21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 2, strictly verbs

To recap. I describe the Greek verb system by multiple vectors:

1.                  Aspect

2.                  Voice

3.                  Definiteness

4.                  Certainty

5.                  Transitivity

6.                  Verb class

Each of these vectors has three parts, although under aspect we have two flavors in each part.

1.                  Aspect

a.                   Imperfective

b.                  Progressive

c.                   Perfective

2.                  Voice

a.                   Executive

b.                  Passive

c.                   Base

3.                  Definiteness

a.                   Conjugation

b.                  Personal gerundive

c.                   Impersonal gerundive

4.                  Certainty

a.                   Indicative

b.                  Oblique

c.                   Epistemic

5.                  Transitivity

a.                   Transitive

b.                  Ergative (intransitive imperfective or perfective in executive or base voice)

c.                   Intransitive (passive voice)

6.                  Verb class

a.                   -mi

b.                  -mai

c.                   non-mai, some of which drop vowels (either 1^st or 2^nd syllable of root), and -mai verbs that are actually suppletives

The flavors of aspect are eventive and conceptual.

Some verbal vectors require a specific structure, as well as specific morphology:

1.                  Ergative

2.                  Passive

3.                  Anti-passive

Knitting -- another Norwegian tradition?

I can't remember how I found the first Valldal pattern I ever saw, but so far I've found five patterns.

Most of them are cardigans but here is a child's jumper. It's pattern #3 by Sandnes Garn, owners of the copyright for the Mariusgenser. Here are search results on their site

https://www.sandnes-garn.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=valldal

Sandnes also has a pattern called Myrdal, but it's very much like the Valldal pattern, see below. I found three other patterns, apparently quite old, and very much like each other, all cardigans, and all very much like some of the Valldal patterns. I was able to give you specific things to watch for so that you would know if you were looking at a Setesdal or a Fana; I can't do that 

with these two styles. If they really are separate. 

I sent a link to some of the patterns to Arne and Carlos. These aren't shown on any of their videos.

At any rate, if you weren't turned on by any of the traditional Norwegian patterns I showed you, maybe this one will get you started. You can find some at the archive where I found Carlos' grandmother's Dovre kofte pattern; you have to take out a membership to get anything beyond the photo. It's 189 kroner or just under $20 for a membership. 

https://koftearkivet.no/suf-1163-valldal/

This link goes to a cardigan that is tagged as 1960-1979, which doesn't sound as if it's a tradition-- but there's a video about the Icelandic lopapeysa jumper which says that tradition goes back to the -- 1950s! But that's for another post.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 1, verbs

Friday I went through the 44 or so posts I had written for this thread but not posted. I found 11 with fairly new information, but they mostly had to do with conditionals. So I decided to go straight to the summaries of the grammar I've been giving you. It's 20 posts, so we're near the end. 

The Classical Greek verbal system as used in Thucydides' Peloponnesian War is aspectual, not tense based.

1.                  Aspect – nuance of verbal meaning such as simple action, habit, or result.

2.                  Voice – also called diathesis, carries the nuance of deliberate decision or intransitivity, and base voice for everything else

3.                  Definiteness – stating the action, describing the action, or substantivizing the action

4.                  Certainty – knowledge of whether the action occurred or is likely to occur

5.                  Transitivity – whether the grammatical subject of the verb is the agent or the logical object

6.                  Verb class – ending of the dictionary entry and whether the verb root contracts during conjugation

Each of these vectors has three parts, although under aspect we have two flavors in each part.

1.                  Aspect

a.                   Imperfective – implies nothing about result, which may fade away or be reversed; used for motion in alternating directions and often for imperatives intended to produce an action.

b.                  Progressive – formation or existence of a habit or situation; used for imperatives intended to produce a state.

c.                   Perfective – action creating a permanent result. Imperative is periphrastic and very rare.

2.                  Voice

a.                   Executive – action deliberately undertaken to produce its ordinary outcome. Exists only for non-mai verbs

b.                  Passive – intransitive action in a specific structure. Exists only for -mai verbs and imperfective non-mai verbs.

c.                   Base – all other uses

3.                  Definiteness

a.                   Conjugation – statement of the action

b.                  Personal gerundive – description of the action

c.                   Impersonal gerundive – substantivized action or complement expressing purpose; used for actions that are due and owing, a quasi-imperative lacking the nuance of immediacy.

4.                  Certainty

a.                   Indicative – direct statement of action, including imperatives.

b.                  Oblique – statement of highly probable action or used in an attempt to persuade.

c.                   Epistemic – speaker is not heavily invested in the truth of what is said.

5.                  Transitivity

a.                   Transitive – agent and object are distinct and use different cases, often -oi and -ous cases respectively. Case of object affects meaning of the verb+predicate phrase.

b.                  Ergative (intransitive imperfective or perfective) structure – object in -oi case, agent in hupo plus genitive. verb has an “aor. 2” form but can be in any aspect as we saw in III 11.2.

c.                   Intransitive (passive voice) structure – a noun in -oi case which is both subject and object.

6.                  Verb class

a.                   -mi – high-frequency verbs like give, take, go, “be”; a number of -mi verbs like histimi and tithimi have intransitive imperfective and perfective morphology.

b.                  -mai – no executive voice; if there is a non-mai verb with the same meaning, the -mai verb will be used to evaluate the action. Formerly called “deponent”, some -mai dictionary entries actually belong to suppletive verbs.

c.                   non-mai verbs with all voices, except that progressive and perfective have no passive. Some like timao and poieo lose vowels in the 1^st or 2^nd syllable of the root.

The flavors of aspect are eventive, which is often marked by augment, or conceptual.

Some verbal vectors require a specific structure, as well as specific morphology:

1.                  Ergative – a verbal plus hupo plus the agent in the -on case, where the verb is a specifically intransitive form (“2^nd aorist” or “2^nd perfect”), with an object in the -oi noun case

2.                  Passive – specific verbal morphology with a noun in the -oi case as both subject and object.

3.                  Anti-passive – a verbal plus an impersonal gerundive which is its complement; the object of the verbal is the subject of the i.g. and comes between them.

Knitting -- ain't technology grand!

Did you ever see knitwear in a historical movie on Youtube -- you might even be able to do this with your pay-per-view streaming service -- and want to weep because it made your fingers itch to knit a copy?

Well, technology can help. I did this with three things from Arne and Carlos videos.

I pulled up the video with the Dovrekofta leaflet that had the grandmother's notes on it; this was in Youtube on my laptop.

I halted the video at the point where Carlos holds up the leaflet.

I used Google Lens to get an image of it with my camera on my Pixel 4.

And voila! the search function gave me the name of the leaflet, Dovrekofta 493.

On my laptop I used Google search and found an archive of Norwegian knitting patterns, and here is the actual leaflet (minus the notes of course).

https://koftegruppa.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/SE-493-Dovrekofta.pdf

I did this with a couple of the jumpers that Arne and Carolos wore. One is the Knut pattern designed for Rowan yarns. It is basically an Icelandic pattern, with the round yoke that goes over the shoulders and has rays of motifs. If you have a Ravelry account you can find it there, too.

https://knitrowan.com/products/knut

The other is the Redd Barna Knit for Ukraine pattern on the Arne and Carlos site.

https://shop.arnecarlos.com/product/reddbarna-unisex-sweater/

Now that I have this technology, I can go back to where I got interested in British traditional designs. When I was watching the Time Team videos on Youtube, I wanted to weep over the great British jumpers the archaeologists wore, and I couldn't imagine getting down literally in the trenches with those things on. Maybe they took them off for the work and put them on for the camera. But maybe they knew where to buy replacements. 

Anyway, Arne and Carlos have a Twitter account and I tweeted to them the link to the sweater leaflet.

Just cos we like traditional hand-knitting doesn't mean we're Luddites, now does it?

21st Century Classical Greek -- more miscellany

Book I section 53. I’m going to kill off another old concept and point out more of Jowett’s transpositions and other failings.

ἔδοξεν οὖν αὐτοῖς ἄνδρας ἐς κελήτιον ἐσβιβάσαντας ἄνευ κηρυκείου προσπέμψαι τοῖς Ἀθηναίοις καὶ πεῖραν ποιήσασθαι. πέμψαντές τε ἔλεγον τοιάδε.

[2] ‘ἀδικεῖτε, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, πολέμου ἄρχοντες καὶ σπονδὰς λύοντες: ἡμῖν γὰρ πολεμίους τοὺς ἡμετέρους τιμωρουμένοις ἐμποδὼν ἵστασθε ὅπλα ἀνταιρόμενοι. εἰ δ᾽ ὑμῖν γνώμη ἐστὶ κωλύειν τε ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ Κέρκυραν ἢ ἄλλοσε εἴ ποι βουλόμεθα πλεῖν καὶ τὰς σπονδὰς λύετε, ἡμᾶς τούσδε πρώτους λαβόντες χρήσασθε ὡς πολεμίοις.’

[3] οἱ μὲν δὴ τοιαῦτα εἶπον: τῶν δὲ Κερκυραίων τὸ μὲν στρατόπεδον ὅσον ἐπήκουσεν ἀνεβόησεν εὐθὺς λαβεῖν τε αὐτοὺς καὶ ἀποκτεῖναι, οἱ δὲ Ἀθηναῖοι τοιάδε ἀπεκρίναντο.

[4] ‘οὔτε ἄρχομεν πολέμου, ὦ ἄνδρες Πελοποννήσιοι, οὔτε τὰς σπονδὰς λύομεν, Κερκυραίοις δὲ τοῖσδε ξυμμάχοις οὖσι βοηθοὶ ἤλθομεν. εἰ μὲν οὖν ἄλλοσέ ποι βούλεσθε πλεῖν, οὐ κωλύομεν: εἰ δὲ ἐπὶ Κέρκυραν πλευσεῖσθε ἢ ἐς τῶν ἐκείνων τι χωρίων, οὐ περιοψόμεθα κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν.’

Learn κῆρυξ in Wiktionary. Also see White, page 222, section 743 for similar declensions.

Heralds were under the protection of Hermes and carried a caduceus to show it. Sending these people out without a caduceus made whatever they said suspect since they had no symbol of being official messengers.

At the start of subsection 2, what flavor of progressive is adikeite? Is it a habit or does it imply a series of actions? Give me your comments with why you picked the flavor you did. Do they also apply to istasthe later in the subsection?

And why is this labeled causal in Word Tool? There’s a history behind that. In old grammars you will find the term factitive which straddles the boundary between transitive and causal. It’s totally useless in this situation, however, for the use of isasthe can be translated reflexively. So I am never going to use the term factitive again. You understand that causal is a meaningless category because every verb has uses which are not causal, just as every verb which can be translated in the sense of fearing may have other meanings that don’t fall into that category.

Notice luete later in this subsection which is progressive of some flavor: Jowett translates it as a future tense even though it doesn’t have the sigma imperfective infix. One of Goodwin’s uses for progressive is “attempt”, and that may have been what Jowett was thinking. But earlier in the subsection Jowett says that the Korinthians think the Athinaians have already violated the treaty. The only way luete could be taken in a future sense is as a progressive eventive, repeated actions violating the treaty. This comes pretty close to the imperfective use that I talked about some time ago, the one that mirrors Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh, but choosing an eventive designation covers all different actions that violate the treaty.

Jowett fails to translate euthus in subsection 3: the Kerkyraeans immediately cried out kill them.

He also reverses the conditionals at the end of subsection 4. The Athinaians offer the carrot “we won’t touch you if you sail anywhere else” and then say “but if you attack our allies we won’t suffer it to the extent possible.” Jowett also fails to translate this as a negative.

I'm just saying -- intelligence is not the same as information

So I found a bunch of science books on Openstax and I've been refreshing what I know about science. I think I have finally memorized acid/base, ox/redox. But I also found cases of scientists making statements that fall outside their fields, never imagining they could be wrong and not thinking about the consequences of what they say.

First up was a statement in a text on geology about mammals dominating the earth. Never happened. Can't happen. First, the bottom of the food pyramid on dry land is not animals. It's plants. There's a 10% reduction in available energy as you work your way up the food pyramid. The mammals may be on the top but they get less than 50% of the available energy in any ecosystem. As well as being far less numerous than plants. And also far less numerous in both species and individuals compared to insects and one-celled life. 

The second was an astronomy text claiming that the Cretaceous extinction wiped out plant life. Can't happen and let life on dry land survive. Two things. While some mammals hibernate now, where's the evidence that their Cretaceous ancestors hibernated? (or estivated) Second, as soon as mammals come out of lockdown, they have to find food within a couple of days. Not just any food but what they are adapted to eating. A carnivorous mammal that eats all the re-awakened mammals it finds will die, if the re-awakened mammals don't have their food -- which is plants. If they are adapted to fruit, there has to be fruit. If all plant life on dry land was wiped out, there could be buried seeds. But the other problem is they have to be buried near the re-awakened mammals or the mammals die before they can find the food.

Part two, acid rain. By the time mammals re-awakened -- if any of them went dormant, which the text does not discuss -- they needed water that wouldn't poison them. Their ancestors drank sweet water, not salt water or acid water. And dry land life dies of thirst faster than starvation. So while I don't doubt there was acid rain, there was at worst a gradient: some areas escaped acid rain and the acidity was lower around them and so on up the gradient to places wiped out by acid rain. If there were any.

Part three, birds. Birds cannot survive without eating more than their body weight most days, and some are food specific. While bug-eating birds are opportunistic and will eat berries or suet when bugs are dead (in the winter), seed and nut birds are not opportunistic. If plants were completely destroyed, these birds would die out pretty quickly. The claim that plant life was destroyed is tantamount to saying that Archaeopteryx and Hesperornis and so on left no descendants among modern birds. That is NOT what this website says.

https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/birds/birdfr.html

I realize that most of our familiar songbirds developed at the same time as humans emerged from the apes. However, the ancestry of ostriches goes back further than the Cretaceous disaster. That's impossible if they had no food to eat or all the water was poisoned with acid.

So when you are writing about your specialty field and you come to the point where it crosses boundaries with something you know nothing about, 1) stop and consult an expert in that field; 2) think hard before you set finger to key or speak into your recorder app; and 3) have that expert read what you wrote and tell you "no, it can't work like that because..."

It ought to be pretty embarrassing for Openstax that a non-specialist can pick up on the impracticality of what their experts wrote. They ought to pull their texts and edit them for more such mistakes. As long as people are allowed to publish texts that show they don't know what they're talking about but nevertheless talked about it, stupid ideas are going to persist. Kind of like what I said on my Gibbon page.

I'm just saying...

21st Century Classical Greek -- transpositions interrupt the flow

Book I section 52. I was going to do several sections in one post but then I found a number of things I thought you ought to know about.

τῇ δὲ ὑστεραίᾳ ἀναγαγόμεναι αἵ τε Ἀττικαὶ τριάκοντα νῆες καὶ τῶν Κερκυραίων ὅσαι πλώιμοι ἦσαν ἐπέπλευσαν ἐπὶ τὸν ἐν τοῖς Συβότοις λιμένα, ἐν ᾧ οἱ Κορίνθιοι ὥρμουν, βουλόμενοι εἰδέναι εἰ ναυμαχήσουσιν.

[2] οἱ δὲ τὰς μὲν ναῦς ἄραντες ἀπὸ τῆς γῆς καὶ παραταξάμενοι μετεώρους ἡσύχαζον, ναυμαχίας οὐ διανοούμενοι ἄρχειν ἑκόντες ὁρῶντες προσγεγενημένας τε ναῦς ἐκ τῶν Ἀθηνῶν ἀκραιφνεῖς καὶ σφίσι πολλὰ τὰ ἄπορα ξυμβεβηκότα, αἰχμαλώτων τε περὶ φυλακῆς οὓς ἐν ταῖς ναυσὶν εἶχον, καὶ ἐπισκευὴν οὐκ οὖσαν τῶν νεῶν ἐν χωρίῳ ἐρήμῳ:

[3] τοῦ δὲ οἴκαδε πλοῦ μᾶλλον διεσκόπουν ὅπῃ κομισθήσονται, δεδιότες μὴ οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι νομίσαντες λελύσθαι τὰς σπονδάς, διότι ἐς χεῖρας ἦλθον, οὐκ ἐῶσι σφᾶς ἀποπλεῖν.

52.3: learn dioti. You haven’t seen it much but you will see it more than once as you read.

Notice the perfective conceptual verbs and derivatives in section 52. They have the nuance that at the point when Thucydides wrote this and other similar sections, the results of what he reports were still in effect. This supports the assumption that Thucydides wrote as things happened, instead of keeping notes and then sitting down and writing it up in one fell swoop after the plague. You may have to read the entire work and keep notes to see if things expressed in perfective held good throughout the war.

In particular look at the end of subsection 1. Thucydides talks about the gathering of the remnants of the fleet, then tells where they were going, then tells what the purpose of this was. He doesn’t use any of the classic purpose particles, the impersonal gerundive is a complement to boulomenoi. Jowett transposes the action and its purpose, creating a sort of parenthetical expression as if he is trying to round a period. Since we know that he doesn’t understand rounded periods, it’s sort of bogus. If, as I have said, Thucydides read his work to an audience as he went, he knew that they would care less about why the actions took place, than about what happened, which includes setting out for a specified location.

And then after specifying that location, he shows why the Korinthians were stupid to go there. There were no repair facilities in this uninhabited place and the Korinthians had not brought spares with them. The Kerkyraeans could simply retreat to Leukimmi on their home island and make all right and tight while giving Athins harbor privileges. These ideas are divorced by Jowett’s transposition.

21st Century Classical Greek -- commentaries

I apologize for being late with this, I had some financial stuff to do this morning. NEhoo.

Book I section 51. I’m going to focus on subsection 4 here to give you reasons not to trust commentaries. Period.

ταύτας οὖν προϊδόντες οἱ Κορίνθιοι καὶ ὑποτοπήσαντες ἀπ᾽ Ἀθηνῶν εἶναι οὐχ ὅσας ἑώρων ἀλλὰ πλείους ὑπανεχώρουν.

[2] τοῖς δὲ Κερκυραίοις ἐπέπλεον γὰρ μᾶλλον ἐκ τοῦ ἀφανοῦς οὐχ ἑωρῶντο, καὶ ἐθαύμαζον τοὺς Κορινθίους πρύμναν κρουομένους, πρίν τινες ἰδόντες εἶπον ὅτι νῆες ἐκεῖναι ἐπιπλέουσιν. τότε δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ ἀνεχώρουν: ξυνεσκόταζε γὰρ ἤδη, καὶ οἱ Κορίνθιοι ἀποτραπόμενοι τὴν διάλυσιν ἐποιήσαντο.

[3] οὕτω μὲν ἡ ἀπαλλαγὴ ἐγένετο ἀλλήλων, καὶ ἡ ναυμαχία ἐτελεύτα ἐς νύκτα.

[4] τοῖς δὲ Κερκυραίοις στρατοπεδευομένοις ἐπὶ τῇ Λευκίμμῃ αἱ εἴκοσι νῆες αἱ ἐκ τῶν Ἀθηνῶν αὗται, ὧν ἦρχε Γλαύκων τε ὁ Λεάγρου καὶ † Ἀνδοκίδης ὁ Λεωγόρου †, διὰ τῶν νεκρῶν καὶ ναυαγίων προσκομισθεῖσαι κατέπλεον ἐς τὸ στρατόπεδον οὐ πολλῷ ὕστερον ἢ ὤφθησαν.

[5] οἱ δὲ Κερκυραῖοι (ἦν γὰρ νύξ) ἐφοβήθησαν μὴ πολέμιαι ὦσιν, ἔπειτα δὲ ἔγνωσαν: καὶ ὡρμίσαντο.

In 51.4, Jowett commits another one of his transpositions that disrupts Thucydides’ structure. Having told how both fleets retreated, Mr. T sends the Kerkyraeans to camp in Leukimmi, saying that 20 ships were left of what the Athinaians sent. Then Thucydides tells who commanded this squadron. Putting the names first as Jowett does, would confuse T’s audience. They want to know what happened more than they care who did it.

Now look at the two daggers in subsection 4. They mark a name and in Perseus, you can look at Marchant’s notes and see what they mean. They set off a name about which there is some uncertainty. Marchant claims that the orator of a similar name would have mentioned his grandfather as being involved in this battle. That rests on a couple of bad assumptions.

The most important bad assumption is that we have all the work that the orator produced. We don’t have all the work of the more-famous Aeschylus, for example; we have about 10% of his lifetime output.

The other bad assumption shows up a lot in scholarly work. It’s called the Presentism Fallacy; the scholar assumes that the work he is studying would have in it all of the information the scholar would have put into it if he had written that work. The same thing happens in Bible scholarship, and the reason is probably the same.

Scholars want the Bible to record specific things, but they are working from a literary standpoint and the Tannakh, at least, is a record of an oral tradition. It is formatted in ways that coordinate with Axel Olrik’s principles. It is also a Jewish work, and some of its mid-level structures show up in Mishnah and Talmud, the latter of which is also the record of an oral tradition. The scholars who are dissatisfied with the gaps in the Bible are mostly Christians who want the Tannakh to cater to them, when Christianity was neither born nor dreamed of between 4000 BCE and the end of the Babylonian Captivity.

An orator by definition works in the oral environment, not the literary environment. He is going to format things in a way suitable for his audience, as I have already shown Thucydides does. He is going to follow Axel’s law of parsimony, and avoid tiring his audience out with things not relevant to the point at hand. He can also avoid information he reasonably expects his audience to have, so he doesn’t offend them by talking down to them. We’ve seen this, too, in Thucydides.

Remember long ago when I referred to Hartley’s work on oratory and avoiding tiring the audience with rounded periods that produce long sentences? In Hartley’s environment, orators wrote their work out at full length to make sure they included pertinent quotations and then they memorized what they wrote to use in their presentations – or they flat out read from their written work. That’s the background of Marchant’s fallacious claim. It’s not how Thucydides worked, and it’s not necessarily how the orator of the same name worked.

Marchant also weasel-words his discussion of the inscription. There is no link to this inscription on Perseus; there is no citation in Marchant’s note, to a work that gives the text. We don’t know what it actually says. We don’t know from Marchant’s note whether any work discusses how such inscriptions relate to what various authors have said about the Peloponnesian War. There is a parenthetical “see crit. Note” but when we click “focus” to see Marchant’s work, there still is no link to any information supporting Marchant’s claims.

In fact Marchant’s work is not available on the Internet, except for Perseus. And Marchant’s work is strictly a commentary on the wording of Thucydides. It is not possible to follow up his claims. I know of commentaries, the claims in which can be followed up and proven false; I destroy two of them on my Fact-Checking blog.

Of course, it’s possible that Thucydides got this name wrong. However, he and not the orator lived in the generation when the war happened, and there’s also the possibility that the inscription is wrong, depending on when it was made and who paid for it. But due to Marchant’s sloppy fallacious work, we can’t tell.

But given the problems – gaps, inaccuracies, bad citations, false claims – in books that only deal with Greek grammar, it shouldn’t be a surprise that people writing commentaries would do even worse. And if you read what I wrote on the Fact-Checking thread, you shouldn’t be surprised that the same thing happens in commentaries on Greek literature.