21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 11, adverbial equative

I dealt with the “cognate accusative” in one of the lessons but it’s worthwhile repeating the information in case you want to save this stuff off somewhere and have it fairly complete when you drive your Greek professor crazy.

All the Greek grammars I looked at (White, Goodwin, Gildersleeve, Smyth) have different definitions of this subject. Gildersleeve copied his from his Latin grammar, and it differs from the definition in Allen & Greenough’s Latin grammar. When there’s no objective definition, there’s no there there.

There is something in Arabic and Hebrew that is called the cognate accusative. It is two words in close association from the same root. One is a conjugated verb; the other is a substantive derivative. The structure is an adverb of manner.

Since there is no accusative morphology in Hebrew, it’s obvious that “cognate accusative” is another misleading label. What I’m going to call it is adverbial equative, like the Hurrian case. I don’t have examples of the Hurrian adverbial equative; Wegener doesn’t give any. If you know of some, ante up.

Then it turns out that Aeschylus and Demosthenes (poetry and rhetoric respectively) have a similar structure, although Thucydides hasn’t used it in Books I-III.

See Demosthenes’ Against Aristocrates, καλήν γ᾽ ὕβριν ἦμεν ἂν ὑβρισμένοι.

And Aristophanes’ Plutus, 1044: τάλαιν᾽ ἐγὼ τῆς ὕβρεος ἧς ὑβρίζομαι.

You don’t use a structure in a political argument or in a sacred drama unless it is meaningful to your audience. I made this same argument in one of my first posts on this thread. So the structure I am now calling an adverbial equative was well known to educated people in Attica at the very least.

And in addition, I have found this structure in Book IV of the Mahabharata, chapter 66, verse 22. Since Mahabharata is in Sanskrit, an ancient Indo-Iranian language, it reinforces the possibility of an ancestral language family spread from eastern Anatolia halfway to the Himalayas. There are a couple of similar narratives, too, although the Indics in the east have extremely sketchy versions of them. (Axel Olrik would say that they decayed during long-term oral transmission as the culture migrated away from its homeland and changed.)

This is not to say that the idea of a Nostratic family is correct, any more than it is correct to say that the resemblances between Greek and Hebrew are Hebraisms. They are not.  They probably go back before domestication of wheat, about the time that NE Anatolian peoples headed out, winding up in Greece, the Basque region, and the British Isles. They carried ergative languages, and their British descendants built Stonehenge before the Celts arrived.

Hurrian, like Basque and Sumerian, was an ergative language. Claiming that Hurria did not exist until the time of its surviving writings is a fallacy called a false argument from silence, since we manifestly do not have a complete dataset from anywhere that people have lived, and since cultura non facit saltus.

More work needs to be done to standardize the definition of adverbial equative, and to search for similar structures in Sumerian and the archives of Ebla.

But for now, “cognate accusative” is my latest victim in murdering concepts in the old grammars.