21st Century Classical Greek -- it's not accusative

I was working on my Arabic language project and came across the topic "doubly accusative".

As you know, I wouldn't bring it up unless it was a stupid piece of nomenclature.

The Quranic citation was Baqara 53 which you could translate in part as "We gave Moses the Scripture..."

Wait a minute.

In English we would call Moses the indirect object and we would call its case dative.

But the case used in Arabic is the same as for Scripture, which we WOULD call accusative, since it's the direct object.

Welp in LSJ a bunch of entries have the note "c. acc. pers. et rei." One example is lissomai, which has this notation in meaning 2. And it means pray to a god (the pers.) about something.

And we would expect the god to be in dative as well. Classical Greek did have a dative (modern Greek does not), but it's not used here.

Also liteuo has the same note, but the pers. is somebody you entreat, and the rei is what you entreat on behalf of. And that is "for" which usually takes the dative in Greek.

I said all through my Greek thread that using case names turns out to be confusing because we keep thinking in Grenglish and Greek doesn't work that way. It turns out Arabic has the identical issue, only Quranic Arabic has already dropped the dative that Classical Greek kept.

I may do an Arabic thread to give examples of all the problems as well as give citations. You can read my Biblical Hebrew and Greek threads for a sneak peak at the kind of things grammarians have been screwing up for 25 centuries.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- maybe it's just me

When you use a verb that needs a preposition, do you struggle with where the preposition goes relative to the predicate?

The farther you put the preposition from the verb, the harder it is for your reader to know what you meant. 

But sometimes it is uncomfortable to put the preposition between the verb and predicate.

Maybe it's just me. I grew up west of Pennsylvania Dutch territory and had schoolmates who were Mennonite or at least "plain". I was used to phrases like the classic "throw the cow over the fence some hay". (tossed plenty of hay in my time too)

In that case the syntax should be "throw some hay over the fence to the cow", because "over" is part of a prepositional phrase, not a complement to the verb. In German, "to the cow" would be in dative and "some hay" would be accusative and there would be no doubt what you were throwing.

Even if you grew up immersed in the language you write in, you can make mistakes. I'm working on Arabic for a project on Samaritan scripture, and James Price assures us that kids are prone to a specific mistake if they grow up with parents who speak Arabic, but the kids don't. (Had to edit that one a couple of times)

So cut yourself some slack, but EDIT EDIT EDIT.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- that stranger

This is another in my looong series of pointing out that unless the person posting is a Jew, they should not be posting.

It's this mistranslating "ger" as "stranger".

A ger is somebody who has agreed to take on Jewish observance. A ger toshav does everything but get circumcised. A ger tsedeq gets circumcised in addition to doing everything else.

So what does it mean ger b'erets nakhri?

Well, a nakhri is always a non-Jew, a non-Hebrew, somebody not descended from our patriarchs.

So the phrase is about living in a land of people who are not Hebrews, not Israelites.

The whole phrase means living by Gd's law even if all around you are nakhriim. The citation is Exodus 2:22.

In Genesis 23:4 Avraham says "I have been a ger and a toshav with you." That means he has been living by Gd's law while he resided at Chevron -- where everybody else was a nakhri.

So all you Jews who fell for the mistranslation, stop doing that. Learn Biblical Hebrew so you can understand your own scripture -- and catch out all the people trying to lie to you.

I'm just saying -- the tragedy of string theory

 I watched the Stanford videos of Dr. Leonard Susskind discussing physics from the standpoint he uses in his series, Theoretical Minimum. Luckily I have some math and science background that let me follow what he said.

Dr. Susskind is one of the founders of string theory, back in 1969, but now he's sounding an alarm, and the interviewer here didn't seem to get it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p_Hlm6aCok

Some of you scientists help me out. What I think Dr. Susskind was saying is:

1/ We have a beautiful and mathematically correct formulation of string theory.

2/ It supports de Sitter space, with its boundary, but we do not live in a bounded universe.

3/ We have a "visual" boundary, a horizon, beyond which we do not have the instruments to make observations. The universe goes way beyond that.

4/ If there is physical confirmation of the current string theory, the evidence lies in the part of the universe that lies beyond our horizon. Since we can't access it, we can't adopt string theory as superior to what we already have -- all the more so as it is inconsistent with the actual conditions of our universe.

The part that the interviewer struggled with was #4. He wanted Susskind to admit that there might be solutions beyond the horizon and so we can't rule out string theory. Susskind's point was that it doesn't matter if they are out there, we can't access them. It's the old invisible purple hippo of quantum mechanics. You can't prove that the hippo is purple because it's invisible.

If Susskind is right and string theory can't get along without a boundary, then it can't be right. The mathematicians need to sharpen their pencils and find a formulation that does not require a boundary.

And then Susskind points out the real tragedy. The young physicists of today don't want to do the work. They can't pick a problem independently and do the work without input from an advisor, professor, or other authority figure. If you tell them they're wrong it hurts their fee-fees. They refuse to consider taking up work that doesn't have a salary attached to it. They are into physics for the money, not out of curiosity. (These are not his words, he is much more diplomatic about it, but that's what it comes down to.)

When was the last time YOU studied something that wasn't job related, that wasn't involved in your CEUs or keeping your license as a professional? Yet the Internet has troves of college textbooks, and yesterday I found like 400 Schaum Outline texts on Internet Archive. If you complain about education in the US but you're not volunteering to improve your own education, setting an example for others, you're a hypocrite -- and before you turn that back on me, just wander for a while through my whole blog. All of that comes from self-education in the 21st century.

I'm just saying....

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Talmud

If you don't know your Tanakh backwards and forwards in Biblical Hebrew or you have never read Mishnah, you need to fix that.

Then go to Sefaria, which just posted the last tractate of Babylonian Talmud with vowels. 

It includes translations. If you use the English one, you will see bolded words representing the actual text, plus filler. You'll only understand why the filler reads as it does if you did the prerequisite work, learning Tanakh and Mishnah. 

Click to the right of a section and you'll get reference material, including Rashi's commentary. But again, you will only understand why the commentators jumped the way they did if you do the other study first.

So learn Biblical Hebrew, study the Tanakh (available on both Mechon Mamre and Sefaria) and the Mishnah (also on both sites), and then tackle Talmud.

By the way, Sefaria also has the Jerusalem Talmud with vowels.

21st Century Classical Greek -- turn it over and over

If you love science fiction, you may remember the episode on Star Trek:TOS where the old man says, "All is not as they tell us, for the world is hollow and I have touched the sky." Then he screams and dies.

Well, we're not going to scream and die, we're going to find out that something I've said almost since I started this blog is true. Classicists are not linguists, they are not scientific, they are more like alchemists.

The subject is, once again, the cognate accusative, which I have slammed on my Hebrew and Greek threads, and now I have more support for slamming it from my Arabic studies that have helped me with my study of Samaritan scripture.

The concept of cognate accusative derives from Latin and it’s a perfect example of somebody inventing a label for something that doesn’t deserve special notice.

The Latin grammar of Gildersleeve, section 333.2 on page 151, gives the definition: "When the dependent word is of the same origin or of kindred meaning with the verb, it is called the Cognate Accusative, and usually has an attribute."

The citation is Plautus, Rudens, Act III, mirum atque inscitum somniavi somnium.

It is the only citation.

If Gildersleeve knew what he was doing, he would give other examples to show the similarity of features. If he was a real maven, he could also give example of uses of the accusative that look like this but are not cognate. In a science you can give examples of what does or does not meet your definition.

The Latin grammar of Greenough says differently in section 238 on page 238. The verb has to be neuter, whatever that means, used with an accusative of similar meaning, modified by an adjective. The student is supposed to understand that the adjective modifies the accusative. This is quite different from Gildersleeve. If you’re working with a science, everybody has to have the same definition. So cognate accusative isn’t really a thing in Latin.

Greenough gives four examples, but what is the kinship between the noun and verb? They are nouns you would expect to be used with those verbs: generation and live; join together in alliance; re-echo and a name; thunder and the direction of thundering; looking at somebody and a noun describing the manner. There's nothing special enough about this to deserve a label separate from ordinary verb-object grammar.

This is how classicists create what I call mirages, slapping labels on things too poorly defined to warrant special treatment. And then they slapped them onto Greek.

Three of the main Greek grammars (White, Goodwin and Smyth) discuss this topic and each one has a different definition. That is not scientific. In science, you may extend or refine a definition as new data turns up, but you don't have a scientific term if everybody defines it differently.

Classicists also slapped it onto Biblical Hebrew, which doesn't even have an accusative morphology, but BH does something specific. Genesis 27:34 has the phrase  וַיִּצְעַ֣ק צְעָקָ֔ה גְּדֹלָ֥ה meaning to cry out loudly. Not only is the noun kindred to the verb, they have the same root. 

So then I looked back at Greek and found Demosthenes, Against Aristocrates 121, καλήν γ᾽ ὕβριν ἦμεν ἂν ὑβρισμένοι. “what a fine insult by them insulting us”. It’s the same structure as in Genesis and it uses accusative.

But what I did in my grammar of Biblical Hebrew was call this duplicate adverbial, because it duplicates the verb root to create an adverbial phrase. That puts it in line with my other two duplicates, conditional and unconditional, which have to do with law so I won’t explain them here. Look on my Hebrew thread.

Now we get to Price’s All the Arabic You Should Have Learned the First Time Around and he, too, babbles about a cognate accusative BUT he admits that the noun is not always in the accusative. Which is a good thing because in my notes I'm calling it Nasb like the Arabs.

IT'S NOT A COGNATE ACCUSATIVE. IT'S A VERB AND A NOUN FROM THE SAME ROOT, OFTEN WITH THE NOUN MODIFIED, TO PRODUCE AN ADVERB OF MANNER THAT MODIFIES THE VERB. If the language has case morphology, the noun will be in an oblique case.

Now let's go back to Greek. If you ignore which case the noun is in, as with Arabic, you can find other examples that no classicist would recognize because they don’t use accusative. One is Aristophanes’ Plutus, 1044: τάλαιν᾽ ἐγὼ τῆς ὕβρεος ἧς ὑβρίζομαι. “wretched me being so horribly insulted.” This uses the dative.

Why does it work to plug the result from Arabic into Classical Greek? The history.

The Semitic languages all have the d.a. Thus it descended to them from proto-Semitic.

The NE Anatolian J1/J2 Neolithic farmer subclade extended all over Anatolia and the Caucasus, and reached Minoan civilization which influenced the Greeks.

Linear B, the script of the Ahiyyawa pre-Hellenic Greeks has the d.a. So does ancient Egyptian, and remember that the Ahiyyawa were called Pelesh (Pelishtim) by the Egyptians.

Tocharian has the d.a. So does Sanskrit. So does Ancient Persian. Linguists use the Semitic description for all these languages. So if it exists in Classical Greek, all the examples have to meet the Semitic definition.

Now circle out. We find it in Chechen, a Caucasian ergative language. We find the d.a. in Hurrian, another ergative language from middle Anatolia, next to Wilusa, and in Basque, an ergative language of NW Europe. The ancestors of the Basques left Anatolia by 8000 BCE. In these languages the structure fits the Semitic definition. It is cognitive dissonance to call the structure cognate accusative because the point of an ergative language is that it HAS NO ACCUSATIVE.

Classical languages do not have a cognitive accusative. The three I’ve studied carefully have a duplicate adverbial: a verb plus an adverbial modifier consisting of a noun from the same root with a noun modifier. The noun may at first blush look like a normal object of the verb, but that noun modifier is what turns the whole thing into a duplicate adverbial. Since Latin doesn't have its act together, we have room to say neither does it have a cognate accusative. Since it's an Indic language, somebody needs to do the research to find the d.a.s in there.

This supports what I’ve said for decades now. How people teach language derives from how they were taught. These mirages keep getting taught because nobody does the objective research that blows up the definitions. They don’t do it within their languages; they don’t do it across languages. They may say that they don’t have time to do it, due to press of business, like the old publish or perish thing. But you have to do research to publish, so the real issue is that not one of them ever questioned what they were taught, or else they were pressured not to embarrass their colleagues by showing them what’s objectively wrong with what they’ve been teaching.

It's like alchemy. Certain things were taken for granted because all the alchemists for centuries had taught it so. Each alchemist wanted to find the secret and all of them kept their method private so nobody could get ahead of them.

That's not how science works -- and as soon as alchemy turned into chemistry, everything the alchemists believed got blown up anyway. 

If people would use real linguistics to study classical languages, we could clear out a lot of crappy claims and then really learn something about the cultures that used those languages. I've done it with Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek. Now I'm doing it with Arabic. One of you needs to do it with Latin. 

It's only taken me a dozen years to get this far. You've only got a hundred years to live. Go to it.

Sooo history -- the questions nobody answers

This post is about the Cretaceous meteor strike, which is fun to discuss, but about which too many discussions ignore fundamental questions. If you know of a video or paper that covers any one of them, I really want to know.

Here’s the video, and it’s charming with all its CGI, but it fills space by repeating things instead of answering the unanswered questions.

https://archive.org/details/dinosaurs-the-final-day-sub-ita

And here are the unanswered questions. Most of them come under the heading of, these things all developed before the meteor struck, so how did they survive if things were as bad as you say?

Water. If the meteor strike pumped huge amounts of sulfur into the air, the “meteoric winter” would have returned it to earth in acid rain. Every land-based life form requires sweet water to survive, and plants are the basis of the energy pyramid. If acid rain wiped them out, what was left to eat for the species that developed in the Cretaceous and evolved in the Tertiary Period?

Grasses. Developed during the Cretaceous. Modern seed is viable for at most 5 years. If the “meteoric winter” lasted ten years, how did they survive let alone come to dominate the planet and our food chain?

Birds. The DNA clocks for struthioformes (ostriches) and columbiforms (doves, pigeons) go back to the Cretaceous. Birds are famous for NOT burrowing and NOT hibernating or estivating. Some species migrate but it is seasonal and not tied to disasters. Birds must eat every day, whether they are omnivorous, frugivorous, or bug-iverous. They also need sweet water. Explain how these two branches survived the meteor.

Reptiles. Even those that hibernate would have been active, since the meteor strike seems to have happened in spring. What’s more, not all snakes burrow. How did they survive?

Mammals. A mammal that burrows at the site of the strike or within some short distance will not survive. What’s more, most mammals nowadays do not burrow at all, or hibernate – and that thing about spring applies here: most mammals would have been bearing young at this time. If the effects of the meteor engulfed the planet, how do we have mammals today?

Insects. Flowering plants developed in the Cretaceous and right along with them came pollinating insects starting almost at the very beginning of the Cretaceous. How did these coordinating species survive the meteoric winter?

Plankton. These nourishers of cetaceans descend from species that throve during the Cretaceous. How did 10% of phytoplankton survive the meteoric winter?

I’m not saying the strike didn’t produce death. I’m saying that you have to explain how life survived or you haven’t explained anything.