21st Century Classical Greek -- ktaomai

I apologize for not posting last week, I don’t know where my head was.

Thucydides Book I section 4 is short and has some great grammar.

Μίνως γὰρ παλαίτατος ὧν ἀκοῇ ἴσμεν ναυτικὸν ἐκτήσατο

καὶ τῆς νῦν Ἑλληνικῆς θαλάσσης ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐκράτησε

καὶ τῶν Κυκλάδων νήσων ἦρξέ

τε καὶ οἰκιστὴς πρῶτος τῶν πλείστων ἐγένετο,

Κᾶρας ἐξελάσας καὶ τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ παῖδας ἡγεμόνας ἐγκαταστήσας:

τό τε λῃστικόν, ὡς εἰκός, καθῄρει ἐκ τῆς θαλάσσης ἐφ᾽ ὅσον ἐδύνατο, τοῦ τὰς προσόδους μᾶλλον ἰέναι αὐτῷ.

The first clause is another example of how aspectual languages do not need to specify the copula in an equational sentence: Minos is the most ancient that as to hearing we know possessed a fleet.

Ektisato from ktaomai would seem to be an exception to my claim that -mai verbs evaluate actions. There is a searchable PDF of Middle Liddell online for free, and it shows that there is no alternative non-mai verb with the same nuance of exerting control over a physical object. Remember, translation is not meaning and just because “acquire” is in ML as part of its English for a Greek verb, does not mean that verb is about acting on a physical object. “Acquiring strength” does not use ktaomai, but all the prefixed forms of ktaomai do relate to achieving control of a physical object.

Notice how the first three phrases end with imperfective eventive verbs. These are simple statements of actions. None  of them imply a permanent result; they can’t, because Minos is dead and gone and the lands he ruled are parts of Hellenic polises. By the way, go to Wiktionary and learn polis.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CF%8C%CE%BB%CE%B9%CF%82

The next bit has two personal gerundives for the lesser focus of what Thucydides is saying: a people called the Karians were expelled and Minos’ sons were made rulers.

Then we get the progressive eventive kathirei showing that Minos had to act over and over again against the pirates. It is conjugated and forms the topic of some upcoming text, which makes it important enough to use a conjgated verb for.

Jowett adds into the last part a phrase that is not supported by the text, “from a natural desire.” Learn mala of which mallon is the comparative. Minos would rather the income of his territory come to him – the unexpressed alternative being that the pirates should keep it.

Auto at the end of this section may seem to be reflexive, “to himself,” but it’s not necessarily so. Thucydides is writing about Minos, and it is appropriate for Thucydides to use auto here in the sense of a third person pronoun, “him”. This example straddles the line but what is more important, ienai, of which this is the object, is not in imperfective aspect, let alone in base voice. Remember, base voice in imperfective is what the old grammars call “aorist middle voice”, which is supposedly reflexive. So once again, there’s no evidence for that old claim.

21st Century Classical Greek -- negations 2

Now I can do a second piece on negation based on Section 3. Go through this section and mark all the negatives. Don’t forget oukh, ouden, oude, oudamou, and mide.

δηλοῖ δέ μοι καὶ τόδε τῶν παλαιῶν ἀσθένειαν οὐχ ἥκιστα: πρὸ γὰρ τῶν Τρωικῶν οὐδὲν φαίνεται πρότερον κοινῇ ἐργασαμένη ἡ Ἑλλάς:

[2] δοκεῖ δέ μοι, οὐδὲ τοὔνομα τοῦτο ξύμπασά πω εἶχεν, ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν πρὸ Ἕλληνος τοῦ Δευκαλίωνος καὶ πάνυ οὐδὲ εἶναι ἡ ἐπίκλησις αὕτη, κατὰ ἔθνη δὲ ἄλλα τε καὶ τὸ Πελασγικὸν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν παρέχεσθαι, Ἕλληνος δὲ καὶ τῶν παίδων αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ Φθιώτιδι ἰσχυσάντων, καὶ ἐπαγομένων αὐτοὺς ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ ἐς τὰς ἄλλας πόλεις, καθ᾽ ἑκάστους μὲν ἤδη τῇ ὁμιλίᾳ μᾶλλον καλεῖσθαι Ἕλληνας, οὐ μέντοι πολλοῦ γε χρόνου [ἐδύνατο] καὶ ἅπασιν ἐκνικῆσαι.

[3] τεκμηριοῖ δὲ μάλιστα Ὅμηρος: πολλῷ γὰρ ὕστερον ἔτι καὶ τῶν Τρωικῶν γενόμενος οὐδαμοῦ τοὺς ξύμπαντας ὠνόμασεν, οὐδ᾽ ἄλλους ἢ τοὺς μετ᾽ Ἀχιλλέως ἐκ τῆς Φθιώτιδος, οἵπερ καὶ πρῶτοι Ἕλληνες ἦσαν, Δαναοὺς δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔπεσι καὶ Ἀργείους καὶ Ἀχαιοὺς ἀνακαλεῖ. οὐ μὴν οὐδὲ βαρβάρους εἴρηκε διὰ τὸ μηδὲ Ἕλληνάς πω, ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ, ἀντίπαλον ἐς ἓν ὄνομα ἀποκεκρίσθαι.

[4] οἱ δ᾽ οὖν ὡς ἕκαστοι Ἕλληνες κατὰ πόλεις τε ὅσοι ἀλλήλων ξυνίεσαν καὶ ξύμπαντες ὕστερον κληθέντες οὐδὲν πρὸ τῶν Τρωικῶν δι᾽ ἀσθένειαν καὶ ἀμειξίαν ἀλλήλων ἁθρόοι ἔπραξαν. ἀλλὰ καὶ ταύτην τὴν στρατείαν θαλάσσῃ ἤδη πλείω χρώμενοι ξυνεξῆλθον.

In 3.3 we have dia to mide Hellinas po. This has to be understood as “because of the not being anybody you might call a Hellene up to this time.” The phrase works because of subsection 2, where Mr. T has explained that it took a long time from Hellenos and his sons coming to the peninsula, before everybody there considered themselves Hellenes.

All the other negations in this section use ou and have to be considered as categorical denials.

 

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Quoting out of Context: Worldview

I'm posting this today because in a stroll around the blog, I found it was missing and two links to it blew up. If you don't remember reading it before, my bad.

Quoting out of context usually applies to using part of the words to mean something when what was said actually means something else.  Context also involves the history of the culture, such that urban legends sometimes require the culture to know more than possible when making its laws.  This is the sort of context which shows that tumah cannot equate to hygiene.

There’s also a context of worldview.  I discussed earlier that American and British law have a number of general principles in common, and American law is built on the same basis of common law as modern British law.  But they don’t handle all situations alike, and I discussed this in the context of when it is legal for police to run somebody over to the station.

The same thing is true for Jewish law.  I already discussed how the populace or their representatives don’t get to change Torah or which parts of Torah shall be observed, nor can a majority of non-Orthodox Jews affect Orthodox practice.

Some of you who know something of Jewish history may object.  For example, Torah clearly envisions the possibility of a man having more than one wife, but in medieval times Jewish courts ruled to prohibit that.  It goes deeper.  Leviticus clearly envisions people eating certain insects, but the subject doesn’t come up in Deuteronomy and Mishnah prohibits all insects because we’re not sure which ones known today fit under the four specific names in Leviticus.

The difference is, that these are permissions, not requirements or prohibitions.  Nothing in Torah says a man has to marry more than one wife to make sure of progeny, at least, not at the same time.  They can be serial wives. 

The Jewish worldview is summed up pretty well in Deuteronomy 7:6-7 and 30:11-14 which rejects principles used in a number of cultures.

·         Miracles.  For millennia after Torah was written down, cultures still governed themselves by miracles or those near relatives, omens or political astrology.  Johannes Kepler was a government astrologer and he lived to 1630 CE.  In Deuteronomy 30:12 Moshe rejected miracles, which are inherently unfair because they can result in different judgments for two cases with the same facts.

·         Heroic deeds.  In Deuteronomy 30:13, Moshe says “nobody has to cross the seas to bring Torah back to you.”  It would be unfair to hold courts hostage to dangerous enterprises.  This is rather similar to the medieval trial by ordeal; everybody knows that Guinevere and Lancelot had an affair, but Lancelot was such a mighty warrior that nobody could prevail against him, and so while other unfaithful wives like Iseult died, Guinevere lived and reigned.

·         Might makes right, and its modern counterpart majority rule.  I sometimes tell people who think Judaism should change, “Judaism is not a popularity contest.”  The Chosen People concept in Deuteronomy 7:6-7 explicitly says the “choosing” did not depend on number or military power.  Majority rule only applies in a courtroom, and then only among the judges, who would not be judging the case except that they are experts.  Other examples of the minority holding fast to Judaism include Gideon using only 300 men against the Midianites, and the small number of people allied to the Hasmoneans who defeated the Syrians.

Historically, cultures that used these principles have risen and fallen while the Jews looked on and saw that nothing had changed in human nature; people kept running after the famous and the popular and then being disillusioned when the fame or the popularity ended.

So when popular culture wonders why Judaism remains so “backward,” – that comes from  people who confuse their modern worldview with the only worldview that works.  It’s a short-sighted, historically uneducated point of view.  It shows neither wisdom nor expertise.  It’s not worth getting agitated about.  When parlamentarianism and popular-suffrage democracy have survived 35 centuries, then there will be something to consider.  And if Judaism has also survived, then it will have 70 centuries of experience under its belt.  And so on.

Knitting -- another tradition?

Use your search engine with "knitting Andalusian stitch" and then in another tab or whatever, search for "double Andalusian stitch". When you have both of them, add "in the round". On one of the Youtube videos, the instructor lives in Spain, so maybe the stitch name is authentically Spanish. 

I used Sirdar Cashmere Merino Silk yarn in "Society Pink", a pale dusty rose. I used double Andalusian stitch to get this waffle pattern. I think it works best in DK or sport weight; fingering would mean a denser texture and with worsted, you have other texture styles like aran. 

It's a 3-stitch repeat in 4 rows. Working in the round, you knit rows 1, 2 and 4. Row 3 is K1 P2. Working in the flat, rows 2 and 4 are purled.

I cast on 240 stitches to size 4 circular needles with a 24 inch tether. At the underarms, I did seed stitch for 8 stitches and then bound off the middle 4 stitches, using the outside ones for a seed-stitch selvage for the armholes. 

I needed 7 balls to get 100 rounds below the armpits. The result is blocky; you probably want to do 110-120 rounds below the armpits and you should be able to get 110 with 7 balls, 120 if you're smaller than me and don't need more than 200 stitches per round.

I made matching socks, as usual, which took one ball per sock; I had to do 30 rounds in the cuff instead of the 40 in my pattern. 

Sirdar sells similar blends under different names with different sets of colors. In "Snuggly" baby yarn they have Piglet which is a pale peach, Prince Charming which is a French blue, and Snow Queen. Prince Charming should make a nice French type Jersey in stockinette with the horizontal stripes in Snow Queen. Work it as a bottom-up raglan with a wide boatneck; you'll need as many as 10 balls, 5 of each, depending on whether you make full-length or three-quarter sleeves. 

While we're talking Spanish knitting patterns, here's a modern mantilla made with traditional stitches:

https://knitty.com/ISSUEss12/FEATss12EK.php

And here's a lace edging pattern:

https://www.knitting-and.com/crafts-and-needlework/knitting/patterns/lace/spanish-lace/

Here's a transcribed pattern for an overall lace:

http://www.knittingfool.com/StitchIndex/StitchDetail.aspx?StitchID=816

Here it is used in a coverall:

https://mariettesbacktobasics.blogspot.com/2012/04/cotton-ajour-sweater-with-lace-effect.html#axzz2qAOzgXFt

This is by Mario (Men Who Knit)

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/faux-spanish-lace

The page 17 "Spanish Mantilla" here is just an Old Shale worked large. Some websites speculate that both Fair Isle and Shetland lace started with Spanish patterns derived from the Spanish Armada. Since traditional knitting patterns are handed down in the female line (except maybe for German socks), this would require not only that women were aboard the armada (yeah, Philip II put women aboard planning for his soldiers not to interbreed with British women), but also that they survived the wreck. Modern archaeology suggests the Armada survivors washed up on socially and environmentally inhospitable shores. Another myth shot down.

https://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/pub/PDF/6-JA038Corticelli18.pdf

If you have some real traditional Spanish knitting patterns, including lace, send me a link to your blog.

21st Century Classical Greek -- suppletives

Go through Book I, 3.4, and mark all the things you have learned about.

οἱ δ᾽ οὖν ὡς ἕκαστοι Ἕλληνες κατὰ πόλεις τε ὅσοι ἀλλήλων ξυνίεσαν καὶ ξύμπαντες ὕστερον κληθέντες οὐδὲν πρὸ τῶν Τρωικῶν δι᾽ ἀσθένειαν καὶ ἀμειξίαν ἀλλήλων ἁθρόοι ἔπραξαν. ἀλλὰ καὶ ταύτην τὴν στρατείαν θαλάσσῃ ἤδη πλείω χρώμενοι ξυνεξῆλθον.

Now click on that last word, ksunekshlthon, and then click on “Middle Liddell” to see the dictionary entry.

At the top it says “Dep.”

This is an abbreviation for “deponent”, a Latin term for a word that doesn’t have an “active” voice, as if it were defective somehow.

When you look at the top of the box, you see sunekserkhomai; it’s a -mai verb. All -mai verbs are marked deponent in the dictionary.

But Thucydides is not evaluating the going or coming out accompanied by somebody. Khromenoi describes the action of a sort of oracle proclaiming it was time for the Greeks to learn to be good sailors. In a sense, the Greeks were fated to become good sailors.

Now copy sunekserkhomai, paste it into Wiktionary, and get rid of the two prefixes so that all you have left is erkhomai. Now hit enter. Make sure you have the page for Ancient Greek that has Usage Notes in the middle. This describes what erkhomai really is: not a deponent, but a suppletive.

A suppletive uses different roots in different parts of its conjugation. This page lists the various roots, some of which look like abbreviations of others.

Erkhomai isn’t really a -mai verb in the sense of having no executive voice. It’s a suppletive with executive voice in those parts of the conjugation which it borrows from non-mai roots. This is that exception I told you about a long time ago, to the distinction between -mai and non-mai verbs.

Learn erkhomai and also learn eimi, “come, go” (you already learned eimi “be”). There’s another important verb in this subsection, epraksan from prasso, but only learn that if you have some brain cells left when you’ve learned the other two.

Thucydides’ last point about the Hellenes not working together for common goals, is that they had to learn seamanship before they could engage in the Trojan War. We all know that the siege of Wilusa took 20 years, which is not exactly a sea engagement. What does Thucydides mean? We won’t find that out until section 11.

21st Century Classical Greek -- perfective!

Book I 3.3 is another long section to parse out.

τεκμηριοῖ δὲ μάλιστα Ὅμηρος: “the best evidence is Homer” (notice that this is an equational clause with no verb for the copula)

πολλῷ γὰρ ὕστερον ἔτι καὶ τῶν Τρωικῶν γενόμενος  “for much later yet, the Trojan [War] happening…”

οὐδαμοῦ τοὺς ξύμπαντας ὠνόμασεν, οὐδ᾽ ἄλλους ἢ τοὺς μετ᾽ Ἀχιλλέως ἐκ τῆς Φθιώτιδος,

οἵπερ καὶ πρῶτοι Ἕλληνες ἦσαν, “the whole had no name, except that those with Achilleos from Phthiotis, who were the first Hellenes…”

Δαναοὺς δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔπεσι καὶ Ἀργείους καὶ Ἀχαιοὺς ἀνακαλεῖ. “Danaans in the epics and Argives and Achaeans was the name…”

οὐ μὴν οὐδὲ βαρβάρους εἴρηκε διὰ τὸ μηδὲ Ἕλληνάς πω,  “not truly [that there] was no barbarian but because there was no Hellene yet…”

ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ, ἀντίπαλον ἐς ἓν ὄνομα ἀποκεκρίσθαι. “as it seems to me, oppositely by name to be set apart.”

Yes, that’s Homer in that first line. Thucydides knows that his audience of educated men have Homer at their fingertips. Nowadays we would cite to Herodotus, if he said anything about the Trojan war that we could use at a place like this, but for Mr T, Herodotus was not hallowed by time, being only a couple of decades older than Thucydides. Herodotus also drew on Homer so Thucydides, even if he had read Herodotus, would have gone for the writer both of them accepted as an authority.

Learn polus from which we get pollo here; see White, page 230, section  753. You might as well learn megas while you’re there.

Click on apokekristhai. Just from inspection you know it’s an impersonal gerundive in base voice. The word tool will tell you it’s “perfect tense”; that means it goes in our perfective conceptual slot in our aspect table. The -ke- is the reduplication used in Attic Greek in perfective aspect. It does not appear in any other Greek dialect.

The use of perfective aspect is to talk about something with permanent results. In this case, the distinction between Greek and barbarian persisted to Thucydides’ time. He regards the distinction as something that simply came about, instead of being deliberately adopted.

Modern archaeology tells us that “Achaeans” is a version of Ahiyyawa, the Hittite name for the people who were not autochthonous Cretans but lived in the Palace Culture and went a-viking around 1200 BCE. To the Egyptians, this same people were known as Peleshet, and they are listed on Ramses III’s Medinet Habu inscription about the Sea Peoples. If you’re wondering why that looks so much like Pelishtim in Biblical Hebrew, well, yes, they are the same people. Their immersion in Kretan culture led to Linear B being their writing system, until they settled on the west coast of the Mediterranean and learned Ugaritic cuneiform. About 1180 BCE, they helped destroy Ugarit.

“Danaans”, on the other hand, refers to an element of the Sea Peoples listed as Denyen on Ramses III’s inscription. Other elements were the Sikila, the Sherden (Sardinians), Weshesh (Oscians), and Teresh (Etruscans). The Sikila and Sherden settled north of the Pelishtim and, with the indigenous people, formed the Phoenicians.

Argos was inhabited by “Pelasgians”, showing that the Peloponnese adopted and adapted the Egyptian Peleshet. By Homer’s time, the term “Cretan Iaones” was also used and invocations are made to Pelasgian Zeus in the Iliad. The original god of the Peleshet/Ahiyyawa, however, was Apaliunas (Apollo), according to a reference in one of the Hittite letters that dates before the destruction of Wilusa (Ilion, Troy) by the Sea Peoples.