21st Century Classical Greek -- identifying aorist 2

So I got a new laptop after wearing out the keyboard on my old one, and I restored files from external backup – and I couldn’t find a lesson on Section 6. Here’s the text. Mark up whatever is familiar and then I’ll point out some things.

πᾶσα γὰρ ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἐσιδηροφόρει διὰ τὰς ἀφάρκτους τε οἰκήσεις καὶ οὐκ ἀσφαλεῖς παρ᾽ ἀλλήλους ἐφόδους, καὶ ξυνήθη τὴν δίαιταν μεθ᾽ ὅπλων ἐποιήσαντο ὥσπερ οἱ βάρβαροι.

[2] σημεῖον δ᾽ ἐστὶ ταῦτα τῆς Ἑλλάδος ἔτι οὕτω νεμόμενα τῶν ποτὲ καὶ ἐς πάντας ὁμοίων διαιτημάτων.

[3] ἐν τοῖς πρῶτοι δὲ Ἀθηναῖοι τόν τε σίδηρον κατέθεντο καὶ ἀνειμένῃ τῇ διαίτῃ ἐς τὸ τρυφερώτερον μετέστησαν. καὶ οἱ πρεσβύτεροι αὐτοῖς τῶν εὐδαιμόνων διὰ τὸ ἁβροδίαιτον οὐ πολὺς χρόνος ἐπειδὴ χιτῶνάς τε λινοῦς ἐπαύσαντο φοροῦντες καὶ χρυσῶν τεττίγων ἐνέρσει κρωβύλον ἀναδούμενοι τῶν ἐν τῇ κεφαλῇ τριχῶν: ἀφ᾽ οὗ καὶ Ἰώνων τοὺς πρεσβυτέρους κατὰ τὸ ξυγγενὲς ἐπὶ πολὺ αὕτη ἡ σκευὴ κατέσχεν.

[4] μετρίᾳ δ᾽ αὖ ἐσθῆτι καὶ ἐς τὸν νῦν τρόπον πρῶτοι Λακεδαιμόνιοι ἐχρήσαντο καὶ ἐς τὰ ἄλλα πρὸς τοὺς πολλοὺς οἱ τὰ μείζω κεκτημένοι ἰσοδίαιτοι μάλιστα κατέστησαν.

[5] ἐγυμνώθησάν τε πρῶτοι καὶ ἐς τὸ φανερὸν ἀποδύντες λίπα μετὰ τοῦ γυμνάζεσθαι ἠλείψαντο: τὸ δὲ πάλαι καὶ ἐν τῷ Ὀλυμπικῷ ἀγῶνι διαζώματα ἔχοντες περὶ τὰ αἰδοῖα οἱ ἀθληταὶ ἠγωνίζοντο, καὶ οὐ πολλὰ ἔτη ἐπειδὴ πέπαυται. ἔτι δὲ καὶ ἐν τοῖς βαρβάροις ἔστιν οἷς νῦν, καὶ μάλιστα τοῖς Ἀσιανοῖς, πυγμῆς καὶ πάλης ἆθλα τίθεται, καὶ διεζωμένοι τοῦτο δρῶσιν.

[6] πολλὰ δ᾽ ἂν καὶ ἄλλα τις ἀποδείξειε τὸ παλαιὸν Ἑλληνικὸν ὁμοιότροπα τῷ νῦν βαρβαρικῷ διαιτώμενον.

Sentence 2 illustrates the difference between Thucydides and Jowett. Thucydides is recording his thoughts as if he were speaking them out in the agora, that is, in oral mode; he puts the topic first to connect what he says to the previous sentence. Jowett reverses this order. If I haven’t said it before, I’ll say it now: Thucydides knew that if you don’t put the connection first, by the time you state that it is a connection, you have lost the attention of your audience who are wondering why you are talking about this. The difference in syntax between Greek and English is no excuse for what Jowett does.

The last word in sentence 4 is from an important class of verbs called “aorist 2”. The root is histimi. “Aorist 2” is not just a morphological label; this class of verbs has a special use that no other morphology applies to. I’m going to spend the next few lessons on this subject because it supports a structure that, as far as Google results show, hasn’t been studied before.

As I said, I am renaming the “optative” as an uncertainty epistemic, bringing it in-line with 21^st century terminology. So in sentence 6 we have one:

πολλὰ δ᾽ ἂν καὶ ἄλλα τις ἀποδείξειε τὸ παλαιὸν Ἑλληνικὸν ὁμοιότροπα τῷ νῦν βαρβαρικῷ διαιτώμενον.

Most people who have studied Greek before would pick up on the particle an and say that this is a conditional. But an can mean “that, who, which, such that”, the same as ei in indirect discourse is not “if”, it’s “whether”.

Here an is part of an idiom, “much that might point to the ancient Hellenes is identical to the current habits of the barbarian.”

Thucydides seems to have a suspicion that there’s a link between old Greek customs and current Persian customs. In fact Persia is an Indo-Iranian culture and there has to be some link – but it’s so far back in time that the vocabularies have important distinctions. Thucydides didn’t know that, but he was smart enough to realize that most of his audience hadn’t done the homework he had done, and wouldn’t agree that the hated Persians have anything in common with them.

 

 

DIY – meat substitutes

DIY is partly about if you can’t find it on the grocery shelf in something close to its natural state, you don’t use it, and you find some other way to deal with the situation. Sustainability is another issue: the great thing about making your own yogurt is you can chain batches instead of buying another box of culture tablets. The first thing you need to know about meat substitutes is the chemical content, because the amount of non-grocery chemicals you need affects whether they can be produced sustainably.

So. There are plenty of recipes out there for black bean hamburger substitute and white bean poultry substitute, and I recommend them. We can all use more beans in our diet for the fiber. They are even pretty good on iron.

There are also recipes for tempeh, seitan and tofu. These can be more trouble. You can find  black beans and white beans in the store, but what about the ingredients for tempeh and so forth.

So I started with the best known meat substitute, tofu. And Google turned up a recipe from a company where I bought yogurt culture. And what do I see? You have to start with soy milk.

OK sure, you can find this on your grocery shelf, but is it sustainable? No. The rage for soy milk is destroying forests.

https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/soya/

So before you try to make your own tofu, you need a substantial source of soybeans, and that means having an impact on the environment.

Tempeh is also made from soybeans.

Dairy cows are fed soybeans, but soybeans are not necessary, to feed dairy cows. The German tribes who beat up on Quinctilius Varus over 2000 years ago did not have soy beans. Their cattle also did not have broad pastures sown with clover and whatnot. Or silage. They grazed on mast, the natural product of the vast German forests. If you have a multi-function farm today that includes fruit trees, you can give the dropsies to your cows. You can’t use them yourselves; the risk from E. coli is too great, as a juice factory once found out. You can also grow sugar beets and when you have processed them for sugar, you can feed the refuse to any animal on the place, including poultry. In the 1800s, England started using mangel wurzel, AKA fodder beet, to feed cattle. The Jewish Mishnah speaks of raising “pumpkins”, some kind of gourd, as cattle feed. And dairy cows put out fertilizer that hardly needs to be composted. You can’t get that from soybeans.

Seitan is different; it’s made from wheat gluten. Which means, if you’re gluten-intolerant or otherwise cutting gluten from your diet, you don’t want to eat seitan. What’s more, the gluten is only part of the protein content in wheat. Wheat is 7-22% protein by dry weight, and the gluten is 70-75% of that. So only 5-17% of your wheat grains wind up in your seitan. A pound of wheat can make a one pound loaf of bread, but you get less than 3 ounces of seitan from that same pound of wheat. And first you would have to do all the work of separating the gluten from the rest of the wheat.

Now, some of you are saying that meat substitutes can be healthier than meat, but here’s something else you probably don’t know.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/7-nutrients-you-cant-get-from-plants

If you’re not getting them in the plants, how do you get them? That’s right, supplements. Chemical products. Or by-products of the meat or dairy industries. Highly processed. Probably processed using petroleum, if they aren’t made out of petroleum, like the paraffin in Cool Whip. And you wouldn’t have to buy the supplements if you ate only 2 ounces of meat every few days. Alternated with eggs and fish, sustainably grown or caught. IOW your quarter-pounder is twice the amount of meat you need to get these nutrients, and your Big Mac is an even bigger problem.

So tell me again: why would you refuse to dial back on meat but insist on using unsustainable chemically enhanced substitutes that wouldn’t exist without factories running on petroleum?

Oh and ICYMI, almond milk has its own pros and cons.

21st Century Classical Greek -- analyzing verbs

Section 5.3 has some other interesting grammar. 

ἐλῄζοντο δὲ καὶ κατ᾽ ἤπειρον ἀλλήλους.καὶ μέχρι τοῦδε πολλὰ τῆς Ἑλλάδος τῷ παλαιῷ τρόπῳ νέμεται περί τε Λοκροὺς τοὺς Ὀζόλας καὶ Αἰτωλοὺς καὶ Ἀκαρνᾶνας καὶ τὴν ταύτῃ ἤπειρον. τό τε σιδηροφορεῖσθαι τούτοις τοῖς ἠπειρώταις ἀπὸ τῆς παλαιᾶς λῃστείας ἐμμεμένηκεν:

Learn mekhri.

Sidiroforeisthai is a base voice (non-deliberate) progressive conceptual (habitual) i.g. It is partly nouny, “a habit of bearing arms”, as shown by the to article referring to it. Doing this among mainlanders was a relic of ancient piracy.

You might know the term sidereal as having to do with the stars. In Greek, using sidiro- in terms of weapons implies iron weapons, in what some scholars would claim is the Bronze Age. That’s based on outdated information.

About the time the Indo-Europeans started to form in Anatolia, people there were picking up meteoric iron and using it for things like personal ornaments. That’s the source of sidero- in this word.

At the same time, the copper ore they were digging and refining was mixed with iron, tin, and arsenic. Smelting it to get the copper naturally produced both tin and arsenic bronze. Part of the refuse was iron “bloom”. Ruth Russo proposes that this was used for small implements and weapons, such as iron arrowheads, and that’s how references to iron got into the Iliad. But the Iliad is a narrative with its origins in the 1100s BCE. Archaeology shows that smelted iron was already in use by 2000 BCE and that carbon steel turns up in the 1800s BCE. So the oral narrative behind the Iliad owes part of its origin to a time when both bronze and steel were in use.

Finally, let’s look at emmemeniken. All the word tool entries come from the perfective; it’s deliberate, it’s definite, but is it eventive or conceptual?

If I hold that sidiroforeisthai is its antecedent, then it has to be conceptual, which is singular.

If I hold that toutois tois ipeirotais is its antecedent, then it can be eventive, which is plural. But with the -ois case, emmeniken means be true “to X” and we are not talking about being true to the mainlanders, we are talking about being true to a custom.

That’s why you have to study the whole lexicon entry – so as not to miss details like this.

Knitting -- brioche correction

I think I gave you a bum steer in a brioche posting. The really good video for one-color brioche in the round is this one, with good sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy4oGGfQako

She makes two things clear. One is that after the setup round, you bring the yarn to the front and slip the first stitch, and then wrap the yarn the whole way around the needle. This provides a YO for the slipped stitch. Then the yarn is in front so you can PURL the next two together.

When you finish that round, you take the yarn to the back. You are faced with a YO and a stitch that you slipped in the previous round. Knit those two together, YO, and slip the next stitch purlwise. This stitch that you just slipped is the result of a P2TOG on the previous round.

I made lots of mistakes because I was trying to do the K2TOG, bringing the yarn between the needle holding the two stitches and the previous purlwise slip. You have to take it around that slip stitch to create the YO that maintains your stitch count.

The other mistake I almost made early on a sock was I dropped a YO. I had to wrassle the yarn back into place before I could do the K2TOG at that location. Before you do ANY TOG, make sure one stitch is a YO.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- partial answer

So here is a partial answer to my challenge last time. I said find Mishnayot that use nun-final verbs and see if Talmud changes them to mem-final, for things that take place only in the temple or during the temple period which ended in 70 CE.  The experts among you may have jumped directly to Tractate Yoma. (We who follow the Daf Yomi cycle just finished reading it.)

Mishnah Yoma 1:3 tells how the elders would take aside the kohen involved in the Yom Kippur service and read the service to him in case he was uneducated. The Gemara is daf 18a in Bavli. And in both places it uses qorin. And some of you said to yourselves, but the kohen didn’t do a Yom Kippur sacrifice after the temple was destroyed.

Having read that, others of you are saying, but we have a kohen duchan on Yom Kippur. He gives that hand sign before the ark. (The one that Leonard Nimoy used for his Vulcan sign of greeting.)

The verb in Talmud shows that priests were still involved in the Yom Kippur service. While the Mishnah admits that even when the temple stood, there could be uneducated priests, the Talmud endorses that. It’s a qal va-chomer or a fortiori argument: if when the full culture was up and running some priests might be uneducated, how much more so would this be true after the Hadrianic persecutions?

Mishnah Yoma 1:7 also has people reading to the priest from works that will keep him awake. This prevents him from becoming a baal qeri and having to go to the mikveh. This is on Yoma 18b in Talmud and once again, the nun-final form is preserved. Taharut applied even after the destruction of the temple; every Jewish community has a mikveh somewhere. I can’t tell you if anybody takes it on themselves to keep the kohen awake after Kol Nidre. What I can tell you is that some synagogues are miles from the closest mikveh and as Shabbat Shabbaton, Yom Kippur has the same driving restriction as Shabbat.

So there is another example of how ignoring the cultural and historical context could have led you down the garden path to a mistaken conclusion while you tried to prove I was wrong. Now I’ll get better results from you.

Oh yeah. Jerusalem Talmud has the same spellings on Yoma 6b and 7b.

21st Century Classical Greek -- reported speech

Thucydides Book I section 5.2 starts with a verb you were supposed to learn. Stop and review it if you don’t recognize the form.

δηλοῦσι δὲ τῶν τε ἠπειρωτῶν τινὲς ἔτι καὶ νῦν, οἷς κόσμος καλῶς τοῦτο δρᾶν, καὶ οἱ παλαιοὶ τῶν ποιητῶν τὰς πύστεις τῶν καταπλεόντων πανταχοῦ ὁμοίως ἐρωτῶντες εἰ λῃσταί εἰσιν, ὡς οὔτε ὧν πυνθάνονται ἀπαξιούντων τὸ ἔργον, οἷς τε ἐπιμελὲς εἴη εἰδέναι οὐκ ὀνειδιζόντων.

The grammarians claim that reported speech always uses the same “tense” as the original speech. Last week I pointed out how reporting speech by tense can lead to an inaccurate report, but reporting speech by aspect is more accurate.

Actually in this subsection we have a reported question, but the same rule applies: Thucydides is reporting a past event when people living on the litoral were in the habit of asking anybody who made landfall whether they were in the habit of pirates.

And here we have our third level of certainty, eii [eidenai]. Thucydides is not signing up that the questioners wanted to know if they were under threat. The modality related to investment in the truth of a statement is epistemic.

Biblical Hebrew has two epistemic morphologies, one for certainty and one for uncertainty. The certainty epistemic shows up in the creation narrative and the one about making the tabernacle. A narrator can’t use this form unless his audience has tangible or cultural evidence of the truth of what the narrator says. The truth of the creation narrative lies in the evidence of Gd in His works. The truth of the tabernacle narrative lies in an audience that has a tabernacle before them – some time before the Pelishtim attacked Shiloh and stole the ark of the covenant. The uncertainty epistemic is widely used in giving orders or commandments; it gives the commander the option of refusing to punish people who don’t carry out the command. This is important in Deuteronomy where for the first time, Judaism expresses the out that a person might not have learned Fear of Heaven and that, in addition to four outs expressesd in Leviticus 5, means that either an earthly court or a Heavenly court might refuse to punish them.

In Classical Greek, an indicative verb is as certain as it gets. The epistemic here is as uncertain as it gets. Why would the people ask if they didn’t think they were under threat? Well, everybody went a-viking in those days, so they were’t casting moral aspersions. They just wanted to know the habits of the newcomers.

So now, one of Goodwin’s categories of conditionals has ei plus an epistemic, the dreaded “future less vivid”. In 21^st century terms, it’s a “condition in the truth of which the speaker has not invested.” If there was an apodosis, it would be an plus another epistemic. This makes sense because if you’re not sure the protasis occurred, it’s impossible to be sure the apodosis occurred.

Goodwin points out that an imperfective conceptual epistemic cannot be used in either protasis or apodosis, except in reported speech or questions, and then the structure would have to be eventive plus whatever plus ei plus i.c.epistemic plus an plus i.c.epistemic, if the original speech used i.c. indicative. What sense does that make?

Well, it doesn’t. Remember I said that the idea of substituting one aspect or flavor for another fails because there are strict usage lines between them. The same is true for modality. So if the reported speech uses an epistemic in the protasis and apodosis, the original speech used them too. That only makes sense. You meet a stranger, you ask “are you a pirate”, you can’t be sure they are and you don’t want to arrogantly imply that you know all about them.

With an original i.c. indicative, the speech would be “if I promise to do this, then you have to promise to do that.” The reporter can’t turn this into an epistemic because that would invalidate the reporter’s credibility; if he’s not invested in accurately reporting what was said, what is he even talking about?

So now go through Goodwin or Smyth or whatever reference you are using, and black out all the notes on reported speech that have “tenses” converting back and forth. It doesn’t happen in aspectual usage. Now you have more brain cells freed up for other things.

There’s more to the epistemic and I’ll discuss it when I get an example.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- They knew.

So I was studying Talmud and as usual I noticed something I didn’t see before. I thought about it and came up with a solution but those of you who have followed my 21^st century Biblical Hebrew blog or the language portion of my Fact-checking blog will have to look closer.

In every edition of Mishnah that I’ve looked at (davka, Blackman, Mechon Mamre, Sefaria) Mishnah Berakhot 1:1 has several nun-sofit verbs. I explained them as “this is what you ought to do”, and I pointed out that I find mem-sofit verbs in case reports. My conclusion was that the nun-sofit verbs are a follow-on from the uncertainty epistemic in Biblical Hebrew, which is used in a lot of the commandments, especially in Deuteronomy. The mem-sofits in the case studies are things that already actually happened, so there’s no uncertainty about them.

So then that same Mishnah quote in Talmud in every one of those editions (except Blackman, he didn’t edit Talmud) has neekhalim, where Mishnah in non-Talmud versions has neekhalin. Is there a reason?

If you listen to academics like the one I give a link to below, people who spoke Hebrew either had two letters for the same sound, or their scribes didn’t know what they were doing. Or that’s what his sources (other academics) suggest to him. None of them knew anything about the 21^st century description of Biblical Hebrew grammar, and we’ve seen that  “don’t know what they’re doing” argument before.

What’s my answer? Look at all the nun-final forms in Mishnah and see how many change to mem-final in Talmud. Again, Berakhot Mishnah 1:1 has part of the answer. It has qorin because you’re supposed to say shema. Talmud keeps qorin. Why?

Because the law on saying Shema was still in effect in Talmudic times. But while the second temple existed during most of Mishnaic times and the eating of terumah (neekhalin) was still supposed to be done, by Talmudic times the temple no longer existed. Any discussion of eating terumah was historical in nature, like the case reports that use mem-final forms.

Go ahead. Here’s the test procedure.

-- Pick a chapter or tractate of Mishnah. Make a list of all the nun-final verbs. Verify from the context that this is something people are supposed to do. Record the citation so you can find it in Talmud. Remember, there is no Gemara on some tractates of Mishnah so there will be no corresponding tractate in Talmud.

-- Add two columns. For each verb, study the legal context. If it applied only to temple operations or was required only during the temple period, mark one column. Otherwise mark the other column. An example of something not done inside the temple that only happened during the temple period would be farmers paying m’ilah for using the diluted blood of sacrifices as fertilizer.

-- Now go to the quotes of Mishnah in Talmud and record what Talmud uses. The ones unrelated to the temple should all still have nun-final forms. If they have mem, you probably misunderstood halakhah or missed that the context gives the verb a different meaning. But I do need to know about these. One you correct for this issue, the ones related to the temple should now have mem-final forms.

There used to be this idea that Hebrew used nun-final forms under the influence of Aramaic, although I can’t find my sources that said so on the Internet. Hebrew supposedly was evolving to drop mem-final in favor of nun-final. The change from neekhalin to neekhalim, with preservation of qorin, says otherwise.

So once again we have academics who haven’t sufficiently studied the sources saying things that are picked up by later academics who also don’t study the sources enough, and so the urban legends roll down the years.

 

Qumran Hebrew: An Overview of Orthography, Phonology, and Morphology

By Eric D. Reymond 2014

https://books.google.com/books?id=bmoYAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=later+hebrew+language+final+mem+replaced+by+final+nun+Influence+of+aramaic+-wikipedia+-sript&source=bl&ots=Ms5nNePtF_&sig=ACfU3U2PmlbGuimxtEQCPmle4r5GOql0jA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiHgYCehtHxAhXZW80KHUp7BK0Q6AEwBXoECBUQAw#v=onepage&q=later%20hebrew%20language%20final%20mem%20replaced%20by%20final%20nun%20Influence%20of%20aramaic%20-wikipedia%20-sript&f=false

21st Century Classical Greek -- have, carry

Thucydides Book I section 5.1 is kind of long and has lots of words you should recognize.

οἱ γὰρ Ἕλληνες τὸ πάλαι καὶ τῶν βαρβάρων οἵ τε ἐν τῇ ἠπείρῳ παραθαλάσσιοι καὶ ὅσοι νήσους εἶχον, ἐπειδὴ ἤρξαντο μᾶλλον περαιοῦσθαι ναυσὶν ἐπ᾽ ἀλλήλους, ἐτράποντο πρὸς λῃστείαν, ἡγουμένων ἀνδρῶν οὐ τῶν ἀδυνατωτάτων κέρδους τοῦ σφετέρου αὐτῶν ἕνεκα καὶ τοῖς ἀσθενέσι τροφῆς, καὶ προσπίπτοντες πόλεσιν ἀτειχίστοις καὶ κατὰ κώμας οἰκουμέναις ἥρπαζον καὶ τὸν πλεῖστον τοῦ βίου ἐντεῦθεν ἐποιοῦντο, οὐκ ἔχοντός πω αἰσχύνην τούτου τοῦ ἔργου, φέροντος δέ τι καὶ δόξης μᾶλλον:

Go to Wiktionary and learn ekho. “Have” is a high-frequency verb in every language.

If you are in the mood, also learn fero, “carry”, and notice that while it is not marked as a suppletive, it’s a mish-mash of roots.

So Thucydides uses a bunch of progressive eventive base voice verbs conjugated in indicative modality, to show that the viking habit existed among both Hellenes and non-Hellenes, whether they lived on the mainland or in the isldands.

They were led by courageous men who made clients (in the Roman Imperial sense) out of the weak. Thucydides gives the impression that the hunter-gatherers went a-viking but, however, it doesn’t explain how there was anything for them to steal or share out to their clients. Hunter-gatherer cultures are notoriously subsistence cultures. In modern times, even if they can get farmed products, they still have a high rate of hunger.

In subsection 2 we have our first example of what the grammars call indirect speech, but which I am going to call reported speech. All the grammars say that reported speech and questions use the same tense as the original. This is another cognitive dissonance; it implies that being true to the original speech was more important than for the speaker to accurately report events. If the original speech was in present tense, “I am conquering Macedonia”, the reported speech that arrives some days later in the agora could be inaccurate, because by then the attacker could have been defeated.

But when we change to aspect, the original speech is “I am taking action to arrive at the conquest of Macedonia,” and the audience in the agora days later understand this as actions taken to create a situation, not as something that is happening at the time they hear about it. The verb does not change aspect. But the context might include expressions reflecting the time it took the messenger to get to the agora.

So what did Pheidippides really say when he got to Athins to report the victory at Marathon? We’ll never know. The story in Herodotus only covers Pheidippides asking the Spartans for help, not running to Athins and reporting a victory. The oldest surviving story about reporting to Athins is from Plutarch, 400 years later, and he gives the runner a different name. The name and story come together in a work written in the 100s CE by Lucian, a Roman from Mesopotamia. His native language was Syriac, a form of Aramaic (or rather Neo-Babylonian, giving it the 21^st century name), and his Greek was what they taught and wrote from about 65 CE to 230 CE.

All of this is a perfect example of an oral narrative and its progress through literary works. Each of these authors picked up the oral narrative and wrote down what he got. Calling them liars shows the ignorance of literate people about how oralate literature works. We used to call it ethnocentrism – when we were being diplomatic.