21st Century Classical Greek -- parsing a section

So our first subsection is kind of long and into it, Thucydides packs why he did what he did. The first clause is pretty straightforward. Subject – verb – object. The object is even in the -ous case formerly known as accusative – but it drives the meaning of the verb in that context. When you look at lexicon entries, you have to pay attention to case indications or you may choose the wrong subentry and get the wrong verb meaning. This is part of what I call “knowing the verb”.

So the hos that comes after the comma, what does that relate to? Look up the case in the word tool if you don’t remember.

Θουκυδίδης Ἀθηναῖος ξυνέγραψε τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων, ὡς ἐπολέμησαν πρὸς ἀλλήλους, ἀρξάμενος εὐθὺς καθισταμένου καὶ ἐλπίσας μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ ἀξιολογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων, τεκμαιρόμενος ὅτι ἀκμάζοντές τε ᾖσαν ἐς αὐτὸν ἀμφότεροι παρασκευῇ τῇ πάσῃ καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ὁρῶν ξυνιστάμενον πρὸς ἑκατέρους, τὸ μὲν εὐθύς, τὸ δὲ καὶ διανοούμενον.

Remember, you will often have to ignore the pink bar in the Word Tool. In this case, we’re going to parse through things. We’re going to ignore the pink bar as coming only from Autenreith. Those voters must have been fans of his.

Both of the top selections want hos to be in the -ous case, which means it ought to relate to ton polemon. But both of them also want it to be plural, and ton polemon is singular. So we can’t reconcile the grammar in those cases.

That leaves us with choice 3. Section A wants it to be an adverb of manner, and we’re not talking about the manner of doing something in this phrase, we’re giving facts about the war. Section B lets us use it as a conjunction to relate a fact to something else. So that’s what we want, “which they fought against each other.”

Why would Thucydides say “which they fought against each other” when he has named only two combatants? Well, remember your history. Thucydides was the child or grandchild of men who fought in the Persian War, which the Peloponnesians and Athinaians fought against the Persians. Thucydides knows that everybody in his audience knows about this war. So after bringing these two divisions of Greeks up, he says “I’m going to talk, not about that old war, but about the one they fought against each other.”

Next we have arksamenos and I said before that being in the same gender and number as Thucydides, this refers back to him. This is one of those personal gerundives that carry action as a reference, a sort of description.

Jump to kai, which is one of our syntax markers and elpisas again refers back to Thucydides’ action. It even has an -ous case object, which is part of an anti-passive. The object refers back to ton polemon; so does aksiologotaton.

Akmazontes, being plural, refers back to the Peloponnesians and Athinaians who fought the war. Notice that it is executive voice, so this was deliberate stockpiling. Also notice that akmazontes is the predicate of isan, a progressive eventive; the stockpiling required several acquisitions. Triremes were expensive armaments, and they didn’t have deficit funding in those days.

Horon refers back to Thucydides, and its object is to allo Hellenikon, which is the antecedent for ksunistamenon, and then we have these alliances divided into two parts: euthus with men and dianooumenon with de.

I am not going to go over every subsection in this detail. What we learned from this subsection is:

1)         Thucydides may start out with SVO structure, but he hangs things off it in a specific order to get his ideas across.

2)         He carries subtext in text that may seem to be redundant. There may also seem to be missing subtext that you can only get if you know Greek history.

3)         The material skips back and forth between references to the subject and to the object. The case of words can help us figure out what each phrase refers to.

21st Century Classical Greek -- noun functions

My good old 8^th grade English teacher has long since gone to her reward. She made us diagram sentences. If you’ve never experienced that, you might be able to find some web resources about it. At any rate I cringe sometimes when I hear bad grammar, but just so you know, some of the kids in my 8^th grade class never got it. It’s not an issue of when you went to school, it’s other stuff.

At any rate, the basic sentence, as you know, is subject – verb – predicate, or in dissertations, subject – verb – object (SVO). This is what we have in our first clause in Thucydides.

But a sentence does not have to start with a subject. The subject is the antecedent for the number and gender of a conjugated verb or a verb derivative. The subject Thucydides is the antecedent for both ksunegrapse and arksamenos.

Thucydides sometimes starts a clause with a topic. Sometimes the topic relates to the previous section and has the sense of “as for the above-mentioned X,” and Mr. T goes on to give information about it. This is a marker of his oral mental orientation. It gives the audience a reason to pay attention to the following material, which is likely to be new information about a previously discussed topic.

Finally, there is the concept of agent. It’s crucial to a later post on a piece of grammar that none of the old books discuss, but which is known to exist in a number of languages. In some of those languages, it is the only way to have an intransitive expression. Remember, I said that passive morphology required a structure that was intransitive. I also said that the grammatical subject was the logical object. I will show in a later post that a passive structure is capable of naming an agent. That may seem like a new concept to you, but at that time I will show that such a thing is not unknown in English.

In transitive structures subject and agent are often the same thing (I’m hedging my bets) but intransitive structures have a subject for the conjugated verb which is different from the agent.

Besides subject and topic-order clauses, there’s the equational sentence. In an aspectual language, this is noun – copula – predicate. In progressive aspect, the copula can drop out. This happens in Biblical Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian. I’ll point it out if it happens in Greek.

The designator for a clause is “SVO”, but the object is not necessarily in “accusative case”. That sounds just wrong, but it’s important in Greek. The meaning of a verb depends on the context, and the context includes any substantive or descriptive expressions, regardless of case. When you use the lexicon, you will see subentries that begin with “c. dat.” This means that if the object is in the dative, the verb has a different meaning compared to when there is no object, or when the object is in a different case.

The old grammars try to ignore this by talking about “verbs of X” where X is such things as fearing, asking, etc. and assigning to them a specific case of nouns. Where these verb categories lead, is the student learning only one meaning of a verb and using it everywhere that verb appears, regardless of the object case. The results can be painfully wrong.

This is why I gave you that second mantra besides “context is king”; “know the verb.” You won’t understand what Thucydides is talking about unless you always take the object case into account.

By telling you that verb categories like “fearing” are invalid and lead to incorrect understanding of a text, I have eliminated as many as a dozen pages of Goodwin.

Fact-Checking the -- Tannakh -- what about those hemorrhoids?

 If you remember, on the Fact-Checking the Torah page, I posted this, identifying the Pelishtim with the Ahiyyawa, that is, the Pelishtim were pre-Hellenic Greeks known to the Egyptians, and known to the Hittites as Ahiyyawa. As such, they lived in the Peloponnese as part of the Palace Culture which used the undeciphered Linear A script, while the Pelishtim are known to have written in Linear B which represents an Indo-European language.

They're all Greeks to me

Now another part of the puzzle. Read Samuel I 5-6, the story of what happened to the Pelishtim after they captured the ark of the covenant.

Everybody will tell you that the five capitals of the Pelishtim were struck with hemorrhoids. Now that we know who the Pelishtim were, we know something nobody in the history of Bible studies knew, and that nobody now has connected up. Except me. Again.

The main god of the Pelishthim/Ahiyyawa was Apaliunas. He was also the patron of Troy, a city founded by the Gutian Teucer:

Philology

Teucer, according to a Greek poet of the 700s BCE, also founded a temple in the Troad to Apollo Smintheus, usually translated as "Mouse Apollo". The Greeks did not understand the word smintheus but said it was a Pelasgian word. How it got to mean "mouse" is tortuous; Teucer's people were told to build their temple where they were attacked by the "earth-born". There is a long-standing tradition in ancient Anatolian culture that makes its way into Talmud, that mice are born from earth and if you catch them at the right point in their "development", you will find them to be half mouse, half earth. The poet goes on to say that mice ate all the leather of the military equipment and that's where the temple was built.

But the ancients were also fond of bad philology and false friends. "Earth-born" also means "autochthonous", like the warriors born of the earth in which Qadmos planted the teeth of the dragon he slew. Qadmos (cognate to Semitic words for "eastern") founded Thebes in the Peloponnese, a city of the Palace Culture. IOW Teucer was going to be attacked by Anatolians already living in the Troad and he would have to conquer them to be able to build a temple. Which he did.

So how does the story in Samuel relate? Well, the Pelishtim who worshipped Apaliunas had settled in their famous Pentapolis, before attacking the famous Troy VIIb layer. They worshipped Dagon, which closely resembles the Hebrew word dagan, which relates to a word dagah meaning be fruitful, the way grain reproduces manyfold. So basically the Pelishtim were adopting the west Semitic Ugaritic language and adapting its cuneiform to their language, and they helped destroy Ugarit at about the same time as Troy.

Now, mice are also something that dagahs a lot, something else that has been known for millennia, and they will swarm into your grain bins and clean you out if you don't catch them first. So you need somebody to guard you against them, and apparently this was one of Apaliunas' roles. His statue at his temple on the Troad had a mouse underfoot.

But the way the Iliad brings Apollo Smitheus into it, is that when the Greeks refuse to give up the daughter of his priest, the priest invokes a plague on them. And a plague also falls on the Pelishtim who capture the ark. And Apollo was responsible for a plague that struck down Phrygian (Anatolian) Niobe's seven pairs of children when she slammed Apollo's mother for having only one pair. 

The Pelishtim were struck bafolim in Samuel I 5:1-12, and afolim is spelled starting with ayin, a letter that shows up at the start of a number of Hebrew names borrowed from foreign languages. Amorah, the sister-city of S'dom, is another example. So is efron, the man who eventually sells Makhpelah to Avraham.

The letter b' is a preposition meaning "by means of" in some cases. So the Pelishtim were struck by means of their patron god Apaliunas for trying to import a foreign Gd's artifact, the ark, into his temple. At the same time, that foreign Gd struck the Ugaritic/K'naani god Dagon whom the Pelishtim had also adopted.

But Apollo is also the healer god who taught Cheiron the centaur, who taught Asclepius the famous healer, and his son Podalirius who was physician to the Greeks  in the Trojan War. 

So the next part of the narrative is that after three (remember Olrik's Law of Three) of the cities in the Pentapolis are struck by Apaliunas in the same way, the Pelishtim decide to get rid of the ark in chapter 6. They put it on a cart and on the cart they also put five (a magic number for magic and mystery) golden statues of Apaliunas and five golden mice. They yoke to this cart two heifers who have never been used for work and set the heifers wandering to wherever the god directs.

This following of a cow to a god-designated place is also part of the Qadmos story. Apollo's oracle at Delphi tells him to follow a cow to exhaustion and build a city where she lies down. The city was Thebes. He wanted water but a dragon kept destroying his water-bearers. Qadmos killed this dragon, sowed its teeth, and saved himself from the warriors who sprang up except for five who became his guardians. 

Now, how did afolim get to be glossed as hemorrhoids by so many commentators? Babylonian Talmud Masekhet Megilla 25b says it, with an attribution to rabbanan, meaning that it was a widespread ancient opinion; it is repeated in Tosefta 3:20 for that page, as well as Rashi's Talmud commentary. Tosefta dates to the 100s CE and Rashi lived in the 1100s CE. Rashi connects it to the mice saying they created disease in the Pelishtim. 

The connection to mice no doubt comes from chapter 6, not from chapter 5. None of the Jewish commentators knew anything about Apaliunas or Apollo Smintheus. Neither did non-Jewish commentators know anything about the connection between the Pelishtim and the Achaean attackers of Troy. It only comes together when you know 21st century archaeology.

And that's why you can't rest on outdated archaeology if you want to understand Torah or its extensions into Nakh.

21st Century Classical Greek -- syntax

This isn’t all the grammar in section 1 but I’ve thrown so much at you that I think it’s time for a breather. Let’s stop and think about why Thucydides structures his sentence the way he does.

English sentence structure is relatively straightforward. It has to be. There are almost no cases in English, aside from “whom” which too many people use incorrectly. The order of words in an English sentence, along with punctuation and context, determines meaning.

Languages with noun cases work differently. Since you know the case endings of the definite article, you know which words fall into which case and what the antecedent is, for most personal gerundives and adjectives. I’m going to use this fact to show you how Thucydides parsed out an expression.

I am going to discuss things in terms of what Thucydides does to communicate with his audience. That means I will often talk about oral communication because, remember, Thucydides probably read his work to friends or contributors. He had to do three things.

1.                    Make it comprehensible.

2.                    Make it memorable.

3.                    Get audience buy-in with a number of devices.

 

He uses three tools for comprehension.

1.                    Syntax particles to chunk things, and three different types of noun expressions.

2.                    Street-level grammar, including infrequent things like anti-passives.

3.                    Simple compared to poetry; nothing obscure or flowery.

 

For memorability, there is a separate set of tools.

1.                    References to previous material, sometimes with topic order sentences.

2.                    Parallelism and rounded periods.

3.                  Repetitions after sidebars. I’ll point these out when we get to them but Torah does the same thing and it is demonstrably suited to oral presentation.

 

For audience buy-in, Thucydides does three things.

1.                  Clearly marks the actions he finds important with conjugated verbs to avoid confusing them with too many things to focus on.

2.                    Uses grammar as well as specific words, to avoid seeming arrogant in stating his opinions.

3.                  Sticks to things they have personal knowledge of, unlike Herodotus who starts out by appealing to Persian history.

 

The old grammars don’t do much to help you understand what authors were trying to communicate, because they ignore context in favor of morphology. Goodwin didn’t even discuss the syntax particles. If you want a reference on sentence structure, use Herbert Smyth, the basis of Eleanor Dickey’s 2016 book which attempts to teach composition in Ancient Greek. We’ll ignore her. Smyth is in the old grammatical tradition, but we know how to translate that to our system.

https://archive.org/details/agreekgrammarfo02smytgoog/mode/2up

This version of Smyth is not locked. His section on syntax is on his page 255, section 900.

However, even Smyth does not understand some 21^st century concepts of syntax, and because of these gaps I will have to explain some terms to you.

21st Century Classical Greek -- gignomai

To start out this week properly, go to Thucydides on Perseus, click on progegenimenon in this first subsection. Copy the top left word in Word Tool. Paste it into Wiktionary. Use Backspace to get rid of the English. Now go to the start of the word and delete the first three letters, pro-. Now hit enter.

You get the entry for the root gignomai.  Memorize the conjugation; you will need it, because this word, sometimes with a prefix, shows up a lot in Greek.

There are two important notes about gignomai. The first is that there is no sigma marker of the imperfective in the eventive, only in the conceptual.

Second, there is no executive voice for gignomai. Wiktionary pretends that there is, in the perfective aspect, but if you copy gegona, which is the only blue entry for that aspect, you can use your search engine to see if there’s anything on Perseus using it. There isn’t. This form isn’t attested in Classical Greek, it’s in the koine of Christian scripture. So we’re going to forget about labeling anything as executive voice for this verb.

The important thing about gignomai is that it’s the best possible paradigm for a deep split in Greek verbs. No verb with -mai in the dictionary entry (except one, and tell me you didn’t see that coming) has an executive voice in Classical Greek.

Instead, all of them have that intransitive passive voice, and a separate voice. This other voice is conjugated the same as the middle or middle-passive in non-mai verbs.

This is my other reason for calling the third voice “base voice”. It is common across all verbs, with the same conjugations and the same nuance.

So progegenimenon is a perfective conceptual personal gerundive in base voice, substantivized with a definite article, in genitive, as a plural referring to prior wars. When Goodwin and others claim that it is a “genitive absolute”, the timing actually comes from the pro- prefix, not the morphology of the root. As I said, Thucydides uses a perfective conceptual here to get the nuance of 1) something over and done with, 2) with emphasis on the existence of those wars, not the events involved.

And now just one tweak more, and you have it.

Only -mai verbs and the imperfective aspect of non-mai verbs have passive morphology. Progressive and perfective aspects of non-mai verbs have only executive voice and base voice. The reason that the old grammars call the latter “middle-passive” is something we’ll see in a later lesson.

This means you can only talk straight intransitive structures in -mai verbs and the imperfective of non-mai verbs. Otherwise you use base voice, unless you are talking about a deliberate action, which you can only do in non-mai verbs.

In the progressive and perfective aspects of non-mai verbs, you can only express deliberate actions or something that can be transitive but not deliberate. You can’t be intransitive in these aspects in a conjugated verb.

And since -mai verbs don’t have executive voice, they don’t express an action deliberately taken to achieve the normal results of that action. This has an important impact that I will discuss in a later post.