21st Century Classical Greek -- faino

I’m going to start section 2, subsection 1 here a) to give you a feeling of progress; b) for another test of what you already know and c) to have you memorize an important verb.

So mark this text up in your own special way to identify words you know.

φαίνεται γὰρ ἡ νῦν Ἑλλὰς καλουμένη οὐ πάλαι βεβαίως οἰκουμένη, ἀλλὰ μεταναστάσεις τε οὖσαι τὰ πρότερα καὶ ῥᾳδίως ἕκαστοι τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀπολείποντες βιαζόμενοι ὑπό τινων αἰεὶ πλειόνων.

Learn nun as “now”, you will see it a lot.

Click on fainetai, look it up in Wiktionary, and learn the conjugation.

Thucydides uses versions of faino a lot to say that the evidence gives such-and-such an appearance.

The first problem with Jowett’s translation is that he ignores faino most of the time, so that Thucydides comes out as more assertive than he is. Thucydides’ audience comes from his own class and they may know as much about history as Thucydides does; he doesn’t want to antagonize them by basically saying “my way or the highway”.

It’s also possible that some of them contributed information; they would be offenced if  Thucydides said something that rejected their information. Mr. T is suggesting that he had alternative evidence so they don’t get mad at him.

Now for a poke at Goodwin. Remember he wanted you to use ou to negate adjectives that are specific. What is definite about ou palai ? It’s an adverb of time. Goodwin never discusses negation of adverbs. He probably thought ou applied to oikoumeni, and that’s what 3 of the 4 online translations show.

But to show that the region was inhabited in ancient times, Thucydides deals first with whether the inhabitants lived securely, using another adverb, bebaios, and we all know that adverbs can modify adverbs. So ou palai modifies bebaios, not oikoumeni.

In English, to avoid clumsy expression, we would say “It was, seemingly, not in ancient times that the land called Hellas was securely settled.” Thucydides tells us why not and ties it into his theme of I 1.3 about what small change previous wars were. In section 7 he turns to how things changed.

While Thucydides has been chunked into sections for time out of mind, he actually writes story arcs. This first one is about 6 sections long; there will be longer ones later. It’s perfectly reasonable that translators have missed the story arcs; they didn’t even catch the relationships between subsections much. They were too focused on morphology to look at context, and this promoted word-for-word substitution, the most error-prone method of translation of all time.

The first clause is in SVO order with the only definite verb being fainetai. Everybody knows about Hellas being the name of a place and having inhabitants, but Thucydides can’t get much more definite about these issues than a gerundive.

The second clause, after alla, also fails to pin down any migrations by using a conjugated verb. Thucydides gets the idea of migrations from the notion, which he will state explicitly later, that the “Herakleides” (AKA Dorians) took over the peninsula from the prior inhabitants.

We can’t translate this subsection into English without adding conjugated verbs. This should have been a sign that the gerundives had some equivalence to verbs, but none of the old grammars give them credit for replacing conjugated verbs. As a result, nobody tried to form an idea of why the material didn’t use conjugated verbs everywhere that English would. This is another example of how scholars weren’t really reading Greek, they were reading “Grenglish”.

21st Century Classical Greek -- -mai versus non-mai verbs

Now. Since I called the last post “negation 1”, you might think I should cover everything I learned about negation in a chunk. But I’d rather have you go sequentially through Thucydides. It lets me show you how he structured things, and that is going to bring out what’s wrong with Jowett’s translation. It does turn out later that most of what I have to say about conditional (“if-then”) statements clusters reviews 3 and 4. And there will be a consolidated roundup at the end of this thread. But how Thucydides structured his material is not discussed in any of the old grammars and it’s important to my contention that Thucydides wrote as he spoke, from the oral basis with which Greek material originated, reinforced by the theater and the agora and the basilica. If you know of an on-line work that does discuss these issues, I’d love to see the link.

Here’s another thing that none of the grammarians ever talk about, again, because they were looking at morphology, not at context, and they simply accepted that a given morphology of a given verb meant X without asking why that verb was there in the first place.

τὰ γὰρ πρὸ αὐτῶν καὶ τὰ ἔτι παλαίτερα σαφῶς μὲν εὑρεῖν διὰ χρόνου πλῆθος ἀδύνατα ἦν, ἐκ δὲ τεκμηρίων ὧν ἐπὶ μακρότατον σκοποῦντί μοι πιστεῦσαι ξυμβαίνει οὐ μεγάλα νομίζω γενέσθαι οὔτε κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους οὔτε ἐς τὰ ἄλλα.

When you click on ksumbainei, the Perseus Word Tool tells you that when used with an impersonal gerundive (“inf.”), you get “it happened to me to trust”.

But I told you gignomai means “happen”. So ou megala nomizo genesthai ought to mean “I thought they happened to not be great”.

But it’s also a pretty good demonstration of the split in use between all -mai verbs and all of the other verbs.

The -mai verbs are used to evaluate something (ou megala) and non-mai verbs are used for other purposes.

Ksumbainei pisteusai may mean “I happened”, but it’s not an evaluation, it’s soft-pedalling the deliberate decision Thucydides made not to trust some of his data.

I’ll point out other places where Thucydides could have used a -mai verb but used the other form with the same meaning, so that you know I’m not just making things up or seeing things that aren’t there.

21st Century Classical Greek -- negatives 1

Time to look at a very important part of language, negatives. Two negatives are in this third subsection.

τὰ γὰρ πρὸ αὐτῶν καὶ τὰ ἔτι παλαίτερα σαφῶς μὲν εὑρεῖν διὰ χρόνου πλῆθος ἀδύνατα ἦν, ἐκ δὲ τεκμηρίων ὧν ἐπὶ μακρότατον σκοποῦντί μοι πιστεῦσαι ξυμβαίνει οὐ μεγάλα νομίζω γενέσθαι οὔτε κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους οὔτε ἐς τὰ ἄλλα.

Oute…oute is neither…nor.

There are two ways to negate verbs, ou which we have here, and mi, μὴ.

One of the big problems with White is that he never discusses negation. It’s not listed in his table of contents; it’s not listed in his index. Leaving out such an important part of language is a serious flaw in a book that is preparing you to read Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, which is some 800 pages long in the Loeb Classics Library edition. You know that such a long work will definitely have negatives in it.

Goodwin claims that there are two forms of verb with which ou is used, but we can see here that ou negates megala, not a verb. Goodwin says ou occurs with adjectives when they are not part of a conditional statement and when they refer to definite persons or things. He gives one example of definite and one of non-definite. He puts the cart before the horse, as so many grammars do with autos: when an author wants to designate specific persons or things, he uses ou[k].

So in I 1.3 ou megala relates to the two ta’s at the start of the subsection, which relate to kinisis auti at the start of subsection 2, a specific action.

I am going to have to revisit the topic of negation more than once because Goodwin gets into things we haven’t had examples of yet and when we do, I’ll explain why the negation works the way it does.

For now, see section 1611, page 346 about impersonal gerundives. Goodwin admits that the context determines which negation to use by distinguishing between quoted speech and direct speech, and then saying that there are exceptions. He gives no examples and no citations so we are on our own. By analogy with what he has already said, we can expect ou with an i.g. in a specific context and mi in a context where you can’t be specific.

Go through your favorite author and see if what Goodwin says pans out. One thing is for sure, in subsection 3 we wouldn’t have known megala’s antecedent was specific until we got to the start of subsection 2.  You can’t rely on a narrow context to support Goodwin’s claims

21st Century Classical Greek -- end of section 1

So here are the other two subsections, all marked up.

Subject – verb – object

[2] κίνησις γὰρ αὕτη μεγίστη δὴ τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἐγένετο καὶ μέρει τινὶ τῶν βαρβάρων, ὡς δὲ εἰπεῖν καὶ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀνθρώπων.

[3] τὰ γὰρ πρὸ αὐτῶν καὶ τὰ ἔτι παλαίτερα σαφῶς μὲν εὑρεῖν διὰ χρόνου πλῆθος ἀδύνατα ἦν, ἐκ δὲ τεκμηρίων ὧν ἐπὶ μακρότατον σκοποῦντί μοι πιστεῦσαι ξυμβαίνει οὐ μεγάλα νομίζω γενέσθαι οὔτε κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους οὔτε ἐς τὰ ἄλλα.

Subsection 3 is less straightforward. The ta, as the word tool shows, could be either -ous or -oi case. Safos is an adverb, of course, and the position suggests that it modifies heurein. The clause finished with what looks like a predicate of “be”, but what “is impossible”?

If you remember, Goodwin discussed the -ous case as the subject of the impersonal gerundive. At first blush, you might think that’s what ta is, the subject of heurein. It’s not true. Heurein is exercising its impersonal gerundive right to be noun-y as well as verby. The finding is impossible. Finding what? That’s where the ta comes in, which means it’s the object, so the case is -ous.  Since the ta is definitely substantive, it can’t be modified by safos, which has to be modifying heurein. So now highlight heurein and bold the ta, and then in is in blue.

The counterpoint de clause is also not straightforward. It starts with a prepositional phrase relating to the “found”. The hon after it relates it to what happens in the de clause, which is skopounti moi pisteusai. But moi forms an idiom with ksumbainai, “I happened.” To this we have the complement skopounti, a gerundive, and pisteusai. As an imperfective eventive impersonal gerundive in executive voice, this can be the event of trusting – something. But it’s actually another complement to ksumbainai, “happened to believe”.

For the next part of the phrase, ou megala nomizo genesthai, we have to go to nomizo in the word tool, and look the whole way down the entry to II.4. Megala can be a whole lot of things; including a feminine in -ous case. With nomizo, we get “I believed it happened to not be great”.

What was not great? What’s the grammatical match? It goes the whole way back from megala to the two tas at the start of the subsection, and those go back to kinisis at the start of subsection 2. Megala works out to a dual number feminine in the -ous case; it’s dual because Thucydides is writing about ta pro auton, wars before the Peloponnesian war, some of which he will discuss, and ta eti palaitera, older wars, such as the Trojan War.

So Thucydides starts off this last clause by referring back to the evidence which is part of the first clause in this subsection, and also back to the event he started subsection 2 with. He reassures his audience that he considered his data carefully. And finally he delivers the verdict: nothing that happened before the Peloponnesian war, either in ancient times or more recently, either in war or other issues, had the scope of the war he is about to document.

If he put the verdict first, it would beg the question of how careful he was in his judgment. People in the audience gave him data, from their own experience or that of relatives, or they may have recommended written sources from their favorite authors. I’ve had people recommend sources to me, who were very hurt when I didn’t share their enthusiasm for something outdated with debunked information in it. Thucydides is trying to short-circuit arguments about that, but at last he has to tell the truth: most sources I used were too old and unclear to trust, and what I did trust, showed that what I’m writing about is indeed bigger than anything in history.