Peasants' Revolt

There's a series of films in German on Youtube called Die Deutschen and there's a channel called Chronicle, and sometimes it's useful to see more than one viewpoint even if both are somewhat unfactual.

The Chronicle film on the Thirty Year's war starts off with a premise that takes a good deal of undereducation to put out, let alone support. Basically, it says even if Luther did nail his theses to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral, who could have read them? Then it goes on to pretend that the Peasants' Revolt was a consequence of the theses.

Well.

Here we are in 1517, and the Renaissance has been going on for more than 60 years. In 1453 when the Muslims conquered Constantinople, Christians fled to Europe and the scholars and clergy among them took along Greek language manuscripts. This is important because, to that point, Europe's editions of Aristotle, that pillar of the church, were in Latin. And if you know anything about me, you know that I know that translations sometimes aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

The Greek-speaking Byzantines taught European clergy and scholars to read Greek and then died. From then on Aristotle was grammatically described using Latin labels, and if you are reading my 21st Century Classical Greek thread, you know what a disaster that was in my opinion. On the other hand, it became popular for royalty and the rulers of non-royal territory of the Renaissance to read both Latin and Greek. Henry VIII was a Greek geek; so were his children. So were the Borgias. And so on. So for Luther to nail his theses to the cathedral door was not a useless stunt; it was an open invitation for the wealthy and powerful to wrest their lives out of the hands of a corrupt church and become truly independent of it, a direction history had been taking for the whole 500 years since the Crusades. 

But what was truly a stunt was translating the Bible into German. Most people everywhere in the world at that time were illiterate, and thereby hangs the tale. Luther's Bible was another stunt to attract the wealthy and powerful; it did nothing for the peasantry who couldn't read anyhow. The most the peasantry could get out of it was if the Bible was read TO them in German instead of Latin.

The Chronicle video shows Thomas Munzer, leader of the Peasants' Revolt, and Luther having a shouting match over going to war. Luther did not want the peasants jeopardizing his power base, which was pretty fragile (Henry VIII is only 8 years old when Luther hangs up his theses), but the peasants wanted to end their near-servitude. German peasants, particularly in the east, were basically serfs as the powerful tried to hold onto feudalism. Being illiterate, the peasants did not get the message that Luther put into his translation. This is a standard fact of the split between the literate and the illiterate or those who can read but don't, in every country and at all times, including the 21st century. The US MAGA movement is one example.

Literacy in Germany was a product of Luther's translation, and it did not get far down into the peasantry for 200 years.  The printing press helped, but the price of books was still well out of the reach of most people on the land or apprenticed to guildsmen. Die Deutschen shows that Frederick II of Prussia, in the heart of the Enlightenment, promoted literacy among his peasantry so they could be good soldiers, read their manual of arms and his proclamations. Likewise Enlightenment preachers in England promoted Sunday schools so that farmers' workers and landlords' tenants could read their Bibles and learn to be satisfied with their place in the class system.

There's a lot of bushwa out there about literacy and the effect of printed books on the public. Just because something is written or printed doesn't mean it has any effect on people who read, still less on people who don't. It's been that way since writing was invented over 6000 years ago. It's only a surprise to people today if they don't accurately understand how literacy works -- or not.

Twitter archives -- URGENT

I archived my tweets. I  used to do it regularly and I will do it one more time before the pay per tweet goes into effect. Here's what you do in Chrome. It should be similar on mobile.

Go to Settings. Under Your Account, my third choice is download an archive. You need your password and then you ask it to download your archive. Do this TODAY in case you've forgotten your password and need to change it. Also because you will get an email in about 24 hours.

When you get that email, you will get a link in it to download your archive. You will need your password again.

My archive downloaded to my C drive; I don't use the cloud. YMMV. 

When your archive is done downloading, it's a ZIP file. Extract all files to whereever you keep your data.

In February 2022, I got a .csv and a file called tweets that I could view in Excel. You won't get that. You'll get a bunch of stuff plus something with the Microsoft Edge logo if you run Windows. You can open that thing in Chrome and that's where your tweets will be.

Whoever you follow on Twitter, find out if they are moving to Post, Mastodon, or elsewhere. Set up an account with the service that will get you the most bang for your buck and find them there.

Or you could just pay whatever they charge you. 

Personally I think this will finally destroy Twitter. I tweeted with tags to a number of organizations about how this will deprive disadvantaged people of government and other information. They only have 6 days to file for an injunction.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 11, adverbial equative

I dealt with the “cognate accusative” in one of the lessons but it’s worthwhile repeating the information in case you want to save this stuff off somewhere and have it fairly complete when you drive your Greek professor crazy.

All the Greek grammars I looked at (White, Goodwin, Gildersleeve, Smyth) have different definitions of this subject. Gildersleeve copied his from his Latin grammar, and it differs from the definition in Allen & Greenough’s Latin grammar. When there’s no objective definition, there’s no there there.

There is something in Arabic and Hebrew that is called the cognate accusative. It is two words in close association from the same root. One is a conjugated verb; the other is a substantive derivative. The structure is an adverb of manner.

Since there is no accusative morphology in Hebrew, it’s obvious that “cognate accusative” is another misleading label. What I’m going to call it is adverbial equative, like the Hurrian case. I don’t have examples of the Hurrian adverbial equative; Wegener doesn’t give any. If you know of some, ante up.

Then it turns out that Aeschylus and Demosthenes (poetry and rhetoric respectively) have a similar structure, although Thucydides hasn’t used it in Books I-III.

See Demosthenes’ Against Aristocrates, καλήν γ᾽ ὕβριν ἦμεν ἂν ὑβρισμένοι.

And Aristophanes’ Plutus, 1044: τάλαιν᾽ ἐγὼ τῆς ὕβρεος ἧς ὑβρίζομαι.

You don’t use a structure in a political argument or in a sacred drama unless it is meaningful to your audience. I made this same argument in one of my first posts on this thread. So the structure I am now calling an adverbial equative was well known to educated people in Attica at the very least.

And in addition, I have found this structure in Book IV of the Mahabharata, chapter 66, verse 22. Since Mahabharata is in Sanskrit, an ancient Indo-Iranian language, it reinforces the possibility of an ancestral language family spread from eastern Anatolia halfway to the Himalayas. There are a couple of similar narratives, too, although the Indics in the east have extremely sketchy versions of them. (Axel Olrik would say that they decayed during long-term oral transmission as the culture migrated away from its homeland and changed.)

This is not to say that the idea of a Nostratic family is correct, any more than it is correct to say that the resemblances between Greek and Hebrew are Hebraisms. They are not.  They probably go back before domestication of wheat, about the time that NE Anatolian peoples headed out, winding up in Greece, the Basque region, and the British Isles. They carried ergative languages, and their British descendants built Stonehenge before the Celts arrived.

Hurrian, like Basque and Sumerian, was an ergative language. Claiming that Hurria did not exist until the time of its surviving writings is a fallacy called a false argument from silence, since we manifestly do not have a complete dataset from anywhere that people have lived, and since cultura non facit saltus.

More work needs to be done to standardize the definition of adverbial equative, and to search for similar structures in Sumerian and the archives of Ebla.

But for now, “cognate accusative” is my latest victim in murdering concepts in the old grammars.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 10, nouns

The morphology of Greek nouns is complicated, not just because they have multiple cases, but also because of the many variations in declensions. Students have to learn the noun, not rely on categorization, the same as they have to learn the verb, not its categorization.

The entire discussion of cases in grammars has serious problems:

1.                  The impression that cases of like names operate in like fashion.

2.                  The incorrect association of verb categories with specific cases.

3.                  The invalid concept of oblique absolutes as using morphology to identify timing.

No two languages use cases in the same way.

1.                  Some, like English and Hebrew, require free-standing or agglutinated prepositions to produce the meanings of morphology in languages like Greek or Russian.

2.                  This led grammars to ignore that Greek uses two different forms of instrumental, one for inanimate objects and the other for agents in non-transitive structures.

3.                  It is more useful to characterize cases by their morphology than by a label that gives the false impression of showing function, so: -oi for “nomnative”; -on for “genitive”; -ois for “dative”; and -ous for “accusative”.

Grammars and lexicons support a faulty view of how verbs and oblique predicates work.

1.                  The grammars contain sections declaring that certain categories of verb meaning require specific cases. In fact it’s the reverse; lexicons show that which oblique case is used for the object of a verb changes the meaning of the verb.

2.                  The categories focus on one meaning of a verb while the lexicon may present several; the categorization prevents students from appreciating the wide number of contexts in which a verb may appear and causes translation problems.

3.                  Lexicons that focus on invalid grammatical descriptions cause problems of understanding instead of helping the scholar.

The “oblique absolute” concept that expresses timing is obsolete.

1.                  The timing of a context may be contained in the wording or in external knowledge, but not in morphology.

2.                  The oblique absolutes are poorly described, and the morphology has been confused with the interpretation of the passages based on timing clues in the wording or external knowledge.

3.                  Descriptions of cases using concepts like “up to” (“accusative”), “at” (“dative”) or “after” (“genitive”) do not match contexts in which the nouns are used. We need studies, author by author, to see how they use prepositions, with distinctions between set idioms and more flexible contexts.

Prepositions, like verbs, change meaning depending on the case of the object of the preposition.

1.                  There are a very few prepositions that use only one case; en is an example, using the -ois case.

2.                  As with verbs, it is necessary to study the preposition to know which meaning goes with which case.

3.                  Lexicon entries for prepositions suffer the same problem of verb categorization that noun cases do. Pros is an example.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- raqia redux

So I have done the homework on this subject after remembering something and looking it up. The question was why doesn't LSJ have any words about hammering, other than metalworking for weapons and body armor.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/08/21st-century-bible-hebrew-raqia.html

It's like they didn't know about the malleability or ductility of copper, silver and gold. But in the Trojan period about 1200 BCE, they had to to make masks of thin gold that Heinrich Schliemann found, the so-called Agamemnon mask and others.

https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/features/2011/mask-of-agamemnon#:~:text=The%20%22Mask%20of%20Agamemnon%22%20is,graves%20of%20a%20royal%20cemetery.

And the consensus is that if these are genuine, the gold was pressed or even hammered onto a wooden form, then dressed up and put in the grave. 

Later studies suggest that this mask dates to the 1500s BCE, and since radiocarbon dating in the region shows that conventional dates for that period tend to lag the actual date by 150 years, we can suppose the mask to come from -- class? -- the time of the Thera explosion. 

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/greekpast/4917.html

The maker produced thin gold leaf, used hammering to make it coagulate, and also raised some bas relief work for realism.

This being the same time period as the Exodus and the making of the tabernacle, it shows us that hammered gold work was known around the Mediterranean when Thera blew up. 

Fine metalwork could also have been produced by lost-wax casting, known in the region from nearly 5000 BCE. However, it turns out that early Hellenes turned out masses of bronze statues by hammerwork. The verb for this is σφυρηλατέω, and specifically refers to statues according to LSJ, although there's a lesser reference to wrought iron. Originally used for small votive statues, it turned into large statues with an iron armature.

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grbr/hd_grbr.htm

The article shows that later the Hellenes adopted the hammered bronze technique from Syria in the 800s BCE, and later went to lost-wax casting. That leaves a big gap after the Agamemnon mask. 

https://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/72679/excerpt/9780521772679_excerpt.htm

Greek gold jewelry is rare, according to this site, and the earrings shown date to the 200s BCE.

https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/story/recent-acquisition-pair-earrings-bull%E2%80%99s-heads

While Hellenic Greece didn't use hammered gold until the 200s BCE, they did have the verb ἐλαύνω, which LSJ says basically means drive. It refers to the lyrics of Mimnermus of the 600s BCE in part of the entry for elauno:

Ἡφαίστου χερσὶν ἐληλαμένη χρυσοῦ

This part of the entry for elauno says it means to strike or to beat into plates (compare to "laminate"). No wonder I didn't find it when I was searching for "hammer". Showing you can't give up just because one keyword fails you.

The question is still, why did Septuagint use stereoma for raqia and really, this is why asking "why" is a non-starter in linguistics. Knowing that Septuagint is a bad translation in just about every way possible, there's no getting inside the heads of the translators. 

But there was at least one word they could have used, and they didn't, and we have been living with the results ever since.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 9, the particle an

The grammars and lexicons want you to always treat an as if it is part of the apodosis to a conditional. This is not true, but it is what the authorities said and nobody ever challenged the authorities by doing good research.

An is a pivot. In conditionals with an indicative verb in the protasis, it pivots away from asserting that the protasis is true. That is, it appears in “conditionals contrary to fact.” In conditionals with an epistemic verb in the protasis, it pivots away from any assertion that the protasis is more likely than not to be true. 

An also appears in a number of contexts where there is no hint of a conditional. In Book II 93.3, we have three uses of an that let us explore what it means. The last example is definitely the apodosis of a conditional. Tell me what it means based on the modality of the verbs.

οὔτε γὰρ ναυτικὸν ἦν προφυλάσσον ἐν αὐτῷ οὐδὲν οὔτε προσδοκία οὐδεμία μὴ ἄν ποτε οἱ πολέμιοι ἐξαπιναίως οὕτως ἐπιπλεύσειαν, ἐπεὶ οὐδ᾽ ἀπὸ τοῦ προφανοῦς τολμῆσαι ἂν καθ᾽ ἡσυχίαν, οὐδ᾽ εἰ διενοοῦντο, μὴ οὐκ ἂν προαισθέσθαι.

There is no hint of a conditional in the cause leading up to the first use of an. It’s a straight statement, “not at any time the enemies might have unexpectedly sailed up.”  What is an pivoting away from? The rest of the context is about what the Lakedaimonians are doing about the Athinaians and the an pivots away from the enemy to what the Athinaians are doing or thinking.

The most extreme example of an as a pivot keeps the reader, once again, from thinking that the wrong party is under consideration. In Book III 28.1:

..,ὥστε Ἀθηναίοις μὲν ἐξεῖναι βουλεῦσαι περὶ Μυτιληναίων ὁποῖον ἄν τι βούλωνται καὶ τὴν στρατιὰν ἐς τὴν πόλιν δέχεσθαι αὐτούς,

…such that for the Athinaians it was [due and owing] possible to consider anent the Mutilinaians what sort [of treatment] they wished* and they would [be obliged to] accept the army into their city….

* “Wished” is an oblique; they might decide on no action at all against the Mutilinaians, but it’s more likely that they would. However, the closest substantive is the Mutilinaians, and it’s clear that this cannot be the subject of boulontai. The next closest substantive is the Athinaians, and that’s where an pivots to.

However, the dekhesthai after that is in the straight line of the subsection, and at the start there is the phrase oi en tois pragmasin. There are two factions in Mutiline, rebels and the political leaders they are rebelling against. Chapter 28 starts out referring to the leaders. These are the ones who dekhesthai the army, to protect themselves from the rebels.

So now go back to your favorite author and find all the times he used an, and decide which of the three possibilities you have:

1.         A conditional with no ei in the protasis;

2.         A “might have”;

3.         A clue that whoever is carrying out the verb, it is not the closest substantive but further back in the subsection – and not the actual agent in the whole affair.