21st century Classical Greek -- benefit, topic order

Book I section 13.2 lets me show how translators ruin themselves, by disrupting structures in the source document.

φαίνεται δὲ καὶ Σαμίοις Ἀμεινοκλῆς Κορίνθιος ναυπηγὸς ναῦς ποιήσας τέσσαρας: ἔτη δ᾽ ἐστὶ μάλιστα τριακόσια ἐς τὴν τελευτὴν τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ὅτε Ἀμεινοκλῆς Σαμίοις ἦλθεν.

You can see that the bolded word is in the -ois case. This is what Goodwin calls “benefit”; Ameinoklis built ships for the Samians. It’s another example of how case labels don’t work for every language. In Russian you would say dlya X and X would be in the genitive. In Biblical Hebrew, the preposition for benefit, l’, is also the marker for a purpose clause using an aspectless verb (formerly known as “infinitive”). And it is used in the “have” idiom, yesh l’X, which in Russian is u nego X.

Here is that note that I said showed that Thucydides edited his work at the end of the war. When he started writing, he could not know when the end of the Peloponnesian war would be. Granted that even though the war lasted 30 years, it’s a negligible percentage of 300, nearly as negligible as if the war had ended in only a couple of years as most people probably thought it would at the time. Thucydides tries to be precise, although his grammar shows he can’t be precise everywhere. I doubt he wrote this line sequentially with everything else. He was re-reading his material at the end of the war and, careful as he is, he put this note in to make sure people knew that he knew that Ameinocles didn’t build ships for the current war but for a much earlier one.

Thucydides is speaking of the Lelantine war of the 700s BCE between Miletus and Samos. Despite having the latest in military technology, the Samians lost. “Everybody knows” the Trojan War happened before that and so we are closing in on the replacement of kings by tyrants as happening before the 700s. Cypselus took power in Korinth in the 600s BCE. This is why Thucydides has to use progressive aspect in subsection 1.

The second clause in this subsection, eti d’ esti, is in topic order. Thucydides tells you the important fact and then tells you how it relates to the start of the subsection.

Topic order material is a sign of oral presentation; this is the order in which Thucydides thinks of things. Jowett the literate says “he went to Samos” first and then gives the chronological inforrmation.

This disrupts Thucydides’ well-rounded period, a term in a 1766 letter by an educated man named Beattie. Educated men were prone to copy the word formations in the Greek and Latin they studied at university, and it lead to some of those sentences in British  prose that sound so strange today because the ends of the “period” match but the middle seems to introduce something anomalous. Use of well-rounded periods was recommended in a book called Oratory Made Easy by Charles Hartley, a teacher of elocution and oratory (1870), but he also warns against too many of them because they are long sentences and tire the listener.

So Jowett’s transposition in this case is sort of a comment on the quality of his education – not up to the standards of his grandfather’s.

In subsection 4 Jowett does something even worse.

ναυμαχία τε παλαιτάτη ὧν ἴσμεν γίγνεται Κορινθίων πρὸς Κερκυραίους: ἔτη δὲ μάλιστα καὶ ταύτῃ ἑξήκοντα καὶ διακόσιά ἐστι μέχρι τοῦ αὐτοῦ χρόνου.

 ]Thucydides says that a prior war between Korinth and Kerkyraea (the significance of which will become clear in later sections) happened 260 years before tou autou khronou, before Mr. T is writing.

Jowett says it happened “about forty years later” than the Lelantine war. Tsk tsk. The math comes out the same but what Jowett does is why we are learning to read Greek for ourselves, now isn’t it?

21st Century Classical Greek -- subject of an impersonal gerundive

Book I section 13.2 gives us a good look at impersonal gerundives and I will go over what Goodwin says compared to how Thucydides uses them.

πρῶτοι δὲ Κορίνθιοι λέγονται ἐγγύτατα τοῦ νῦν τρόπου μεταχειρίσαι τὰ περὶ τὰς ναῦς, καὶ τριήρεις ἐν Κορίνθῳ πρῶτον τῆς Ἑλλάδος ναυπηγηθῆναι.

So the bolded words are imperfective eventive impersonal gerundives. The first is executive voice and the second is passive voice.

In our aspectual paradigm, these are substitutes for conjugated verbs. Further, the second one is an intransitive structure.

Note that the first one has a logical subject. It’s not a grammatical subject, despite being in the -oi case; it’s not the subject of legontai, “they say”, which is in base voice, not executive voice. The three English translations on Perseus, and the Smith translation for the Loeb Classics Library, agree that the Korinthioi didn’t say whatever it was. Legontai is an idiom for other people saying something.

So it is the Korinthians who metakheirisai’d, deliberately to bring about having ships, but Thucydides can’t be definite because he’s repeating information from up to 300 years before he was born.

When Goodwin claims that the subject of an “infinitive” is in the accusative, he’s wrong. It’s a categorical claim that only needs one contradictory example to defeat it, and that’s what we have here.

The other i.g. is passive voice and triireis is the grammatical subject and logical object. That’s two contradictory data points.

Knitting -- heels with short rows again

 So I gave you two videos on German short rows for sock heels.

They were in my posts on toe-up socks:

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

There were several links here.

Recently I found a short row sock heel that is not German short rows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZahZE4GREr0

You don't have to worry about the funny little stitches. 

You do have to do something special so all the wraps don't show on the outside.

When you do that, you create the gusset.

So here's a photo of a pink sock with my old favorite way of doing the heel,

alongside a photo of a sock with the short rows in the white yarn for the heel.

It was the first time I tried this. I still had holes where the heel and gusset join, and if I do this again, I'll try and follow the instructions better. But you may like it because it seems less fussy than my old stand-by pattern, and it works top down or bottom up.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- "can/could"

I'm working on something I call Narrating the Nakh, a companion to Narrating the Torah with similar features: Olrik’s principles; 21^st century Bible Hebrew; modern archaeology. And I came across a structure that looks like an oblique with an imperfect aspect verb.

In Biblical Hebrew, use of vav plus a perfect aspect verb has several functions, one of which is the oblique. In a subordinate clause, preceded by a statement of a general or specific truth, the oblique is immediately accepted as true, whether it’s a result, purpose, cause, effect, or condition.

Vav plus imperfect aspect is a narrative past in most cases, but I started to find it in non-past contexts and because the context is different, it’s not a narrative past.

See Samuel I 11:1.

וַיַּ֗עַל נָחָשׁ֙ הָֽעַמּוֹנִ֔י וַיִּ֖חַן עַל־יָבֵ֣ישׁ גִּלְעָ֑ד וַיֹּ֨אמְר֜וּ כָּל־אַנְשֵׁ֤י יָבֵישׁ֙ אֶל־נָחָ֔שׁ כְּרָת־לָ֥נוּ בְרִ֖ית וְנַֽעַבְדֶֽךָּ:

So we have our certainty epistemic followed by its narrative past. After the etnach we have a narrative past, an imperative, and v’naavdekha. Is it a true future tense promise to serve Nachash?

Well, no it’s not. The men of Yavesh Gilad have set a condition “make a covenant with us, and [then] we can serve you.” Remember, avad and eved are an exclusive personal services contract between two Jews or a Jew taking on a Canaanite servant. The men of Yavesh Gilad want Nachash to promise the same rights as they would have if they contracted their personal services to a Jew. Well, the condition he sets is unacceptable, consisting specifically of an injury which would release a Canaanite from an exclusive services contract. So the men of Yavesh Gilad send for help. Also see Samuel I 12:10 for the same verb; once Shmuel saves the men of Yavesh Gilad they will be able to be eveds to Gd again.

Samuel I 12:1:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר שְׁמוּאֵל֙ אֶל־כָּל־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל הִנֵּה֙ שָׁמַ֣עְתִּי בְקֹֽלְכֶ֔ם לְכֹ֥ל אֲשֶׁר־אֲמַרְתֶּ֖ם לִ֑י וָֽאַמְלִ֥יךְ עֲלֵיכֶ֖ם מֶֽלֶךְ:

So, “I could set up a king over you” because of obeying according to all you have said to me.

The old Latin grammars would want me to call this the potential aorist but I refuse to do that because it’s based on a tense grammar and Biblical Hebrew is an aspect grammar. Besides, it’s not just potential; it’s about conditions being fulfilled and then this form is used for something that hasn’t happened yet. That’s not a real future tense, which is a promise to do something unconditionally.

Notice that this is not the duplicate conditional, which requires an introductory aspectless verb from the same root and binyan as the imperfect verb; it states what will happen when the action becomes due and owing. That rests on Jewish law.

This new structure does not rest on Jewish law, it rests on things happening which probably no Jewish law addresses. The Law of Kings in Deuteronomy is about how the king has to behave once he is anointed. Here we have what has to happen before Shmuel will anoint a king.

Aside from this new structure, the grammar in Nakh is identical to Torah. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Nakh is part of the Jewish oral tradition. The fact that it is in Biblical Hebrew means it was written down during the first part of the 70 years of the captivity, while enough people still knew the grammar. The use of Biblical Aramaic in Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther and Daniel confirms that Biblical Hebrew literally died out toward the end of the Captivity.

This is different from the Sumerian Kings List which was copied from centuries-old lists of kings in the various city-states, after the 200 years of the Gutian takeover. The scribes of the Ur III dynasty no longer understood the old grammar – probably because of some hybridization with the Gutian Indo-European language – and they made mistakes that show the problem.

So once again, CONTEXT IS KING. The context is non-past, so the verb form can't be classed as narrative past. And the cultural context tells us what the difference is between this and a duplicate conditional. 

Gibbon -- the urban legend pt. 2

 Last time I gave you the four characteristics of urban legends that distinguish them from oral traditions, and I lumped the 10 faults committed by Gibbon into 3 of the four features of urban legends. 

This time I give you chapter 2 of volume 1, which has three features.

1)    More evidence that Gibbon could not access primary sources in Greek, but cited to editions we can't identify well enough to search for on the web.

2)    More classic Euro-centric bigotry, this time about "conquerors benefitting the conquered," the same argument used by enslavers of all times.

3)    Exaggerations typical of urban legends, side by side with outdated information also typical of urban legends.

This last is the really big one in this chapter. Gibbon buys into the urban legend that Mithridates the Great executed 80,000 Roman army personnel. At the time, a legion consisted of about a thousand men -- infantry and auxiliaries -- so this represents 80 legions. There is no outcry over this in surviving Latin literature, as there was over Varus' loss of three legions a century later. You can say all you want about the missing literature being just that, missing, as opposed to never having existed, but the earliest surviving citation is Plutarch and he says 150,000, an exaggeration showing that he relied on an urban legend. 

In fact a 2013 book shows that the population of Roman citizens (everybody in Italy) was just under 7 million in 28 BCE (from a review that gives the conclusion, https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014.02.45/). There is a standard quote that a standing army can never be more than 1% of the entire population (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed46.asp). If Hin's conclusion is anywhere close to correct, Mithridates destroyed 1.1% of the population of the Roman republic. That 7 million is a modern population estimate, comparable to Karl Beloch's estimate for Augustus' census. 

We want to believe that earlier sources are more accurate, because they are closer in time to the events, but obviously that's not the case.  Herodotus' chapters on the Persian War, citing Persian urban legends about the origins of the Greeks, are not accurate. Modern archaeology dooms Herodotus in almost every instance. Modern DNA destroys a claim by Gibbon which I will discuss in a future post.

And by the same token go to the information in this chapter's PDF on alfalfa, linen, and some other agricultural products. In every case, archaeology since 1995 shows that Gibbon is wrong.

Of course, we can't fault Gibbon for not knowing things that weren't known until 200 years after his death. We can only fault 21st century writers or teachers who fail to present the facts at the same time as they lecture on Gibbon. It's disinformation. Anybody who takes a course on Roman history and finds that Gibbon is the main text, or that the professor presents Gibbon as truth, should protest in front of the whole class, and inform the department and dean that disinformation is not acceptable under the guise of academic freedom. But maybe all the historians at all the universities in the US have waked up and none of them teach Gibbon as true.

It is characteristic of urban legends that later versions will have exaggerations even worse than earlier versions. It's exciting and attracts attention. What urban legends never do is update their information. On my Fact-Checking blog I have examples of urban legends that have not been updated in 10, 100, 200 and even 2000 years. 

History cannot claim an exception as being descriptive. Astronomy is descriptive -- you can't run hands-on experiments with quasars -- but it adopts updates as they are peer-reviewed and confirmed.

History cannot claim an exception as being a liberal art. Sociology is in the liberal arts college; psychology can also be in that college. Both of them rely on updated peer-reviewed information.

History cannot claim an exception as a personal choice, aka academic freedom. It is disingenuous if not disreputable to award grades, let alone promote students to advanced studies, based on how well they learn falsehoods -- which is actually happening in another liberal arts field, religious studies, by incorporating Documentary Hypothesis.

So it's not a matter of restricting academic freedom. It's... it's... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U

Now. If you read the lonnnggg footnote at the end of the PDF that I give a link to later, you will probably get the impression that I think there was all this stuff floating around and what survived was just a small percentage of all of it. It's not what I think; it's a dead cert. We know that some 80 of Aeschylus' plays disappeared; we know that Agatharchides wrote 49 volumes about Europe none of which survived. You probably all know about Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice, but did you know about the works of Mary Brunton? Jane almost entitled her work Self-Control, but she heard that Brunton had already published a novel under that title. So Jane took a phrase from Fanny Burney's Cecilia, which you also may not know about, and the rest is history. (Brunton is available online now, but only in soft-copy; even Valancourt Books doesn't publish her novels.)

So it's a dead cert that there was lots of literature floating around in Greek that we don't have any more, and it's highly probable that some of the work between 100 and 400 CE disappeared because it was judged heretical by one ecumenical council or another. And that is what the footnote means.

Saskia Hin, The Demography of Roman Italy: Population Dynamics in an Ancient Conquest Society (201 BCE – 14 CE). Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

The link for this post: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FrwfjEr2OGm0AWF5xReO3pZjd3VCdvi3/view?usp=sharing

21st Century Classical Greek -- ergative 2

Book I section 12.3 may have another ergative structure; it’s worth examining.

Βοιωτοί τε γὰρ οἱ νῦν ἑξηκοστῷ ἔτει μετὰ Ἰλίου ἅλωσιν ἐξ Ἄρνης ἀναστάντες ὑπὸ Θεσσαλῶν τὴν νῦν μὲν Βοιωτίαν, πρότερον δὲ Καδμηίδα γῆν καλουμένην ᾤκισαν (ἦν δὲ αὐτῶν καὶ ἀποδασμὸς πρότερον ἐν τῇ γῇ ταύτῃ, ἀφ᾽ ὧν καὶ ἐς Ἴλιον ἐστράτευσαν), Δωριῆς τε ὀγδοηκοστῷ ἔτει ξὺν Ἡρακλείδαις Πελοπόννησον ἔσχον.

Anastantes is executive voice. It comes from histimi. The verb has a second aorist, which is used here in a personal gerundive. And it has the hupo plus -on case of an animate agent.

So an ergative structure doesn’t need a conjugated verb. It’s very possible to use a less-definite personal gerundive with a middle-transitive structure. It just makes the action doubly descriptive, since an intransitive has descriptive nuances.

Notice the last sentence in this subsection. If the “Dorian invasion” represents the spread of Indo-European Greek over the Peloponnese, the event that Thucydides is talking about happened about 1100 BCE. About this same time, turmoil drove the Israelites to build settlements on bare ground (instead of clearing and rebuilding on an old tell) in the highlands of the Holy Land. The turmoil included the raid by Merneptah for grain that is recorded on his stele, naming the ethnic group Israel as living in the Holy Land alongside the Canaanites. The Midianite attack recorded in Judges in the story of Gideon is another example. Finally, the Peleshet/Ahiyyawa attack that took the Ark of the Covenant captive was a backwash from the attacks that destroyed Troy VIIb, Hattusas, and Ugarit.

The hilltop settlements have two common features. They have locally made pottery; the Israelites did not trade with the lowlands for this necessary item. They stayed on their hilltops so long that differing pottery styles developed in the north and south extremities.

The other feature is that not one of these settlements has pig bones anywhere. Wild pigs were a staple (2%) of the diet the entire length of the Mediterranean coast from Neanderthal times to 900 BCE, when their bones were found in an abbatoir in Dor. They still exist; in 2010 CE, in the 7^th year of a drought, wild pigs started attacking crops.

But in the 1100s BCE, the hilltop settlements not only didn’t eat wild pig, they didn’t use it for anything else – if they had taken off and sold the skins the bones would have gone into the trash along with the meat. By isolating themselves from normal commerce, they had no opportunity to sell the pigs to lowlanders. If their dogs dragged bones in from the fields, those were trashed somewhere – but not in the middens.

The Israelites are the only population of that time known to prohibit pigs. That is, if Torah was in force at the time. My blog lays out the evidence that it was, and my book Narrating the Torah goes into more detail.

21st Century Classical Greek -- caveat on computerized language

I want to make sure that you understand how to examine hoste clauses for nuance.

You can’t do it with an app. You have to touch all the examples yourself.

There’s a paper online purportedly examining a concept in Biblical Hebrew which in fact is false, has been adopted from Arabic, and can be safely ditched. There’s a computer analysis in the paper, but it’s based on old grammer, not 21^st century concepts. I contacted the author and pointed this out to him. He didn’t know anything about modality in Biblical Hebrew.

In the old days we used to call this GIGO. The programmer can only program based on what she knows, and if her knowledge is out of date, she hasn’t produced a useful analysis.

That’s just the first problem.

The second problem is that computers do not understand context. People have been trying to create computers that know language. It has been 40 years since my first contact with these efforts and it’s still not happening.

This is part of the problem with Google Translate. Putting in a given word and getting an answer does not make a good translation. That’s that word-for-word substitution stuff I already condemned. In fact a neighbor of mine who teaches French and Spanish had to give a student like a D at best and it took the kid twice as long to finish the assignment, using Google Translate, compared to learning the material and doing the homework from memory.

Computers invariably get idioms wrong. That’s an issue of context.

And if the computer is programmed wrong, that adds to the problem. I’ve seen entries on Google Translate that look as if somebody is deliberately entering false data.

The only thing a computer can do for you is a) let you download text you can search (full text, not a PDF) b) let you search the Greek of the text for hoste (copy one example and paste it into the search function) c) let you mark the found items for study.

You should not, repeat not, excerpt the found items and put them into a spreadsheet. That disrupts context. The most that the spreadsheet will do is let you list the citations of the examples.

But for prepping the data to find all the material to examine, a digitized searchable text is far and away better than what the old scholars had.

Gibbon -- The world's largest long-running urban legend

Gibbon. What can I say about somebody who wrote 12 volumes, some 3600 pages in all, who is referred to by so many and understood by so few?

I could say that the monkey with infinite time could randomly produce Shakespeare, but that a human with intelligence, education, discernment, good writing skills, and the ability to access primary sources, could purposely turn out the 300 pages of nonsense in the first volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is the fevered dream of an insane man.

Let’s go through his faults.

1)         Citing. I haven’t found a valid citation in Gibbon. One example is citing to "xxii" of Ammianus Marcellinus -- which comes in three volumes, each with a section numbered xxii. This is common in way too much academic writing even now. It is one of the features of urban legends that the propagators give a source but never check whether it matches the primary source. If it’s an issue of differing editions, Gibbon owed it to his readers to say which editions he was using. He doesn’t. Everything marked in the online version as citation to a given writer, has to be exhaustively verified and that won’t be possible for the sources from the two centuries preceding Gibbon, because he doesn’t give enough information. The Internet has done a heroic job of putting this exact kind of material online (online access to Samaritan scripture was crucial to my destroying Documentary Hypothesis), but there’s no way to find Gibbon’s citations.

2)         Sources. It looks like Gibbon copied citations from his sources. His source said or implied something he wanted to use, and gave a citation; Gibbon copied the idea from the source and copied the citation without checking whether it applied. One of the most glaring examples is Gibbon giving sentiments that might be in Juvenal's Satires -- I didn't check because a satire is not evidence of a fact -- to which Gibbon cited, but definitely is not in Ammianus, to which Gibbon also cites.

3)         Primary sources. The farther I get into Gibbon, the more clear it becomes that he could not access some primary sources, specifically those written in Greek. This includes Polybius, Josephus, and Cassius Dio. It also looks like he did not access Latin sources, specifically the Historia Augusta. He has this in common with the purveyors of the “Jesus in Talmud” urban legend who could not read Talmud.

4)         Misreliance on sources. In classical times and even more recently, it was common for writer C to a) put a famous name on writer C’s work, see the Anecdota about Justinian attributed to Procopius and the 12 volumes of garbage attributed to the Philo of the Embassy to Gaius; b) report second hand, third hand, tenth hand, see Herodotus and Ammianus; c) write in accordance with a patron’s desires, see Josephus; d) report current rumor as fact, see Paterculus; e) write so long after the fact that events consuming days or weeks are reduced down to a single line – evidence that better sources for the event don’t exist, see Tacitus and Suetonius. 

5)         Mixing contexts. The best example I can give is Gibbon citing to Vegetius on the Roman Army. Gibbon pretends that his data applies to the army of all times. Vegetius wrote in the time of Theodosius I, after the split in the empire and conversion to Christianity. Vegetius pretends to use Cato the Elder and Augustus as sources, but we have to doubt if much of their work survived 300 years. Vegetius could not consult the Library of Alexandria, which was burned in the late 200s CE.

6)         Absolute falsehoods. Gibbon’s numbers for the troops of a Roman legion are too high. He claims Hadrian ranged all over Scotland north of his own wall; his citation to a source turns out to say no such thing.

7)         Bigotry. Gibbon is utterly Euro-centric. He uses “barbarians” equally for non-Italians like the Cimbri, and Mesopotamians who inherited 3000 years of civilization before there was a Roman Empire. He ignores the Chinese of the Jin Dynasty who ruled a similar territory and population to the Roman Empire of the Antonines, with similar beauty of culture and riches. Gibbon almost never misses an opportunity for a slur -- but he misquotes Horace by leaving out the term "savage" which refers to the Latins.

8)         Self-contradiction. In  volume one, within the confines of page 23, Gibbon contradicts himself about whether the barbarians were stationed strictly on the frontier or “promiscuously” throughout the empire. Aside from that, Gibbon doesn’t seem to understand what “frontier” means, where it was, or how it was demarcated.

9)         Vocabulary. Gibbon wrote in the 1700s and uses many words in the meanings they had prior to the British Regency, which they no longer have. Some words he uses so often and in so many contexts that they lose all significance.

10)       Obscurity. The editor of the version at OLL, Lecky, claims that Gibbon used the clearest language. But in a reference to Britain, Gibbon calls it “insulated” where he claims there was no conflict between its conquest and Augustus’ instructions not to extend imperial territory. To us, nowadays, “insulated” means walled off from external influences. Gibbon may have been thinking of Britain as an insula, island. In either case, the context is incomprehensible.

You are hostage to Gibbon's faults if you can't read Greek or Latin.  In fact, you are hostage to any writer if you don't know foreign languages, because in every field, some work is not available in English. What’s more, most translators up to the 21^st century rely on conventional replacements for the words in primary sources in classical languages -- Greek, Latin, Biblical Hebrew, Arabic, and so on. Most translators working in the 21^st century, continue these bad habits. As I show on my Hebrew and Greek threads, there is a new way of looking at language which reveals what the authors of the primary sources thought.

You must also read 20th and 21st century papers, such as the ones on Jstor, which you may be able to access with a Google or Facebook account if you register. Our understanding of the Sea Peoples has been revolutionized and now it turns out that some of them are pre-Hellenic Greeks while others are pre-Latin Italians. You won't get this from any author working before 1995.

On my Fact-Checking thread, I discussed the difference between oral tradition and urban legend. Aside from the fact that Gibbon worked in writing, not orally, we know he a) wrote about a culture he was not living in; b) misused, misunderstood, manipulated, or ignored sources of information; c) falsely cited to authorities that either didn't say it or don't exist. He's not much better than Jean Astruc, whose falsehoods gave rise to Documentary Hypothesis, another urban legend, a little before Gibbon's time. There must have been something in the air in the 1700s to produce two such monumental piles of falsehood.

Here are two useful links.

The complete work with both Gibbon’s and Lecky’s notes.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/lecky-the-history-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-12-vols

My footnoted version of Chapter 1, the first 34 pages of volume 1.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_JtGMtLZUBzv5K3w5ibjZT0P3pXpiHJE/view?usp=sharing

If you can get through my footnotes without realizing that Gibbon didn’t know what he was talking about, you weren’t paying attention.

21st Century Classical Greek -- ὥστε clauses

Book I section 12 starts with a short subsection.

ἐπεὶ καὶ μετὰ τὰ Τρωικὰ ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἔτι μετανίστατό τε καὶ κατῳκίζετο, ὥστε μὴ ἡσυχάσασαν αὐξηθῆναι.

We’ve had auksithinai before.

Learn the preposition meta. It takes all three oblique (non-oi) cases and this time the meanings vary quite a lot.

Go to the bottom of the Middle Liddell entry. Meta is also used as a prefix to verb roots. The results are very different from verb to verb. This is why you have to learn the verb, not just because the root can have a number of meanings, but also because derivatives with prefixes don’t all change meaning the same way just because they all have the same prefix.

The negation here is of isukhasasan, not auksithinai. Goodwin says this happens when a personal gerundive expresses a condition. If he means a situation, and not a conditional, that’s what we have here. LSJ gives a translation of this exact phrase in a positive statement, “by resting from war”, but we want to preserve the negation so, “so that there was no quiet for increasing,” the turmoil probably included those border wars and exiling of strongmen.

But we have something else here. Goodwin page 310, section 1449 talks about hoste clauses with almost any verb as a result clause. Since results are tied to perfective aspect, it seems natural that Goodwin’s examples use perfective aspect. But auksithinai is imperfective. What’s going on?

Well, Goodwin has an example from Demosthenes 2.26 ending in elpizete which is progressive eventive, but first, he quotes the phrase wrong. He rearranges the wording and gets the form of gignomai wrong. The real expression is hoste di’ hon ek khriston faula ta pragmata tis poleos gegonen, and gegonen is perfective.

Second, Goodwin admits that with an i.g., this equates to a purpose clause, not a result clause. Unless the i.g. is perfective, we have to be looking at a purpose clause. And in that case an imperfective is no surprise, since an imperfective, as I keep pointing out, is the default verb form.

Finally, Goodwin contradicts himself in section 1451. He is forced to admit that this type of clause, with an i.g., could be negated with either ou or mi. To him, if there’s a result, we would negate with ou; if a purpose, we would negate with mi. But that would require negating the verb; we’re negating the personal gerundive, not the impersonal.

When you read through pages 310-311, sections 1449-1460, it becomes clear that hoste can introduce a clause with any verbal form the author needs to get across the idea of either a result or a purpose, subject to all the nuances of aspect and definiteness, but always with complete certainty – no obliques or epistemics. Since we know, however, that Goodwin and his sources gloss over inconvenient truths, you should download a text version of your favorite author and use some kind of search function to see if you can find hoste used with an oblique or epistemic. If you can, no holds are barred and we can reduce three pages of material to the simple statement that hoste introduces a clause; what the clause means rests on our 21^st century paradigm of verbal nuance and on the context, but it tends to be a statement of result or purpose.

Result and purpose are two of the functions of the oblique in Biblical Hebrew. Your next question might be why does Greek also have oblique morphology. However, BH uses its aspectless form in clauses of purpose; it also has the auxiliary l’maan “for the sake of” with the aspectless form. So there is more than one way to deal with purpose and result in both ancient languages. It remains to dig deep and find out if the variation in use has a special meaning, or is  simply stylistic.