Fact-Checking the Torah -- Aramaic it ain't

Remember on the Documentary Hypothesis part of this thread, I trashed the concept of mischsprache. 

Now, if you read everything on this part of the blog, you are going to think I am beating a dead horse in this post, but I come to bury the horse, not beat it.

So once again, turn it over and over. I'm slowly going through Talmud Bavli Berakhot testing my concept of its orality and I come across this on page 3b.

 כו אֶלָּא אָמַר רָבָא: תְּרֵי נִשְׁפֵי הָווּ  נְשַׁף לֵילְיָא וְאָתֵי יְמָמָא, נְשַׁף יְמָמָא וְאָתֵי לֵילְיָא. 

Rather, Rava said: There are two times referred to as neshef, and the word can refer to either evening or morning. [understand] “the day moves past [neshaf ] and the night arrives.” [Williamson Talmud translation]

The Williamson Talmud explains in accordance with an Aramaic root. And some people who used to be fans of DH are going to think maybe they gave up too easily to my persuasion, because it certainly looks as if the Hebrew of Psalms 119:147 has been doped by Aramaic.

Which ignores three things.

a) Two languages can sometimes use identical spelling to get identical meaning, no matter how long ago they split off from the family tree, and without one being adopted into the other.

b) Jastrow's Talmudic dictionary shows the adoption of Hebrew words into the Aramaic of Talmud. Some of them are verbs; some are technical terms like Shabbat.

c) The claim assumes a history that not only is not supported by archaeology, but archaeologists rejected it starting in the 1990s, and it also does not agree with the history of Tannakh as the Jewish oral tradition, or the evidence that the Samaritan Pentateuch is a languishing version of the same oral tradition.

There are lots of spurious claims that Tannakh includes Aramaic words in books other than Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, but the claims don't recognize how oral traditions work. They arise from a concept called mischsprache which underlies Documentary Hypothesis. It is not the same as the concept of creolization that produced Yiddish, English, Yeshivish, and the language of Samaritan scripture. Mischsprache would claim, for example, that use of min in Tannakh only occurs because of the Babylonian Captivity when Biblical Hebrew stopped being the street language. There are two problems with that.

First is that when people migrate to a new country and their children are raised in a language other than the one their parents grew up with, the kids only use terms from the mame loshn in a suitable context. So Talmud uses Shabbat in related contexts even if the rest of the text is in Aramaic, and Yeshivish uses Talmudic technical terms in related contexts in English. It doesn’t insert random Hebrew or Aramaic words into the English speech of the kids once they are adults. 

In fact 130 out of 678 occurrence of min are in Esther, Daniel, Ezra, or Nehemiah. Out of those 130, 14 occur in Aramaic expressions in Ezra and 9 are in Hebrew expressions in Ezra, while of the 90 occurrences in Daniel, 18 are in Hebrew expressions. In the other two books they are in Hebrew expressions. So the vast majority of occurrences of min in Tannakh are in Hebrew expressions. 

The fact that Biblical Hebrew also uses mi but the Aramaic doesn't, is no proof that min is Aramaic. Hebrew also has the ancient nifal binyan; Aramaic has lost it. Hebrew also has a lamed heh verb class that is missing from Aramaic; the fact that it has the same endings in the imperative as the Aramaic lamed yod or lamed vav verb classes doesn't mean that those parts are Aramaic. They derive from the common Semitic ancestor which was lamed yod/vav not lamed heh.

Second is that Samaritan Pentateuch also has min. This has to result from the oral tradition of the Samaritans, which survived the split in the kingdom after 930 BCE and the Assyrian hegemony, which occurred before Nevuchadnetsar conquered Assyria. Some of its differences from Jewish Torah are examples of recognized patterns in both languages and oral traditions that become divided from their source. It’s the verbal equivalent of the Samaritan kohanim having one genetic linkage different from their distant relatives, the kohanim of the Jews. But the uses of min are in the same places in Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch. If you want to check up on that, the Resources page and bibliography link to online versions of both.

The differences between Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Torah have two major roots. 

One is the natural divergence of the content because the Samaritan culture was divided from the Judean culture under the Assyrian hegemony, even more strongly than after the split in the kingdoms. Archaeological evidence supports the "iron curtain" concept while the tales of Athaliah and of Hezekiah's invitation to observe Passover show the permeability of the north/south border before the Assyrian invasion.

Another is that the grammar of Samaritan Pentateuch suggests that by the time of the oldest manuscript, around 1000 CE or so, the Samaritan dialect of Hebrew had creolized with Arabic; that took about 300 years after the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land. This led to the Arabic features in Zev Hayyim's Samaritan Grammar; the Samaritan Pentateuch does not preserve Second Temple features or relate directly to Aramaic, as Hayyim tries to claim.

But the real kicker is that the concept of mischsprache is directly related to history as seen in scripture or in archaeology. And in the 21st century, DH has given up on discussing historical evidence. There's good reason for that. Archaeology has not (so far) turned up any samples of JEDP, and it argues in opposition to DH. The retreat from historical concepts isn't complete yet; there are still supporters of DH who try to relate it to archaeology. They have had to adopt the interpretationism outlook, however, which says as long as they feel like saying it, nobody can argue against them. That's not science. That's Steven Colbert truthiness.

When you find somebody saying that there are Aramaisms in Tannakh in Hebrew concepts, read their work carefully. 

a) If they espouse DH, it's probably pre-21st century DH concepts; they are out of touch with the modern view. 

b) Look at their linguistic references; John Cook's work is probably missing. 

c) They probably don't refer to Samaritan scripture; they probably wrote before Walton's polyglot and von Gall's critical edition went online. 

Not having the evidence is not the same thing as being right. 

It's another case of tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, because knowledge has also changed. It's the pits trying to keep up, but ignoring the changes makes you irrelevant.

21st Century Classical Greek -- negating a "pluperfect"

Book I section 15.

τὰ μὲν οὖν ναυτικὰ τῶν Ἑλλήνων τοιαῦτα ἦν, τά τε παλαιὰ καὶ τὰ ὕστερον γενόμενα. ἰσχὺν δὲ περιεποιήσαντο ὅμως οὐκ ἐλαχίστην οἱ προσσχόντες αὐτοῖς χρημάτων τε προσόδῳ καὶ ἄλλων ἀρχῇ: ἐπιπλέοντες γὰρ τὰς νήσους κατεστρέφοντο, καὶ μάλιστα ὅσοι μὴ διαρκῆ εἶχον χώραν.

[2] κατὰ γῆν δὲ πόλεμος, ὅθεν τις καὶ δύναμις παρεγένετο, οὐδεὶς ξυνέστη: πάντες δὲ ἦσαν, ὅσοι καὶ ἐγένοντο, πρὸς ὁμόρους τοὺς σφετέρους ἑκάστοις, καὶ ἐκδήμους στρατείας πολὺ ἀπὸ τῆς ἑαυτῶν ἐπ᾽ ἄλλων καταστροφῇ οὐκ ἐξῇσαν οἱ Ἕλληνες. οὐ γὰρ ξυνειστήκεσαν πρὸς τὰς μεγίστας πόλεις ὑπήκοοι, οὐδ᾽ αὖ αὐτοὶ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης κοινὰς στρατείας ἐποιοῦντο, κατ᾽ ἀλλήλους δὲ μᾶλλον ὡς ἕκαστοι οἱ ἀστυγείτονες ἐπολέμουν.

[3] μάλιστα δὲ ἐς τὸν πάλαι ποτὲ γενόμενον πόλεμον Χαλκιδέων καὶ Ἐρετριῶν καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ἐς ξυμμαχίαν ἑκατέρων διέστη.

We have a use of mi here with an adjective, “enough”, the attacks happened when people didn’t have enough land and wanted to take over new turf.

Subsection 2 is where Thucydides talks about the border wars. He says they could never be anything but border wars, each polis fighting on its own behalf, not allying under pre-eminent states.

Thucydides has an interesting use of perfective eventive, ksuneistikesan, in subsection 2. As a perfective, it ought to relate to a permanent result. However, it is negated. Why would Mr. T negate a perfective instead of an imperfective, the default verb form?

Because he’s not negating the action. He’s negating the result.

Think about it this way.  Why does Thucydides use perfective aspect for the works of the poets? Because “the moving finger having writ, moves on, and not thy piety nor wit, can wipe it out nor change a word of it.”

In subsection 3, Thucydides gives information that shows why he’s negating the result. His audience know who was allied to whom in the Peloponnesian War. In subsection 3, Thucydides talks about another war, in which the allies were different to what they are at the time of his writing.

So he can’t negate that there were alliances. All he can negate is that the alliances remained in effect in his own day.

And that’s another benefit of looking at things aspectually instead of by tense.

Knitting -- darn it

So I have a beautiful top that I love the pattern and color I chose, and it has developed a hole.

Luckily the hole is in the sleeve, not too far from the cuff, and I have extra of the color. So one way I could fix it is to unravel the sleeve to that point, join in more yarn, and re-knit past the hole. It will look the neatest.

Here are other ways to fix knitting, mostly for socks. Socks usually wear out unless, like me, you used that modern form of linsey-woolsey to make them, Cotton Fine. It's from Brown Sheep, comes in a large range of colors, and lasts decades without, unlike linsey woolsey, shrinking. I have a couple dozen pairs that even the dryer hasn't destroyed (I got tired of wet socks hanging all over the house in winter while they dried).

1. Weaving. This would work with Cotton Fine or 100% cotton but it leaves a recognizable patch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDkMShaLX9c

2. Knitting a patch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTJEKyeB2n0

Once you get good at knitting a patch, it takes 30 minutes to knit a 10 x 13 patch. It takes me 8 hours to knit a single sock. 30 minutes may sound boring and why bother, but gather all the socks that have holes in them and you may want to put in a good video or binge-watch part of a series to get them all done.

While the patch leaves a hole on the inside of the garment, that's only important because it won't be as warm as the rest of the sock. 

3. Duplicate stitch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4mKdlG4x8

Video 3 is more about noticing that your socks are wearing thin and doing something about it before you get a hole. This would work great with commercial socks if you could get a yarn in a similar fabric. There are lots of cotton/acrylic yarns in different weights nowadays. It all depends on whether you want to spend the time (about 15 minutes) instead of spending the dime for new socks.

4. Swiss duplicate stitch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxmCN1DrM1E

This takes longer, about 20 minutes for a 5 x 5 hole, but that is less than the time to re-knit the sock, and it is almost invisible. It would work great for a sweater I did that has about 3 stitches that have let go. You have to 1) mess with the hole until you get it square shaped; b) set up your thread frame for your duplicate stitches; c) do your duplicate stitches. 

Swiss darning is probably best for non-wool yarns like 100% cotton Schachenmayr Catania. 

5. Scotch darning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_eWrpPCt9c

This can fix quite a big hole, without all the prep work of Swiss darning. However, it is woven, not knitted, so it doesn't have the give of duplicate stitch. It tries to stick with the existed knit rows and columns, and that makes it different from video 1. 

You need darning needles plus something to keep you from mending the sock shut. 

Dritz, a manufacturer known to generations of needle-women, sells darning eggs and needles through Joann's. 

Knitpicks also sells darning eggs and three sizes of needles. 

Michaels and Yarn.com sell the Chibi needles in video 2 (I think it was; anyhoo).

You should use the same weight yarn you used in knitting the socks, which means leftovers shouldn't go in the trash. For video 1 or Swiss darning which are woven and won't have much give anyway, you could use a pearl embroidery thread. 

What's really impressive about our foremothers is that they did darning along with actual garment-making, plus all that cooking and cleaning with none of the modern conveniences (sometimes not even water brought into the house), plus all that outside work -- milking, poultry, gardening for food and herbals and dyestuffs and maybe vegetable rennet, making the actual butter and cheese (takes about a day to process a gallon of milk for cheese) and keeping up their sourdough trough so they could make bread in a world without little packages of yeast (3 to 7 days). And of course sometimes the men would be away from home so the woman had to cut the stovewood and maybe do the plowing and sowing and so on. My hat's off to you, ladies!

Fact-Checking the Torah -- another one bites the dust

Turn it over and over, you never get to the end of it.

So I'm doing my Daf Yomi, Megillah 9a-b, and it gets to the Talmud version of the origin of Septuagint.

Only it's not 70 (LXX you know), it's 72. That's a magic number in Judaism: remember Numbers 11:24-29 with the 70 elders plus Eldad and Medad. I would claim that the 70 languages of Talmud Sotah 32b and other citations were in addition to Hebrew and Aramaic, but apparently the number 70 is the descendants of Noach, which includes Shem. (Although 72 is important in gematria.)

Talmai Melekh puts each of these rabbis into a separate room and each comes up with a Greek version of Torah. All of them are identical. None of them are word for word translations. That's a good thing.

The way the rabbis all translated was the same. Every single one of them came up with the same results. That's the Holy Spirit for you.

And what they did, for example, was change the order of words. Instead of translating bereshit and putting it down, then translating bara, and so on, they translated elohim and put that down, then bara, then something else.

Anybody here read the Septuagint lately? That's not how my copy reads. Here's the Williamson Talmud bilingual version of the page in Megillah.

So the Septuagint that has survived, is not what these rabbis wrote. Where did it come from? The Aristaeas letter says Ptolemy got six rabbis from each of the twelve tribes to do it.

{{screech}}

By the time of Ptolemy, the following tribes survived: the Levites, as priests, so descended from Aharon, among both Jews and Samaritans; other Levites, among the Jews but not the Samaritans; the descendants of Yehudah, plus descendants of Gentile converts such as the ancestors of Shemaiah and Abtalion, as Jews; three male DNA lineages among the Samaritans, which survive today. There are at most 5 tribes nowadays, and we can't DNA test for any others because we don't have the test material. There won't be any Richard-the-third reveal here.  

There's a further urban legend involved. "Rabbi" is a Jewish term. What a Samaritan expert was called at the time, I don't know. But a Samaritan expert in their scripture was not an expert according to the Jews. The Jews and Samaritans had been at daggers drawn ever since the Jews returned from Babylon. If you read your Bible you know that. It got so bad that when the Seleucid Syrians attacked across the Holy Land to take Egypt from the Ptolemies, the Jews fought for Egypt (how did that happen, wink, wink?) and the Samaritans fought for Syria. Ever after Egypt and Judea were allies, notably under the famous Cleopatra VII.

If you read my blog, you also know that the contents of Samaritan Pentateuch are not identical to Jewish Torah. The differences come under different headings so start here and read to the end of the blog. The important fact being that when the Samaritan Moses goes up to the top of Pisgah and looks out over the Holy Land, he doesn't see the lands of the northern tribes. While the Samaritan Pentateuch was being transmitted orally, the names of those tribes vanished from this part of Deuteronomy. While the Samaritans have a Joshua, it does not record the sharing out of the land that starts in chapter 15; the Samaritan Joshua instead has a story set in Hasmonean times, as attested by geographic names, with a literate format instead of an oral one. Samaritan "Chronicle" ignores the Assyrian invasion entirely, although it does talk about Nevuchadnetsar. The Samaritans have not recorded genealogies like the ones in Jewish Chronicles I. These are all signs of things that nobody cared about among the ten tribes, not even keeping track of their descent in the male line. There's no tradition of who those three male lineages are descended from.

All of the manuscripts of the Aristaeas letter date after 1000 CE. How old could this letter be and still report such an urban legend? Well, remember, between 200 and 600 CE everything in Talmud was put into writing. The letter's "six rabbis from each tribe" sounds like an urban legend built on top of what Megillah says; urban legends always exaggerate and they always incorporate ignorance. So whoever wrote the letter didn't know anything about Jewish history. The 400 year period until the oldest surviving manuscript of the letter is plenty of time for such an urban legend to develop.

But it would develop out of Talmud and there weren't many Greek geeks at that time reading Talmud, or so I would think. The best-known Greek geeks of antiquity were Eusebius and his heir-in-Greekness Origen, of the 200s and 300s CE. Origen left us his Hexapla, with the Septuagint and the Greek of Aquila (supposedly written under the direction of Rabbi Akiva) -- and this section of Megillah in Talmud is all about how Greek is the only language legal to write a Torah scroll in. This ruling is attributed to Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai who died about 170 CE, but the story about Talmai is not attributed so we have no date for it other than "some time during the development of the oral tradition of Talmud". How it would get into the hands of a Greek geek who is trying to promote the importance of Septuagint, I can't tell you.

And before you tell me that the early Church fathers used Septuagint, read this.

There are three other possibilities, each of which I can knock down.

Supposedly Josephus who died about 100 CE refers to it in his Antiquities but we know that things have been inserted into Antiquities by people who a) copied the grammar of Thucydides. Book 18, sections 65-80 of the Greek (Whiston's English is not numbered this way) are known by their grammar to be an interpolation by somebody using a different grammar than anywhere else in Josephus. What did I say about validating authorship? It works here. 

And b) 18:63-64 is also an interpolation. It uses words that Josephus never uses elsewhere, in bad grammar, and implies meanings Josephus never would have used. These two bits are in one and only one surviving copy of Wars of the Jews, and they are known to be a forgery there. So the scenario is that a Christian, who owned copies of both works, wrote a new manuscript of Wars which included the forgery, and then made the same change to Antiquities.

So just because our surviving version of Josephus refers, supposedly, to the Aristaeas letter doesn't mean that's how he originally wrote it.

The two-fer comes with the claim that Philo's "Jewish Antiquities" also refers to the Aristaeas letter, and we know that he died about 50 CE. Or do we? Remember what I said about Philo. The blatant ignorance and falsehood in Philo's Antiquities shows that no educated Jew wrote this. It wouldn't be the only example in antiquity of one person claiming that somebody else -- somebody famous -- wrote his material. So even if "Philo" refers to the Aristaeas, that doesn't mean the Philo of the Embassy to Gaius knew about the Aristaeas letter. The person who used Philo's name without authorization "knew" it. Or maybe not. As we can tell from Josephus, some Greek geek could have inserted info about the Aristaeas letter into "Philo".

The third place that refers to the letter is Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Book 8, chapter 1 and 2. And the problem here is that we know Eusebius reports urban legends. In History of the Church, Book II, chapter 17, point 1, he says he heard that Peter and Philo met up in Rome. Peter was executed in Rome in 54 CE. It all depends on how long you think Peter was in Rome before his execution. By the time Eusebius heard of this, 200 years had passed after Peter's death, plenty of time to create the legend. 

So the earliest that we know of a "letter of Aristaeas" is the late 200s to early 300s CE, almost half a millennium after Ptolemy I, and Eusebius' claim that Aristaeas was well-educated crashes on the rocks of the "six from each tribe" urban legend. Given that Eusebius reports an urban legend without questioning it, we can't trust him about anything he reports, unless we have external verification.

The question is, why is Megillah not an urban legend while Aristaeas is? Well, Aristaeas apparently originated in writing, not as an oral tradition; it transmits false information about its purported subject; and the oldest verifiable version shows up in a culture other than the one the letter is supposedly about.  Megillah is part of an oral tradition. 

Bottom line. The Septuagint that survived to the 300s CE for Origen to use in the Hexapla, even if it's the same one that survived for Brenton to translate badly in the 1840s CE, is not what Talmud Megillah 9a-b is talking about. It's not Aquila; what Talmud Megillah says is not in the Hexapla for "A" on page 6 of that. So it's a good thing that I already showed that Septuagint is a bad translation because it ignores high-frequency grammar and uses words all wrong. It means Jews don't care where Septuagint came from or that Megillah exposes that it probably wasn't written by Jewish rabbis.

Jews reject translations and external commentaries and interpretations of our literature. We can't afford to waste time on them because there's so much of our own literature to learn, and it supports that the external material is all badly done.

21st Century Classical Greek -- negation and aspect

I am skipping section 14 because about the only thing in it is that we have our first perfective eventive, ekektinto. Book I section 15, on the other hand, lets us examine more negatives to see what is going on.

τὰ μὲν οὖν ναυτικὰ τῶν Ἑλλήνων τοιαῦτα ἦν, τά τε παλαιὰ καὶ τὰ ὕστερον γενόμενα. ἰσχὺν δὲ περιεποιήσαντο ὅμως οὐκ ἐλαχίστην οἱ προσσχόντες αὐτοῖς χρημάτων τε προσόδῳ καὶ ἄλλων ἀρχῇ: ἐπιπλέοντες γὰρ τὰς νήσους κατεστρέφοντο, καὶ μάλιστα ὅσοι μὴ διαρκῆ εἶχον χώραν.

[2] κατὰ γῆν δὲ πόλεμος, ὅθεν τις καὶ δύναμις παρεγένετο, οὐδεὶς ξυνέστη: πάντες δὲ ἦσαν, ὅσοι καὶ ἐγένοντο, πρὸς ὁμόρους τοὺς σφετέρους ἑκάστοις, καὶ ἐκδήμους στρατείας πολὺ ἀπὸ τῆς ἑαυτῶν ἐπ᾽ ἄλλων καταστροφῇ οὐκ ἐξῇσαν οἱ Ἕλληνες. οὐ γὰρ ξυνειστήκεσαν πρὸς τὰς μεγίστας πόλεις ὑπήκοοι, οὐδ᾽ αὖ αὐτοὶ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης κοινὰς στρατείας ἐποιοῦντο, κατ᾽ ἀλλήλους δὲ μᾶλλον ὡς ἕκαστοι οἱ ἀστυγείτονες ἐπολέμουν.

[3] μάλιστα δὲ ἐς τὸν πάλαι ποτὲ γενόμενον πόλεμον Χαλκιδέων καὶ Ἐρετριῶν καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ἐς ξυμμαχίαν ἑκατέρων διέστη.

Ouk elakhistin is an idiom, “not least” those who got rich got not the least of the strength (but Thucydides punts on whether they had the most).

Oudeis ksunesti does negate an imperfective; of the earliest wars was a joint war. Here Mr. T can negate an action.

Ouk eksisan uses a derivative of eimi “be” in an eventive. So you know eimi and you know this isn’t imperfective. What does it mean to negate a progressive? “They did not repeatedly or habit-formingly…”  Which is exactly what Thucydides is saying in subsection 2; the habit was for each polis to fight for itself against another polis encroaching on its borders. In the clause here beginning with kai, Thucydides is talking about attacking foreigners on their own turf, ep’ allon. That’s the habit they didn’t have. It continues in oud’ au autoi…epoiounto.

Goodwin never gets to the point of asking why, in a past situation, negations wouldn’t just all use “aorist”. He doesn’t have a listing in the index under aorist for negations. Under imperfect (tense), he points to sections that differentiate between aorist and imperfect; those sections don’t discuss negation. There’s no such reference under pluperfect or perfect.

Goodwin’s claims about the difference in use of the various eventives or perfect (which he considers a past tense) are wholly subjective.

The aspectual paradigm gives us objective reasons for using eventives, both positive and negated. Biblical Hebrew also puts across different nuances depending on which aspect is being negated, and also on what is used to negate it.

Now that the eventives show such clear differences under negation, I’ll scope for conceptual differences.

I'm just saying -- know what the PFAS you're talking about

There was a recent dustup on a community Facebook page over PFAS. I contributed, because the original post said "don't drink the water" and I was able to google evidence that this was unrealistic because 2/3 of Americans have PFAS in their water supply, and bottled water has it too.

The other problem with the original post is that PFAS don't just come in water. You can put a dent in PFAS if you avoid all toiletries -- cosmetics, shampoos, nail polish, and eye makeup. If you're not going to do that, you're going to wash PFAS into your water supply. (I haven't worn makeup in decades and I use an herbal mask on my hair.)

PFAS are in waterproof and stain-resistant fabrics. Your athletic wear and things you use in the kitchen are likely in this class. Wear natural cottons when exercising or doing dirty work; look for something that doesn't unravel in chlorine bleach, or find a way to bleach them in the sun.

Speaking of the kitchen, that non-stick cookware may use PTFE, a PFAS. There are ways to keep food from sticking to cookware. For one thing, when the cooking is almost done, put in a little water, put the lid on the pan, and turn the burner off. For another, most parchment paper is free of PFAS and I use it to bake bread so the pan doesn't get bread baked onto it.

Any plastics can be hiding PFAS. You have to cook from scratch at home to avoid them, and you can't use meal kits like Blue Apron. Even cardboard french fry boxes have PFAS in them; take-out food is a major source of PFAS. Plastics used to package cooking ingredients may contain PFAS; buy things that come in metal or glass containers.

And look at plastic storage in your house. It's not enough to replace ziploc bags by durable washable plastic dishes (that may also survive nuking). You have to know if those dishes contain PFAS. The queen of plastic dishes, Tupperware, makes a number of product lines and some of them have PFAS in them. Steamable vegetable packaging can contain PFAS; so can microwavable packaging on frozen dinners. On the bottom of plastic dishes is a number indicating the class of plastic it contains; only use things with 2, 4, or 5 -- and even those are "safest" not "safe". Replace plastic with glass storage or metal with a tight-fitting lid.

Your dish detergent and laundry detergent could contain PFAS, especially those laundry pods. Up to 75% of those plastics winds up in our water supply.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2021/08/08/study-says-up-to-75-of-plastics-from-detergent-pods-enter-the-environment-industry-says-they-safely-biodegrade/

I switched to fair trade castile soap nearly a decade ago for both dishes and laundry, except for the shampoo I use for my hand knits which contains tea tree and lavender oils. Understand: there is a difference between detergents and soaps. What I use is a real soap, not a detergent. And it seems to cut grease better than detergents, which is important for me because I do a lot of India-style recipes with turmeric. For scrubbing, use baking soda which is also non-scratch and deodorizes things. This limits your exposure to PFAS to what might be in the steel wool pads you use for charred-on food. And if you know what you're doing (see above) you won't get charred-on food in the first place.

I also use castile soap for general cleaning, like scrubbing carpets or floors. You can even use it in your hair, with a rosemary tea chaser to make your hair soft. Soaps are notorious for drying your skin; I have a pure aloe lotion with chickweed infusion and lavender essential oil that I make up at home; all the ingredients are famous for being good to your skin.

It's also true that there are carcinogens in commercial detergents, particularly 1,4-dioxane. So by ditching them, you get a two-fer.

https://www.newsday.com/news/health/dioxane-household-products-contaminant-1.19725580

Finally, dryer sheets. I stopped using them years ago. I spent $13 on a set of six woolen dryer balls; four of them have never left the box. I use two balls per load; they beat your things soft. They are naturally unscented but you can put drops of essential oils on them for fragrance; some essential oils like lavender have a reputation for being anti-microbial. 

And you probably want to get rid of carpet, especially (see above) if it is stain resistant. The crawling baby can pick up PFAS on his hands and then, we all know kids put their hands in their mouths. 

The OP on Facebook reposted with a header about how EPA is starting -- STARTING -- to look at making industry report on PFAS. You don't have to wait for that. You can vote with your $$$$. You can contact the makers of the products you ditch and tell them you ditched their product because of PFAS. You can post on social media about products that contain PFAS.

In the meantime, use the EPA site to find products to replace your PFAS.

https://www.epa.gov/saferchoice/products

Where this all started, was with somebody ringing alarm bells without providing a course of action to take. When you find that going on, you know that the alarmist hasn't done their homework. There might really be something worth getting alarmed about, but do your homework and make sure you know what to do about it. 

What's more, the OP wanted government to do something about PFAS. Well, the government is incapable of doing anything permanent as long as you and I keep dumping PFAS into our water supply or landfill. 

I'm just saying....

Gibbon -- the urban legend pt. 4

So in case you missed it last time, Gibbon knows nothing about Roman government, suppresses inconvenient truths, and contradicts himself within the length of a page.

This week I open up with something common since the printing press: the falsehood that just because somebody put it into print, it was influential .In a world that generates a Terabyte of data per day, we have to admit that almost none of it will remain in circulation in 5 years, except for the urban legends.

So Gibbon starts chapter 4 with Commodus and there are two things wrong with it.

First, he assumes that all his sources must be accurate. In the 21st century, Nero's reputation is being rehabilitated by pointing out that the Flavians who followed him had a vested interest in destroying Nero. 

The same is true for Commodus, with one curve ball high and outside.  The Antonine plague was on during Commodus' life; it killed 2,000 a day in the city of Rome during his reign. Overall mortality was a quarter of the empire's population. There were two wars going on at the same time. Turn around and look at the behavior of Rudy Giuliani, once "America's mayor" and later a Trumpist at risk of losing his law license due to supporting fraudulent election claims. The behavior of Commodus becomes very understandable in this light; Commodus only lived 31 years, just 10 years longer than the period from 911 to the Covid pandemic, and under similar stresses.

Second, Gibbon talks of Commodus learning from the reigns of Nero and Domitian what NOT to do as emperor. This assumes that the gossipy works of Tacitus and Suetonius were in the Antonine palace library. It also assumes that the Stoic philosopher Marcus Antoninus had his son's tutors base their curricula on historical works instead of the same old standards like Homer, Vergil, and whatever philosophers were in "print" (OK manuscript but you get my point).

Far too many writers seem to think that written material is both available to and accessed by everybody who reads. Universities were turning out clergy in Gibbon's time, and taking on upper class men so they could meet future pastors and maybe, through patronage, give them a living. If you weren't keeping the terms of the university -- if you were just a janitor, say -- you couldn't access these libraries. If you lived near a Stately Mansion, you had to run tame in that mansion to access its libraries. Otherwise you had to have the money to subscribe to a bookseller's or circulating library. And then you had to choose works of history or philosophy, instead of plays, poetry, travels or -- gasp -- novels. You have free access to literature through a local library. You also have Internet access to almost all the surviving Greek and Roman literature, plus literature from all over the world. Think about book choices by your family and friends, and you will realize that Gibbon's assumption is humbug.

Marcus Antoninus would have appointed Stoics as his son's tutors. The Stoics would not have taught, for example, Aristotle, that writer so crucial to the later Christian Church. In fact Aristotle's scorn for non-Greeks and frank definition of one-man rule as kingship, would have offended Augustus, for example, who was trying so hard not to be king. Commodus had a positive example in his own father's life; Marcus wanted Commodus to learn to think, not just copy or avoid previous rulers' behavior. 

And now for more evidence that historians may undercut their own credibility. In this chapter Gibbon discusses one of those military problems that he recently denied happened. Soldiers were deserting and taking to plunder. The gossipy Historia Augusta never says why but here's a suggestion. In the very first year of his solo reign, Commodus debased the coinage. Heckel's notes for a class given by the Federal Reserve discusses inflation as a cause of the fall of the Roman Empire and specifically notes this debasement.

Inflation would have reduced the buying power of the soldiers' pay, and they didn't take it lying down. They deserted and turned to robbery. Gibbon mentions one specific robber who even planned to assassinate Commodus and take over. He was betrayed by an accomplice. Gibbon puts the problem down to "negligence of the public administration," neither he nor the Historia having any more intelligent suggestion to make.

Why would Commodus debase the coinage? If you think he wanted the gold and silver to spend on his own lifestyle, well, remember, Commodus is supposed to be this horrible selfish person with no respect for anything. He could have plundered temples all over the empire and melted down statues or at least melted the gold and silver off of them, to get what he wanted. According to Suetonius such things happened under Augustus (chapter 73); Nero (chapter 32); and Galba (chapter 5). So much for Commodus learning from previous emperors or from Suetonius.

Why Commodus would need the money for expenses rests on Historian's Fallacy.

Today, if we provide goods and services, we expect to get paid for them. We can take somebody to court for failure to pay. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, we could get the sheriff to auction off the debtor's goods to get a return. Debtors could also go to prison for non-payment.

Even if this could happen in the Roman Empire, we all forget one thing. By the reign of Commodus, there was no representative assembly any more. Taxation without representation? Don't make me laugh! Commodus did not have to rule by consent of the governed. He was the emperor. He could confiscate property without submitting his claims to a court. He didn't have to pay his bills. The idea of coinage being a tool of the state is nonsense in a state with an absolute head who doesn't have to get permission from a representative assembly to use the coinage. Coinage is a convenient way of exchanging goods and services that leads to the credit economy where business doesn't have to be done face to face. But before there's a credit economy, it's a lot easier to move around a couple of denarii than it is to move around two cows or a cow and two sheep or whatever.

Now, if you said Commodus didn't want to give up gold or silver to the Treasury to do the minting, that's another thing. That's the act of a stupid twat. Whoever spends that gold or silver coinage gets less for his money, and the person he buys from can show a lower outflow on his tax return, and object that he shouldn't have to pay as much in taxes. And even if the government disagrees and confiscates the right amount of coins anyway, those coins are debased. The taxes flowing into the Treasury aren't worth as much as before the debasement. The Treasury can't buy as much for its money as it could before debasement -- and if the government wants to maintain the inflow of goods and services, they have to confiscate the goods and non-pay the services.

Well, within two years this debasement caused military desertions all over the empire, and the deserters turned to plunder so they could survive. This is a downward spiral that the Federal Reserve agrees is one cause of the decline of the Roman Empire. Eventually the coinage is worth nothing and the providers of goods and services refuse to accept them. Then you have to go back to the barter system unless you are one of the people high in government with authority to confiscate.

But as I said last time, Gibbon and his contemporaries would never see it this way, despite Gibbon waving the flag of "liberty". Still less would prior generations understand what was going on. So nobody can give us a real picture of why Commodus debased the coinage, except that he was a stupid twat.

Now, in chapter 40 about about Justinian, Gibbon will talk about people shaving or clipping coins (although this comes from the highly suspect Anecdota which were attributed to Procopius). This was pretty dangerous. Once debasement began, coin clipping yielded less precious metal and so that stopped being attractive.

Kevin Butcher says there were almost no sources for people to go to in the 1700s and 1800s, once they understood economics better and went looking for information specifically on Rome. That's another case of Historian's Fallacy. The publication of Wealth of Nations (1776) didn't mean that prior generations or civilizations knew what an economy was or how it worked, so why would they write in terms Smith used? 

Kevin Butcher, Debasement and the decline of Rome.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/intranets/staff/butcher/debasement_and_decline.pdf

Matthew Heckel, Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire

https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/education/lessons/pdf/inflation_and_the_fall_of_the_roman_empire.pdf?la=en

Gibbon was not aware of economics as a banking issue, only as an issue of ownership of real and private property. That is how people of Gibbon's class thought. Banking was a necessary evil, you had to pay your rents into some safe place , but you were hindered by bankers' complaints about overdrafts if you "spent your money like a gentleman" on horses, gaming, mistresses, and fine dining. So Gibbon was incapable of realizing that the problem with Commodus wasn't his crazy behavior while suffering from PTSD; it was his stupid idea of debasing the coinage.

To the PDF

21st Century Classical Greek -- mi verbs

Book I section 13.6 lets me start a topic that most of the grammars leave until last, which is a real shame.  

καὶ Ἴωσιν ὕστερον πολὺ γίγνεται ναυτικὸν ἐπὶ Κύρου Περσῶν πρώτου βασιλεύοντος καὶ Καμβύσου τοῦ υἱέος αὐτοῦ, τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἑαυτοὺς θαλάσσης Κύρῳ πολεμοῦντες ἐκράτησάν τινα χρόνον. καὶ Πολυκράτης Σάμου τυραννῶν ἐπὶ Καμβύσου ναυτικῷ ἰσχύων ἄλλας τε τῶν νήσων ὑπηκόους ἐποιήσατο καὶ Ῥήνειαν ἑλὼν ἀνέθηκε τῷ Ἀπόλλωνι τῷ Δηλίῳ. Φωκαῆς τε Μασσαλίαν οἰκίζοντες Καρχηδονίους ἐνίκων ναυμαχοῦντες:

Anethike is a prefixed form of the verb τίθημι, so copy that and paste it into Wiktionary to see the conjugation.

Tithimi, “put, place”, like histimi, has an intransitive imperfective eventive (“second aorist”). The two belong to a subclass of non-mai verbs called -mi verbs. Eimi, both “be” and “come, go”, belong to this group, although they don’t have the i.i.e.

Another -mi verb is δίδωμι, “give”. It has an i.i.e. as well.

Do you notice anything about the -mi verbs? Their meanings are some of the most frequently used in any language.

They also conjugate differently from most verbs. Where have you seen this phenomenon before?

Well, if you have studied other languages, like I have, you know that these simple words are classed as “irregular” in most languages. Personally, I feel as if they are the most ancient, and the speakers of languages just sort of made up how to say words, until the number of words they used had multiplied so much they started copying conjugations instead of making up new ones.

Learn tithimi and didomi and notice the other similarities with histimi. You can apply these similarities to other -mi verbs – although not to “be” and “come, go” as you already know from learning them.

And remember, these verbs that have the i.i.e. may show up in ergative structures. When you find one with an agent expressed as hupo X where X is in the -on case, look at it carefully for a logical object in the -oi case. And let me know if you find them.

I can’t say that only -mi verbs have i.i.e.s. If you already knew Greek, you may know whether it’s true or not.

The old grammars mostly leave -mi verbs until last, as if they’re too hard to learn. Being high-frequency and quite regular within their own province, -mi verbs should be addressed early on. And that’s why I’m doing them now, a little over a year into the posts – there are lots to come.

Notice the reference here to Cambyses, son of Kuros, who sponsored the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Some people claim that Judaism didn’t exist until the time of Cambyses, which begs the question what religion was practiced in the Second Temple in the time of Kuros.  The claim fails the Test of Occam’s Razor, however, due to the reference to Israel as an ethnic group on the Merneptah stele of 1220 BCE, and those pigless highland settlements of the 1100s BCE; if you ignore part of the data (a fallacy called sampling bias), you fail the Test.

21st Century Classical Greek -- impersonal gerundive subject in -oi case!

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. When Goodwin says that the subject of an “infinitive” is in the accusative, he’s wrong.

Smyth allows as how the subject of an infinitive can be in the -oi case but he has requirements, none of which apply here:

1)         The subject of the infinitive is also the subject of a conjugated verb in the same sentence. We don’t have any conjugated verbs here.

2)         The i.g. is substantivized with an article in an oblique case (not -oi). The definite articles in this sentence have noun complements; the i.g.s are not substituting for nouns, they are substituting for conjugated verbs.

Smyth deals with this subject in section 1973 on page 439; his discussion of the -ous subject of an i.g. is in section 936 on page 260. This is one of the many pitfalls of the old grammars: segregating information that should be addressed in the same place, even if that means repeating information. And, as I said, neither of these conditions applies to 13.2.

The other i.g. is passive voice and triireis is the grammatical subject and logical object.

DIY -- healthier and still delicious

I love to play with my food. Once I got my new toy and could bake again, I started doing some research on the web.

We all need more whole grains in our diet. What if it could be delicious?

In anything you bake, you can substitute whole wheat flour for white, cup for cup. There's even a butter cake recipe out there which uses all whole wheat flour. Add in some dried fruit and chopped nuts, and you can hardly get a healthier snack. Take anything you bake and start by replacing half the white flour with whole wheat. When you're used to it, go a little further, until you're using all whole wheat flour.

But wait, it gets better. In anything you make (not just bake), you can substitute plain fat-free yogurt cup for cup for milk, sour cream, heavy cream, and even butter. I use it instead of sour cream and buttermilk in ranch dressing. I used it to make a peanut butter frosting for the whole wheat cake.  It's great for things with baking powder in them, where you might normally use buttermilk to activate the baking powder. 

So here is a pan of scones, made with yogurt instead of milk. (Although I did use butter for shortening.) Looks nice and brown while it cools on the range top. I didn't cut the scones out into rounds. I cut a plus sign, then a circle, then outside the circle I cut the quarter moons in half. 

And here's some taken out of the middle. See how nice and fluffy it looks? (The little dark things are currants, I had part of a bag to use up.) Scones are another thing you can put dried fruit into, although if you want to use anything larger than a raisin you ought to chop it up. You can also put in carob morsels or chopped nuts, or a tablespoonful of some kind of extract like maple. I have seen recipes with icing but I won't be doing that. The beaten egg glaze on the top is traditional and adds protein.

You can also make these gluten-free. They use baking powder, not yeast, so they will rise even without gluten.

Remember, buy the right yogurt and you can incubate more from a bottle of milk. I have a dehydrate feature on my toy that is perfect for incubating yogurt.

Now. My toy includes air frying. Here's how you make that healthy. For both veggies and nuggets, use batter. Use a fat-free batter. Find a recipe for General Tso's chicken, leave out the garlic and soy sauce from the batter, use whole wheat flour not white, and add whatever seasoning you like. I have dozens of them, berbere and balti, cajun and Italian. Roll your bits in the batter and pop into your air fryer. Less fat, tastes great.

Play with your food!

Gibbon -- the urban legend pt 3

The last post was about how urban legends never update their information. During their life, they may acquire greater exaggeration because that's exciting and promotes transmission. But it's too boring to go back and try to correct the falsehoods they contain, and the corrections never catch up with the urban legend in the minds of people who love urban legends. That's why urban legends persist despite the best efforts to debunk them.

This time, we're up to chapter 3 of Gibbon which has one major fault. Gibbon describes the early empire as sowing the seeds of decline. It's not true; everything that grows has a decline at some point. Human cultures are no different from human beings in that way. What Gibbon says about the start of the decline is a classic example of misunderstanding or willfully misinterpreting his sources, one of the features of urban legends that contributes to their falseness.

Gibbon's description is something I've seen before: a pretense that Gibbon's description is accurate. Where I've seen it before is in the behavior -- or at least statements -- of the prosecution in the Mendel Beilis trial. The prosecutors pretended that they were working under a system similar to that in Britain or even the U.S. While Tsarist Russia adopted the 1813 nullum crimen principle, in fact Beilis was tried in 1913 for a "murder out of religious fanaticism" charge that was wiped out of the criminal code in 1906. Much to the chagrin of the Black Hundreds and in particular civil prosecutor Aleksey Shmakov. It's possible that Andrey Yushchinsky's death was whomped up into a federal case so as to justify passing a new law criminalizing this charge. But the evidence was all forged, the testimony perjured; the jury knew it by day 8 of a 34 day trial, and Beilis was acquitted specifically on that charge (though the bigoted urban legend pretends otherwise).

Gibbon is falsifying his testimony as to Roman government. He continues his pretense that Rome had a free constitution in the same terms as Britain of his own times, and provided liberty in the same terms. No doubt this is what has led the Online Library of Liberty to host his text, and they operate under a similar misapprehension. I talked about this in a footnote to chapter 1 but let me say it here. 

In Gibbon's time, liberty as opposed to non-liberty was the freedom to enjoy one's property without fearing that government would confiscate it without justification. This was the difference between the Stuart monarchies, and the Glorious Revolution followed by the Hanoverians.

Nevertheless, Gibbon was a friend of Lord North, the prime minister at the time of the American Revolution. Not only did the colonists have no representation in Parliament, but they -- and Britons who supported them -- were prosecuted for sedition. But Gibbon had a horror of real democracy and it shows throughout his work.

Gibbon's government was a thing of patronage, privilege, and jobbing. Gibbon got into Parliament for St. Germains, a rotten borough (nobody lived there so he represented no actual Britons) in Cornwall, under the patronage of the 1st Baron Eliot, Edward Craggs-Eliot. Eliot only needed Gibbon to pass legislation; Gibbon never made a speech or did anything noteworthy. Again, Alexander Wedderburn's patronage named Gibbon to the Board of Trade when Gibbon's finances were shaky. Gibbon had ignored Eliot; he lost his patronage -- and his parliamentary seat and position at the Board.

But Gibbon is hypercritical of patronage, privilege and jobbing in the Roman Empire. He pretends that Augustus destroyed a free government with real elections, when the Roman Republic was run by the patricians and equites. When it degenerated into the civil war between Sulla and Marius, the stage was set for somebody to use the army for a takeover. Julius Caesar got the blame and was assassinated. Revenging him, Octavian made it possible to actually run the unwieldy structure that Rome had become after conquering western Europe and northern Africa. Northern Africa, including Egypt, was crucial to feeding an Italy that dispossessed farmers in favor of slave labor, pushing lots of people into the cities where they might not be able to make a living wage. Getting food to these people required big government. The upper classes were too busy fighting their rivalries to provide big government. 

Idle hands also were lent to crime. Gladiatorial games would distract the jobless population, but gladiatorial games were expensive; good gladiators needed good training, good food, housing, and a little cash for drink and prostitutes because gladiator survival rates meant they were not good marital prospects. It took big government to run good gladiatorial games. In the 1984 version of Last Days of Pompeii, when the nouveau riche candidate tries to buy votes by paying for games, that's one of the most realistic things in the whole miniseries.

What's more, the experience of the social war showed that if you tied your allies up in your armies, you could move them where they were no danger to Rome. If they rebelled or disobeyed, they were subject to death under military discipline. This set the stage for putting the "barbarians" of conquered territory into legions that were sent far from their homes to serve and, upon retirement, settle. 

This all rested on Augustus making himself paterfamilias of the empire, instead of just the head of the senate. Whatever the paterfamilias ordered, the familia had to do. He even had the right to sell his children into slavery. Once the Emperor was a Christian, his troops and population were highly motivated if not required to follow suit. When Constantine supported the Council of Nicaea in 325, it was a foregone conclusion that the outcome would become the law of the Empire.

Gibbon writes about the concept of paterfamilias, He shows that he knows Augustus took on this role. But even after chapter 2, he continues to argue that his own attitudes toward government applied to the Roman Republic and were suppressed by Augustus in the Roman Empire. 

There's a disconnect there, which I describe as "the left side of the brain is not talking to the right side." I've known people trained in a given field who, when they leave the office, leave behind everything they learned and do the exact opposite in their personal life, with the same outcome their training prevents for their employer. I've known scientists go haring off after unproven concepts in a field not their own; Linus Pauling is probably the most famous example. I've known people with college educations falling for every urban legend they meet up with, because they simply have no critical thinking facility outside their own field.

In this chapter Gibbon tells outright lies about what was going on in the empire. He claims that all was peace with the exception of the Year of the Four Emperors, until 192 CE. His sources would have showed him differently. He either suppressed an inconvenient truth, or he didn't read the sources that give the information, as I have said before. I'll say more about this a couple of posts from now.

Gibbon is writing about a culture he does not live in. He can't use his sources adequately -- some he can't access at all. And he makes up his mind as to what he thinks, rejecting all information suggesting that he's wrong, some of which he actually records. 

There is more ahead and I will keep posting. But as a spoiler, I recommend you start reading my blog of urban legends about Judaism. Then when you get to the point where Gibbon is what they call "not even wrong", you will understand why I would say that.

If you want to know about Roman government, especially the history of it, you are better off reading

Abbott, Frank Frost (1901). A History and Description of Roman Political Institutions. Elibron Classics  https://ia800309.us.archive.org/18/items/historydescripti00abbouoft/historydescripti00abbouoft.pdf

To the PDF

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.