21st Century Classical Greek -- dia

This week we have short, straightforward sections, I 2.3-5.

μάλιστα δὲ τῆς γῆς ἡ ἀρίστη αἰεὶ τὰς μεταβολὰς τῶν οἰκητόρων εἶχεν,

ἥ τε νῦν Θεσσαλία καλουμένη καὶ Βοιωτία Πελοποννήσου τε τὰ πολλὰ πλὴν Ἀρκαδίας, τῆς τε ἄλλης ὅσα ἦν κράτιστα.

Learn malista and ελάχιστα elakhista as “most [of all]” and “least [of all]”. They are irregular superlatives.

The first clause has the verb at the end, so the order is SOV. This is very common in Greek, so always identify the subject or topic and verb; what’s in the middle is going to be the object of the verb or an appositive to the subject/topic.

διὰ γὰρ ἀρετὴν γῆς αἵ τε δυνάμεις τισὶ μείζους ἐγγιγνόμεναι στάσεις ἐνεποίουν ἐξ ὧν ἐφθείροντο, καὶ ἅμα ὑπὸ ἀλλοφύλων μᾶλλον ἐπεβουλεύοντο.

Meizous is the comparative of mega, “big”.

The regular comparative of both adjectives and adverbs is -tera and the superlative -taton, as in aksiologotaton from section 1.

And finally, learn poieo, “make, do”, a high frequency verb both alone and with prefixes as in subsection 4.

The structure here is a prepositional phrase as the topic. Where is the verb? It’s enepoioun. The subject of that verb is eggignomenai, and so we have TSOV. The topic links this subjsection to the previous one.

Eftheironto is a problem. The morphology is base voice, the aspect progressive. It is not a -mai verb, yet Middle Liddell gives us mostly passive – that is, intransitive – meanings for it. But look at II and the example ei mi ftherei, “if you don’t depart”. That’s intransitive, but it suits our context.  What does this subsection discuss except reasons why people left their turf?

Jowett follows Middle Liddel to destruction – or rather, “ruin”. The communities weren’t ruined, a true passive concept. They did depart their turf, and the subject of migrating away from one’s home is also covered in subsection 5:

τὴν γοῦν Ἀττικὴν ἐκ τοῦ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον διὰ τὸ λεπτόγεων ἀστασίαστον οὖσαν ἄνθρωποι ᾤκουν οἱ αὐτοὶ αἰεί.

Learn dia, “through, because of”. You’ll mostly see it with the -on case, but notice that it sometimes shows up with the -ous case. It means pretty much the same thing regardless of the noun case, which causes a problem for the old grammars. Ek can also mean “because of”, as you saw in subsection 3.

All of the old grammars try to generally define oblique noun cases, the -on case being a departure from something and the -ous case being the approach to something, while the -ois case is supposed to mean within a space or time.

However when you study dia you find it it means “during” with both cases. This is close to the claimed nuance of the -ois case.

Old grammars also describe the -ous case as being part of an expanse, but with dia the -on case certainly takes on that nuance.

Finally, notice that dia plus either case is a kind of instrumental.

Knitting -- bottom-up raglan

I won't be posting Sunday, the first day of Passover, so I thought I would put this out there today

Some time back I gave hints on working a top-down raglan jumper, which is good for using up leftover yarn.

Bottom-up raglan is good for yoke sweaters. The increases working top down leave fairly obvious traces, and have to be coordinated with the ribbing of the neck to look neat and tidy. Working a motif across the increases can be funky unless the pattern is specifically designed to work with a top-down raglan. In a bottom-up raglan, you do invisible decreases at strategic rounds and then one or two final decrease rounds above the pattern to fit the neck.

You will need a circular needle with a 24 inch tether for the body and one with at least a 32 inch tether for when you join the sleeves on. You need DP needles to start each sleeve and a circular with a 16 inch tether for when you have too many sleeve stitches for your DPs.

Work the body normally to the armpits. At the back middle, start working in the 32 inch circular; when you get to the left side, put the stitches of the first armpit on a holder.

Now knit one sleeve to the armpit, bottom up, and put the stitches of the armpit on a holder. Now pick up the rest of the sleeve stitches with the 32 inch circular needle.

Work across the body and put the armpit stitches on the other side on a holder.

Work the other sleeve like the first one and put the free stitches onto the 32 inch needle.

At this point you have to deal with two things.

One is that you now have as many as 480 stitches to work with. It’s heavy. You need strong hands even if you are using fingering weight yarn.

Second, the stitches at the armpits are tight. They have a habit of getting dropped. Work carefully at the armpits for 4 rows, making sure not to miss any stitches that drop.

Then decrease evenly around so you end up with a multiple of the number of stitches at the bottom of the pattern where it is the widest. If you have a yoke pattern, decrease where the pattern indicates from here on out, using a SSPO.

If you are not working a pattern, use the number of stitches left, the number of stitches you want in the neck, and the number of rows from here to the neck to figure out how many decrease rows you need and how many stitches you have to decrease. I keep telling you, knitting requires math.

For example, when I use fingering weight for myself, sleeves have 120 stitches of which 16 are the armpit, and the body has 300 stitches, 14 of which on each side are armpits. (The difference in stitch numbers helps loosen things up, making dropped stitches less likely.)

When I have sleeves and body on the same needle, I have 480 stitches on the needle. In the 5^th round, I decrease every 12 stitches for 24 stitches lost. I need 65 rounds between armpit and neck, and 132 stitches at the neck. The math says to repeat the 12-stitch decrease round every 4 rounds. The last round before the neck ribbing has to have no decreases and be 132 stitches around so the last decreases should be no higher than the next to last round. A mid-back elevation goes before the last decreases. Knit the armpits together and close off the cuffs, tie in the tails of yarn and you're done.

The Periwinkle pattern on DROPS is a bottom-up raglan.  I also found a bottom-up raglan on Dale Garn (409-04). Both are something like the floral pattern on the Lofoten Yarn website.

This yoke is 60 rows high and used about 220 yards of the blue fingering weight yarn. If you are knitting for a chest size less than 40 inches, you'll need less yarn for the yoke. Also those two dark bands between the little bottom motif and the floral, between the floral and the top motif, have no decreases in them. You could leave out some of those rounds if you have less than 220 yards of your second color; to get the yoke the right height you would work more of the white between the yoke and neck. 

You could also use up multiple colors of leftover yarn in either Nordic or Fair Isle motifs. So once again, raglan is your go-to technique for using leftovers.

If you want to design your own pattern for the yoke, go to the Periwinkle pattern and make a reproduction of their chart -- blank of course -- in your spreadsheet, including the bars where the decreases go. This requires a multiple of 20 stitches where you START decreasing and comes out to a multiple of TEN stitches at the top. Plug in blocks for your design, check the look in a mockup in the spreadsheet, and away you go. Also notice that the chart for the smaller sizes will be useful with worsted or bulky yarn, while the chart for the larger sizes works well with fingering and sport/DK.

I suspect that working bottom up raglan in brioche is a good idea. Working in two colors, be careful that the body and sleeves have their armpits on the same half of the pattern so that the join doesn’t wreck things. And notice that, since you are putting the sleeve stitches on the same needle with the body stitches, you continue working in the round so you don't have to worry about purling.

You think I've done it all now? Nope. I still have some major projects to go.

21st Century Classical Greek -- perfective passive

Thucydides I 2.2 is another long piece of text. What is its structure?

τῆς γὰρ ἐμπορίας οὐκ οὔσης, οὐδ᾽ ἐπιμειγνύντες ἀδεῶς ἀλλήλοις οὔτε κατὰ γῆν οὔτε διὰ θαλάσσης,

νεμόμενοί τε τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστοι ὅσον ἀποζῆν

καὶ περιουσίαν χρημάτων οὐκ ἔχοντες οὐδὲ γῆν φυτεύοντες,

ἄδηλον ὂν ὁπότε τις ἐπελθὼν καὶ ἀτειχίστων ἅμα ὄντων ἄλλος ἀφαιρήσεται,

τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀναγκαίου τροφῆς πανταχοῦ ἂν ἡγούμενοι ἐπικρατεῖν,

οὐ χαλεπῶς ἀπανίσταντο, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ οὔτε μεγέθει πόλεων ἴσχυον οὔτε τῇ ἄλλῃ παρασκευῇ.

1)         The antecedent for the bolded gerundive is the hekastoi of the preceding subsection. Note oud’ negating the deliberate habit of mixing with each other, as well as the ouk negating the existence of trade, and oute…oute, “neither…nor” relative to land and sea.

2)         The next clause has its own subject, again, hekastoi, with nemomenoi as the verb substitute, which is at the start, not the middle. That makes this a verbal clause, parallel to verbal sentences in Arabic and Biblical Hebrew. Why the verbal expression is at the start, instead of the middle, I don’t know but this is something to watch out fot to see if Thucydides has specific habitual uses for it.

3)         periousian has a pink bar in the word tool for the -ous case, but the ouk ekhontes says that it’s an -on case object of negated possession.

4)         All the negations in this subsection use forms of ou not mi. Thucydides is negating whole classes, not parts that might or might not exist. This first clause is SVO but the clause after oude is OV.

5)         The clause that ends in afairisetai starts with adilon. In the lexicon, the first subentry is wrong for the context. You want the next thing down. It reflects uncertainty, and that almost requires an oblique which, nevertheless, is conjugated and therefore definite.

6)         The bolded conjugated verb is progressive eventive, formerly known as “imperfect tense”, and is not interrupted by any other action. Note the negation applies to khalepos, the adverb. It does not negate the removal, it negates the nature of the removal, like ou palai which we had previously.

In the next to last phrase, click on higoumenoi. This has a non-mai counterpart in ago. However, when you study the verb higeomai, you find that the lexicon entry is incomplete. All the meanings require the -ois or -ous case, and we have nouns and adjectives in the -on case. But they are inanimate nouns and they can’t fit with part II of the lexicon entry.

The meaning that we want to fit into this place is “anywhere that they were led,” and this is allowed with a -mai verb. But Wiktionary claims that there’s only a middle-passive or base voice in progressive conceptual. It shows the same thing for perfective.

Now think about it. Progressive and perfective have no passive in non-mai verbs. What the Wiktionary entry shows us is that there’s also no separate passive morphology in -mai verbs for progressive and perfective. The base voice and passive are identical in -mai verbs.

One more clue. In the word tool, click on LSJ and go down to IV where it says “pf. in pass. sense.” Without knowing it, LSJ also says that this -mai verb has no separate spelling for passive voice that can be distinguished from base voice.

So when I said some time ago that progressive and perfective non-mai verbs have no passive morphology, it was an incomplete statement. In -mai verbs, they also have no passive morphology.

How do you distinguish the voice?

It’s the context. If the context is intransitive, you must have a passive voice verb. Otherwise you have base voice.

And that’s why the old grammars cripple modern readers. They don’t tell you how to tell what voice you have when the morphology is all the same, because they recognize only morphology, not context, as the driver of meaning.

So in this context we’re perfectly safe with a passive translation.

21st Century Classical Greek -- breathing

You who already know Greek know all about breathing. You know the answer to a question some other readers may be asking: “why, when the first letter is a vowel, am I putting an ‘h’ in front of it” when I transliterate?

If you know anything about paleontology or horses, you know that the Greek word is usually spelled hippus in transcription. The Greek word is

ἵππος

Let me enlarge that for you so you can see what the Greek geeks already know.

ἵππος

The sort of “open quote” mark is the “rough breathing”. That’s where the “h” comes from in the transcription.

So words you’ve already seen that have it:

Section 1.

ὅτι – hoti, “that”

Ἑλληνικὸν – natch, hellinikon, “Hellenes” and Hellas in section 2

ὁρῶν – horon, “seeing, perceiving” (think horoscope)

ἑκατέρους – hekaterous, “on either side” and hekastoi in section 2

αὕτη – hauti, “them” but not auton later in the subsection

ὡς – hos, “which”, and hon later in the subsection, and hoson in section 2

εὑρεῖν – heurein, as in “heuristics”

Section 2.

ῥᾳδίως – trick question, rhadios. Rho always takes the rough breathing.

ὑπό – hupo, see the word tool and recognize this as the source of hypo-

ἅμα – hama, “at one and the same time”

ἡμέραν – himeran, “day”

ἡγούμενοι – higoumenoi, do you know the word “hegemony”?

So if you see the sign for the rough breathing, remember there’s a sort of huffing sound like if you are very careful to say “hwat”.

Knitting -- still going

 And you thought I had hung up my knitting needles!

Not even close.

I've been replacing sweaters that wore out.

I also worked the third traditional pattern in Dale Garn catalog 267. You can't get the catalog free online any more. I've been to the Dale Garn site and tried searching several ways. What you can do at this point is look at my Fana post and find the Setesdal and Sirdal patterns that are still free on DROPS. For now, here are photos of the Sirdal genser and jakke from DG267.

That twisty motif is the Sirdal pattern, as the big X's are for the Setesdal such as the classic Mariusgenser. There was a sweater pattern as well as the jumper.

Notice the dapples. They are called lus, literally lice. If you think they look uneven, you're right. The catalog wants you to work this pattern in DK, sport, or worsted weights. It makes the lice show up better, and the Setesdal lice patterns on DROPS (for example 217-10 and 219-15 women's and men's jumpers) calls for DK. I worked in fingering weight to use up some extra yarn.

What's more, if you are working a button-front sweater, you are going to purl some rows. Make sure to loosen up the tension on those rows. Since you  are working in two colors, you will be using one color with a Continental hold in the left hand. I tend to tighten my grip because I'm normally right-handed, so I have a tighter tension on purl rows. It just happens. Lighten up on the purl rows even in worsted, and especially if you use fingering weight.

You're saying are the sleeves the same on both designs. No, they aren't. The jumper has plain blue sleeves so I didn't worry about getting those in the photo.

Norwegian colorways tend to be stark: Fana started out as strictly black and white; Setesdal and Sirdal traditionally are dark or navy blue and white. Things have loosened up nowadays, so use the colors you like best, as long as you can get good contrast between two colors. There's a Fana on Ravelry that looks muddy -- I don't know how else to put it -- because it uses so many colors. The beauty of Norwegian is the crispness of the contrast. If you really want something multi-color, do a Fair Isle, which has a Scandinavian origin and can use any of the small motifs you find in the Nordic sweaters on DROPS.

I am trying to find Lofoten patterns. I found one that looks a lot like bargello, I think it was at Dale Garn. The DROPS 181-9 and 185-3 (women's and men's versions) have a floral motif. Photos at the Lofoten Wool website show floral motifs even on men's jumpers.  If you know what a classic Lofoten jumper looks like, send me a link.

21st Century Classical Greek -- oblique modality

So we’re studying afairisetai, and I eliminated the Word Tool suggestion that it was a “future perfect”, which is passive, because the structure isn’t intransitive. I also argued against a “future indicative” in base voice because that would make no sense in a context that calls for executive voice. The only choice left was “aorist subjunctive” and I changed the label “subjunctive” to the 21^st century term oblique, which expresses an action that is probable but not certain.

τῆς γὰρ ἐμπορίας οὐκ οὔσης, οὐδ᾽ ἐπιμειγνύντες ἀδεῶς ἀλλήλοις οὔτε κατὰ γῆν οὔτε διὰ θαλάσσης, νεμόμενοί τε τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστοι ὅσον ἀποζῆν καὶ περιουσίαν χρημάτων οὐκ ἔχοντες οὐδὲ γῆν φυτεύοντες, ἄδηλον ὂν ὁπότε τις ἐπελθὼν καὶ ἀτειχίστων ἅμα ὄντων ἄλλος ἀφαιρήσεται, τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀναγκαίου τροφῆς πανταχοῦ ἂν ἡγούμενοι ἐπικρατεῖν, οὐ χαλεπῶς ἀπανίσταντο, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ οὔτε μεγέθει πόλεων ἴσχυον οὔτε τῇ ἄλλῃ παρασκευῇ.

Now let’s deal with why a verb would be labeled aorist when it has no augment.

There is one really good reason for that. Verbs that start with alpha don’t take augment. This includes both roots and prefixes that start with alpha.

The second problem is calling it eventive instead of conceptual. Why? Look at White page 239, sections 766 and 767. Remember the base voice conjugation endings that we had a table of a long time ago? Which flavor of imperfective base voice has -tai as a conjugated ending in 3^rd person singular?

It’s the conceptual flavor.

But in oblique modality, that ending is listed under the eventive flavor.

For comparison, look at page 238, section 765, for progressive aspect middle voice. The oblique is labeled as conceptual flavor.

The old grammars clearly considered oblique modality as something that hasn’t happened yet, that’s why it got labeled “future more vivid”. If it hasn’t happened yet, it belongs in the conceptual column – even in imperfective. (There’s an exception which I will discuss later.)

So I want that whole chunk of oblique conjugation moved from section 767 to section 766. Making the conjugations more regular. When was the last time that happened in a grammar?

Now look at page 240, section 769 for perfective aspect. The base voice oblique is periphrastic; it requires that extra word. It uses the base voice personal gerundive, which forces it into the conceptual  flavor; there is no eventive personal gerundive. The executive voice oblique has no augment, which means it is also conceptual.

In general, how progressive and perfective verbs act is no rule for imperfective verbs. We already saw that the impersonal gerundive in imperfective is eventive, while the other two are conceptual. We already saw that the imperfective has a real passive in non-mai verbs but the progressive and perfective don’t.

You pays your money and you takes your choice. Either the imperfective oblique is conceptual and conjugates the same way in base voice as in other aspects, or it follows the flavor rule for impersonal gerundives and passives and lies in the eventive. I’m going to put it in the conceptual flavor column; if you find a context that says otherwise, please share the citation and we’ll all look at it.

So here’s our text again; what is Thucydides saying?

…νεμόμενοί τε τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστοι ὅσον ἀποζῆν καὶ περιουσίαν χρημάτων οὐκ ἔχοντες οὐδὲ γῆν φυτεύοντες, ἄδηλον ὂν ὁπότε τις ἐπελθὼν καὶ ἀτειχίστων ἅμα ὄντων ἄλλος ἀφαιρήσεται,…

He’s saying that settlements with no walls had the experience that attackers came to carry off their food, and whenever they saw armies amassing on their borders, they expected that afairisetai.

Thucydides is definite about the carrying off; he conjugates the verb. But he knows it is probable that some unwalled settlements didn’t experience this.

So we have three layers of definiteness in Thucydides’ use of verbs (conjugated, personal gerundive, impersonal gerundive) and we have more than one layer of certainty (indicative, oblique).  There is a third one which I’ll talk about when we get one.

DIY -- dutch oven retake

 First I want to correct something I said in the old post on this topic. You bake on the middle rack of your oven. The dutch oven is the same; you want a booster to make sure your bread or whatever is in the middle of the heated space.

So I tried again with sourdough pumpernickel. First, I made rolls not loaves. They fit in the dutch oven better; it took three rounds to make a dozen rolls. If I had bought a bigger dutch oven, maybe I could have done it in two rounds.

Second, I bought a package of three foil pans that you can use for cake. One went upside down in the dutch oven.  This was my booster. I had to pinch the sides in a little to make it fit.

That left me with two pans. Each held four rolls, so I had one in the dutch oven and one loaded while the rolls continued to rise.

The same set-up works for pies and cakes. Sourdough  bread likes to cook with steam; pies and cakes don't, so make extra sure you don't forget to use parchment paper to keep the basting bumps from dropping steam down onto your pie or cake. I haven't tried it yet but the recipes on the Internet tell you it's so. This means that quick breads like brownies and shortbread should work the same way as pies and cakes.

I made another batch of rolls, this time sourdough honey 100% whole wheat. I used a lot of sour and they are very tangy; this makes them great with cheese or lunch meats. And of course a year ago it was great to have sourdough starter around because all the yeast disappeared from the stores when the pandemic started or, as I have often said in this DIY column, when SHTF.

21st Century Classical Greek -- modality

So we’re studying afairisetai, which the Perseus Word Tool suggests might be a “future perfect”, which in our schema is not a perfective but a passive of the imperfective conceptual. It turned out that we had a transitive context, in which it is impossible to use passive morphology. I also crossed out a base voice assignment because I couldn’t think of a way that taking something would not be deliberate, requiring executive voice.

τῆς γὰρ ἐμπορίας οὐκ οὔσης, οὐδ᾽ ἐπιμειγνύντες ἀδεῶς ἀλλήλοις οὔτε κατὰ γῆν οὔτε διὰ θαλάσσης, νεμόμενοί τε τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστοι ὅσον ἀποζῆν καὶ περιουσίαν χρημάτων οὐκ ἔχοντες οὐδὲ γῆν φυτεύοντες, ἄδηλον ὂν ὁπότε τις ἐπελθὼν καὶ ἀτειχίστων ἅμα ὄντων ἄλλος ἀφαιρήσεται, τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀναγκαίου τροφῆς πανταχοῦ ἂν ἡγούμενοι ἐπικρατεῖν, οὐ χαλεπῶς ἀπανίσταντο, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ οὔτε μεγέθει πόλεων ἴσχυον οὔτε τῇ ἄλλῃ παρασκευῇ.

The only option left from the word tool is “aor subj”, the dreaded subjunctive. It is dreaded because we get taught that it is used in conditional for “future more vivid” and the question is, “more vivid than what?” How much more vivid does it have to be, to use subjunctive?

It’s a fuzzy definition and in the 21^st century we have a more objective one.

Languages have a way of expressing things that are uncertain, things that are probable, things that you want to say while showing that you’re not invested in the truth of what you’re saying. Languages have different ways of saying these things; sometimes it’s morphology, sometimes it’s periphrastic (using auxiliary words). English modality tends to be periphrastic; Biblical Hebrew has morphology for non-indicative modalities.

I generally go with three classes of modality besides the indicative: deontic (imperatives and wishes); epistemic (investment in truth); and oblique.

Oblique is all over Torah in Biblical Hebrew. It generally appears in a two-clause statement. There’s a main clause which states something generally or specifically known. There’s a subordinate clause with a specific verb morphology, the truth of which is instantly accepted on the strength of the main clause. Most of the subordinate clauses are purpose or result clauses; a large number are cause or effect clauses; one or two are conditional.

Greek is different. The oblique in Classical Greek is an X that will  probably happen. It is not guaranteed like an indicative verb; there are grounds for thinking that it is true, but it’s not hard evidence.

This is why oblique shows up in some conditionals, in the protasis (“if” clause). This is a proposition for which there is no exact evidence, but it is likely to be true.

Oblique also shows up in persuasive speeches presenting an action that is eminently possible, but for which the speaker doesn’t want to issue an imperative. An imperative (which is deontic modality) would be pretty close to an ultimatum. The speaker who uses an oblique is trying to be persuasive, not arrogant.

Because an oblique is only probable, its negation is mi. I said I would give you a good reason why mi is used for anybody who might fall into a given class and this is it; the speaker is not signing up that 100% of people deserve to have a certain adjective applied to them, but some people do deserve it. The speaker uses ou only when he is sure that the group he is talking about deserves the adjective.

There’s just one more issue with the word tool assignment and that’s for next week.