21st Century Classical Greek -- Herodotus

All right. I have gone on with Herodotus. After I thought that he threw me under the bus over ergatives, I decided to see what he has done for me lately.

Well.

First, Book I, 4.2. He confirms that an pivots between concepts.

δῆλα γὰρ δὴ ὅτι, εἰ μὴ αὐταὶ ἐβούλοντο, οὐκ ἂν ἡρπάζοντο.

The subject is kidnapping women. The ei clause has the women for the subject of eboulonto, the “then” clause has the kidnappers for the subject of irpazonto.

The verbs are both indicative; in a conditional, this means a conditional contrary to fact. Herodotus has to negate the verb because the fact is that the women were kidnapped. The verbs are both in base voice, not passive. They are progressive eventive, and the progressive does not have passive voice.

Second, Herodotus proves that there is no “imperfect tense” that is interrupted by another action. He is speaking of thinking or wanting, and kidnapping, and neither action is interrupted by another action.

In I.5.2

…αἰδεομένη τοὺς τοκέας οὕτω δὴ ἐθελοντήν αὐτήν τοῖσι Φοίνιξι συνεκπλῶσαι, ὡς ἂν μὴ κατάδηλος γένηται

A woman sails away with the Phoinikians “so that something does not become obvious.” What? Her pregnancy. An pivots from the woman sailing away, to her pregnancy.

The genitai is an imperfective eventive oblique; she knew it was possible for her parents to detect her pregnancy but she sailed away to prevent it from shaming her before them.

In I.14.3 there IS an ergative structure and it uses a progressive conceptual:

ὁ δὲ χρυσός οὗτος καὶ ὁ ἄργυρος τὸν ὁ Γύγης ἀνέθηκε, ὑπὸ Δελφῶν καλέεται Γυγάδας ἐπὶ τοῦ ἀναθέντος ἐπωνυμίην.

Kaleo has an “aor.2” form the way aireo has. The old grammars did not understand ergative structures and so they would not have labeled kaleetai as “pres.2”. But here it is with krusos and arguros as -oi case and hupo Delfon as agents.

I.30.1. is an example of progressive eventive with an agent.

ἀπικόμενος δὲ ἐξεινίζετο ἐν τοῖσι βασιληίοισι ὑπὸ  τοῦ Κροίσου·…

Ksenizo does not have an “aor.2” It is in base voice, as we know because progressive does not have a passive voice. This is also another example of how “imperfect tense” is a false concept for this verb form.

Here is Herodotus (I.70.3) using an agent clause with an imperfective eventive passive voice:

ὡς ἀπαιρεθείησαν ὑπὸ  Σαμίων. κατὰ μέν νυν τὸν κρητῆρα οὕτω ἔσχε.

And finally, in I.141.1, I get an imperfective intransitive eventive:

Ἴωνες δὲ καὶ Αἰολέες, ὡς οἱ Λυδοὶ τάχιστα κατεστράφατο ὑπὸ  Περσέων…

The root strefo has an imperfective intransitive eventive which uses phi instead of the normal psi  of a transitive imperfective eventive.

So I spoke too fast. Herodotus uses progressives in ergative structures but he also has the normal imperfective ergative.

Knitting -- Icelandic sweaters

The Icelandic "tradition", according to one fan, goes back to the 1950s. The Icelandic sweaters include the Lopapeysa, which you're supposed to knit in Lopi yarn, The Icelandic patterns I've found mostly want you to use bulky yarn.

Let's take the last point first. I found a great pattern but I wanted to use a yarn labeled fingering weight that had a great loft. So of course I had to do the math to get it right.

Icelandic patterns tend to have you using three colors at once at some places. You MUST work with a loose tension. If you can't stand not to pull the yarn tight, you will have to use a larger stitch count than you normally do for the weight of yarn you are using. The more colors, the less give in the fabric. If you don't increase your stitch count, you'll never get the sweater on. Let alone that it won't stretch where it needs to.

Third, two of your yarn colors have to be controlled by one hand. Between that and the need for a LOOSE tension, the best way to handle those two colors is to just run them over your forefinger and not worry about anchoring them with your little finger. Then work SLOWLY and pick the one you need when you need it. 

I also found that I kept dropping stitches and working slowly helped me catch them before I had gone so far that picking them up would have increased the fabric tension. You know what I mean: if you drop a stitch 7 rows back, then picking it up and catching in each of the rows above it makes the fabric tight. You have to massage it to loosen things up. This is trouble in a Fair Isle sweater with no more than two colors per row and it would be death in an Icelandic sweater.

One of the patterns I found uses a technique I saw on the Arne and Carlos site. You do the neck in K1/P1 rib, BUT it's KTBL. This makes ribbing with more give.

Icelandic sweaters tend to have round yokes. Some of them have a rayed pattern with each ray getting larger from neck to armpit. This pattern works like that.

https://alafoss.is/collections/alafoss-lopi

This pattern also illustrates that tradition says to use the same colors as undyed sheep's wool: black, white, off-white, gray, brown. Pattern is more important than color. That said, plenty of the patterns you find online will have other colors.

You have to follow the pattern carefully and increase or decrease where it tells you to. The one I worked had you adding a color at the same time as you worked an increase. So K the new color front and K the old color into the B of the same stitch; if the new color is supposed to come second of course you're going to reverse that.

This site sells the classic Lopi yarn. So do Woolly Thistle and Yarn.com but I have known Yarn.com not to carry all the colors for Brown Sheep yarns, so check Woolly Thistle first.

https://alafoss.is/collections/alafoss-lopi

The original pattern for this jumper had the traditional natural colors, which I changed cos there was some handsome yarn on closeout. I thought the gray was a lighter color but I went with what I got. I got lots of the pinkish color (it was labeled apricot), made a twin set and a new copy of the old Spinnerin pattern I have, as well as the matching socks to satisfy my obsession on that subject. A good time was had by all.

One technique I used on this jumper is from a Youtube video on Lopapeysa sweaters. It worked bottom up and joined the sleeves onto the body at the armpits. Well, as you know, you get stretched stitches and gaps when you do that. The new technique copes with that. When you are ready to add a sleeve, you slip the first stitch on the sleeve and pass the last body stitch over it. Then you put it back on your left needle and knit it. One the other side of the sleeve you do these steps again. When you're done, you use duplicate stitch to close up any stretchy stitches you find.

My pattern worked top down. When I finished the body and went to start the sleeves, the sleeve stitches were on holders. I picked them up, put a slip stitch on the left needle, passed the last sleeve stitch over, then I cabled on the 10 armpit stitches. Then I added one stitch and passed the first sleeve stitch over. 

And that is the latest northern knitting tradition that I have found. I'm going to work another icelandic pattern to use up some old worsted yarn. 

21st Century Classical Greek -- never rest on your laurels

I’ve gone about as far as I can go with syntax, because it takes a complete re-evaluation of the database to understand what writers are doing, given the new aspect paradigm and the death of old concepts (which is next week’s post).

But after I finished writing all the above posts and like Alexander, sat down weeping because there were no new worlds to conquer, I decided to do some more work. So I turned to Xenophon, a prolific prose writer.

Well.

In Xenophon Cyropaedia I 1.1 I found the bolded verb.

ἔννοιά ποθ᾽ ἡμῖν ἐγένετο ὅσαι δημοκρατίαι κατελύθησαν ὑπὸ τῶν ἄλλως πως βουλομένων πολιτεύεσθαι μᾶλλον ἢ ἐν δημοκρατίᾳ, ὅσαι τ᾽ αὖ μοναρχίαι, ὅσαι τε ὀλιγαρχίαι ἀνῄρηνται ἤδη ὑπὸ δήμων, καὶ ὅσοι τυραννεῖν ἐπιχειρήσαντες οἱ μὲν αὐτῶν καὶ ταχὺ πάμπαν κατελύθησαν, οἱ δὲ κἂν ὁποσονοῦν χρόνον ἄρχοντες διαγένωνται, θαυμάζονται ὡς σοφοί τε καὶ εὐτυχεῖς ἄνδρες γεγενημένοι. πολλοὺς δ᾽ ἐδοκοῦμεν καταμεμαθηκέναι καὶ ἐν ἰδίοις οἴκοις τοὺς μὲν ἔχοντας καὶ πλείονας οἰκέτας, τοὺς δὲ καὶ πάνυ ὀλίγους, καὶ ὅμως οὐδὲ τοῖς ὀλίγοις τούτοις πάνυ τι δυναμένους χρῆσθαι πειθομένοις τοὺς δεσπότας.

The dictionary entry is anaireo and how did that ita get there?

The clue was partly the hupo clause after it. Where have we seen that before? anybody? anybody? Bueller?

Yes, in two structures, passive and ergative. The Word Tool labels anirintai a perfective base voice in 3rd plural. But not only do we have a hupo agent, we have -oi case in front of the verb. If those were base voice objects, that shouldn't happen. So this has to be a passive construction. Well, the context looks passive -- but remember, perfective does not have true passive voice, only executive and base. So that doesn't work.

So I looked up the verb at the right side of the entry line, aireo. Guess what I found?

Aireo, like histimi, has "aor. 2", that is, an imperfective intransitive for an ergative structure. It uses that ita. There's no reason aniriintai can't be a perfective intransitive, something I found in Thucydides and which could have been a mirage.

To find two prose writers who are near-contemporaries using the same structure means that the ergative in Classical Greek is not a mirage, it's a thing.

I searched through a couple of books of Herodotus and did not find imperfective or perfective intransitive verbs with hupo. When Herodotus uses hupo with an animate agent, the verb tends to be progressive eventive, but a lot of times it’s a personal gerundive. It’s not clear why two writers immediately after his time would start using the ergative.

Never assume that you're right: keep doing your homework. But when things turn up aces, take the win and brag about it.

DIY redux

So somebody I follow on Twitter griped that FDA doesn't do enough to regulate processed food, so they have too much sugar, sodium, fat, and other bad things in them.

You know what my answer is. It's the answer that consumer reporters have been giving for over 40 years. Avoid processed food as much as you can. Here are some facts.

1. Plant-based meat substitutes are all processed food. Look at the nutrition panels and compare to USDA recommendations. Beyond Meat is losing customers, maybe because it has stopped trending, or maybe because it has more sodium than you want in your diet. Other lurkers: PFAS in the packaging; emulsifiers which promote obesity; guar gum; allergens. Cell meat is even worse; it is processed food from beginning to end, requires energy input, and doesn't provide the same nutrition as on-the-hoof meat.

2. Soy. This may be in your meat substitute; it may be in your tofu, soy sauce, your cooking oil or the part-soy cheese on your pizza. There are a thousand and one uses for soy but the bottom line is that soy production is promoting deforestation, according to Greenpeace. You want olive oil, corn oil (I buy Mazola), sesame or canola oil if you are going to saute or fry things. And of course, you fry things as little as possible because of the fat content.

3. Almond milk. One website swears by almond milk yogurt but stop a moment. First, the writer admits she has to milk her almonds herself. Store-bought almond milk won't cut it. If you're using processed food to save time, this is not the way to go. Second, she admits she can't chain yogurt batches like you can with cow's milk. She has to have fresh culture for every batch. Almond prices are rising due to the collapse of bee colonies, but she is spending even more because she just has to use those almonds to make yogurt.

4. Cow's milk products. If you think you are saving the planet from methane by not using cow's milk products, you don't know what you think you know. You need to start a project to convince farmers not to feed soybeans to their cattle, kind of like the one that has reduced the use of anti-biotics and hormones in meat cattle. It will help prevent deforestation as well as cutting the methane output of cows. Second, if you destroy cow culture, you lose natural fertilizer as opposed to manufactured fertilizer. And how do they manufacture fertilizer? Using fossil fuels. 

5. Restaurants. Ever since I got out on my own, consumer reporters have been saying the same thing about restaurants. They are too expensive, they promote obesity with portions that are too large and contain too much fat and sugar as well as too much salt, they don't serve enough vegetables or variety of vegetables. Add to that the woody veggies you get in a restaurant cos the sous chef shows the microwave to them instead of cooking them properly. And the shortcuts that restaurants take, including using MSG when they say they don't. Or the cost cutters like part-soy cheese, to which people can be allergic (I knew somebody once who was). Or the menus that say "gluten free" but it really isn't (I have a relative who knows all about that). 

6. Food recalls. In 2019, the top two food recalls were allergens hidden in the "other natural ingredients" or just not reported, and listeria. I remember one Passover when there had just been a recall of pre-torn romaine lettuce for listeria. The veggie guy at my kosher market could not keep ahead of the demand for heads of romaine lettuce, while the pre-torn stuff languished in the cooler case. It probably got thrown out after Passover started cos it passed its freshness date. I'm over 65 and I can still tear my own lettuce, thank you.

7. Exercise. You say "but I'm too tired to cook when I get home". Exactly! You can't whine about having no time to exercise because you have to cook, because cooking is exercise. You stand at the counter while you cut veggies or mix sauces, you stand over the proverbial hot stove while you saute and simmer, you put a lid on the pan and turn off the heat to let the juices absorb and then if you sit down to read Twitter, you have to get up to plate the meal. You can put a healthy hot meal on the table in less than half an hour -- FROM SCRATCH -- and that's half an hour of exercise every day, sometimes two or three times a day. And don't use the microwave. You can microwave frozen veggies, with their lower sodium content, but read the package. It takes almost twice as long to nuke them as to start a little water boiling and cook them on the back of your stove while you make the rest of your entree. 

8. Trash. Meal-in-a-box doesn't cook faster than scratch and doesn't always have enough of the seasonings or sauces; even if they make the packaging from recycled something, you might not be able to recycle it. Kind of like paper towels; you HAVE to throw them in your kitchen waste because they can't be recycled. You can learn to cook just enough food for a single meal -- or you can always cook enough to deliberately have leftovers for another day. Leftovers are famous for tasting better than the original meal. They can also be converted into other dishes -- spaghetti into frittata, potatoes into latkes or boxty cakes, rice into fried rice, macaroni into chili mac. And you can learn how to NOT burn food by turning off the burner before it's done, putting on a lid, and letting the juices soak the bottom of the pan.

9. PFAS. Pizza, take-out, meal in a box, are infamous for containing those forever chemicals that are ruining our health and our environment. 

10. Sodas. All sodas, diet or not, contribute to obesity and diabetes. The studies are sure about this result but aren't sure why, unless the sweet taste on the tongue starts the pancreas working, ultimately wearing it out. Sodas generate trash. Canned sodas are getting more expensive as the world shuts out Russian aluminum to punish them for attacking and committing genocide in Ukraine. Sodas also contain gum arabic to keep the flavors in solution instead of precipitating out. Gum arabic is another conflict product; it's how Sudan funds their wars. There are recipes for making your own syrups to mix with carbonated water, but they all contain large amounts of sugar, which is more unhealthy for you than fat or salt.

Here's how you save time cooking for yourself.

1. Buy a week's food at a time. Pick ingredients not pre-made food. People talk about food deserts; frozen veg can be better than fresh cos they are frozen at the farm with all the natural sugar. Buy dried fruit; it's a healthy snack with a long shelf life and you can rehydrate it in boiling water. Canned fruit is always packed in syrup or some form of sugar, and you don't need that. Yes, you have to plan, and you may have to change plans if you can't find all the ingredients -- or you could improvise. Learn to play with your food.

2. Buy things that have more than one use. I buy cinnamon to bake and cook with, and to sprinkle in my coffee. Buy 5 minute oatmeal; the instant stuff makes cookies turn out like they were made with sawdust. The big canister lasts a long time and doesn't put as much trash in the landfill as those packets. Buy raisins for your oatmeal, and for baking, and my sauerbraten recipe calls for raisins. Your 5 minute oatmeal with raisins will be done before the water boils for your coffee or tea. Instant coffee is much cheaper than those little K-cups, and I have several recipes that use it for flavor or coloring. Get yourself a thermos for your coffee and a microwavable dish for your oatmeal, and you can go straight to work and nuke them while all your friends are wasting time in line at Dunkin or McDonald's. 

3. Cook your starches in bulk. Potatoes, spaghetti, rice, and so on can always be reheated and sometimes they are the long pole in the cooking process. I know that when I switched to brown rice, I used to cook a cup of rice at a time and that was enough for 3 or 4 meals. 

4. Make big batches. Most cooked food will freeze well. If you don't want to eat the same thing twice in a week -- and if you're eating fast food every day, how can you gripe about that -- then freeze some of it in microwavable boxes to take to work.

5. Trawl the web. There are tons of websites with shortcuts and time savers, as well as recipes. I have collected some 500 recipes off the web, lots of them for ethnic comfort food that goes beyond what you will find in restaurants, as well as for things you won't find in ANY restaurant no matter how diverse your region is. 

6. Invest. In a slow-cooker you can make stews, but you can also make a roast or a poulet en cocotte which has a yummy vegetable sauce. I bought one of those multi-function boxes when my baking element broke; it runs on a lamp outlet  and it has been great, not just for toast or air-frying, but also for roasting meat and incubating yogurt, which takes all day anyway, and for baked eggs in ramekins which make a perfect Egg o Muffin substitute. I bake most of my own bread, including English muffins, so I get more bang for my buck from that box than you might. Speaking of which a bread-maker is not a bad idea, but making it yourself from scratch manually gives you more, what class? EXERCISE.

This is only the start. Read my DIY page for basic cooking instructions and calculations about how much you save if you learn to do things for yourself instead of, like the Twitter person, expecting somebody else to do everything for you. 

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 13, syntax 2

I apologize for being so late with this, but I had to report for jury duty, which happens about every 3 years. There were 100 of us going for voir dire on a criminal case but it got continued and they let us go. 

Syntax is supposed to help you analyze material so you can understand the meaning. My 8^th grade English teacher made us diagram sentences so we could see where modifiers had to go where to mean what you intended the sentence to mean, and also how to understand the sentence. Sequence is important in English because it doesn’t have cases. It’s important in Classical Greek, too, but for a different reason. Your real clue to meaning is what kind of verbs are where in your text.

When you analyze one of Thucydides’ sentences, look for the conjugated verbs.

1)         They are the most definite forms of action. If they are indicative, they are also the most certain facts he has for presentation.

2)         They will have for subject the agent or the topic on which the sentence focuses. Note that an agent will be the subject of an executive voice verb. Other verbs have a subject but, since they are not actions deliberately undertaken for the sake of their results, the subject isn’t really an agent.

3)         You will sometimes find your conjugated verb at the end of the clause that uses it.

If all the verbs you find are gerundives, this is an explanatory piece of text about its topic and what happened relative to that topic. Trace personal gerundives to the substantives they agree with in case and gender to know who did what. Watch out for an when multiple substantives are involved, to tell you which of them goes with the action in which clause.

So for example, Thucydides I 2.2 doesn’t get around to a conjugated verb until afairisetai, and then it’s an oblique, not an indicative. It is base voice, and so is the next conjugated verb, apanistanto. Why conjugate these two and none of the others? Because the point Thucydides is trying to make, is that while the population of the Peloponnese was still mobile and not settled, there is an associated reason: the probability that any crops one raised might be taken over by a stronger clan. But the takeover did not have the purpose of making the owners move, and the move was not done for its own sake but under compulsion.

While verbs are critical to understanding Thucydides’ Greek, there is one thing Biblical Hebrew has in spades, and which is common in Arabic, but not in Greek. The verbal sentence.

A verbal sentence starts with a verb, which is followed by its subject. The subject may be compound, but the verb can be singular. The most common example is when the compound subject is moshe v’aharon, Moshe and Aharon. You won’t see this in Thucydides. I don’t think I found such things in Mahabharata either. Maybe it is a Semitic thing.

Finally, remember that because Thucydides uses verbs aspectually, his equational sentences will not always contain the copula. When he does use it, analyze the aspect for the nuance he is trying to present.

Sooo history: Gildas and Arthur 1

Sooo Gildas. I was reading his De Excidio, which is a starting place for some Arthurian enthusiasts, although I don’t know why I picked it up. At any rate, looking at it through lenses of other studies, I see a whole different animal from what you might think it is, based on fake TV histories claiming to be about the Arthurian period. One lens is the geographic information in Excidio and a Breton biography of Gildas written at a monastery named for him. Another is my studies of oral traditions and the writings that arise from them; that will be for another post and you can get a leg up from my Fact-Checking thread so you understand what I’m going to say. The final lens is what we know today about the 500s CE and about Britain itself.

First, we can’t rely on Gildas for describing Britain from a British or Welsh geographical viewpoint. From the start, when he describes Britain as being to the southwest, we know that he’s not in Wales or Ireland. The only places that can describe Britain as southwest, are Scandinavia and Lindisfarne. Scandinavia was not Christian in Gildas’ time. Saying that “Gildas” didn’t know what he was talking about requires proving that any of his supposed residences allow this statement. Without that evidence, we can suspect that nothing in Gildas is true, and we’re done. Below I’ll show some evidence that Gildas is right about this.

If you’re willing to keep going, think about “Gildas” describing his location as cold and bitter. We know that he’s talking either, once again, about Lindisfarne, or he’s talking about the 530s with the double eruption of Krakatau and Ilopango. I’ll deal with the second issue in the third post. The first issue confirms that the writer is in east Scotland, possibly between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall.

Such a location feeds into his other complaint: that the cities have all been destroyed. Roman outposts at the walls had extensive settlements around them, both of soldiers’ families and of logistics services of various kinds. Archaeology has found relatively rich remains at outposts of Hadrian’s Wall. But once the Romans left, the outposts dissolved, along with larger cities like Bath and London. From “Gildas’” claustrophobic geographical viewpoint, he might have known nothing about Bath or London.

Gildas doesn’t mention Dal Riata, settled from Ireland, a Christian outpost on the west side of the big island. If Gildas is restricted to the east of Scotland, the difficulties of travel could have kept him from knowing about it. But its inhabitants were in their second or third generation in his time. For Gildas to have no news, or to ignore Dal Riata which also did not fight against the Angles, raises the issue whether our Scottish “Gildas” wrote after Dal Riata as a name disappeared – in the Christianization of Scotland.

Nor does he reference Evrawg. York, a Roman city, may have lost power, but it recovered to govern a thriving region – until William the Conqueror razed it and visited its surroundings with fire and sword. Being 150 miles south of Lindisfarne York, like Dal Riata, was out of Gildas’ ken. The Mabinogion story of Peredur, the precursor to Percival, tells about a prince of Evrawg in Arthurian legend, so if Gildas has anything to do with Arthurian times, it’s odd that he doesn’t refer to Evrawg. But if  Gildas is geographically distant from Arthur, then it isn’t odd at all.

The existence of these cities wouldn’t have meant anything to Gildas. He is feverishly, almost insanely, angry at five specific leaders from close to his viewpoint, and he hates the Angles. The rest of his so-called history is contradicted by other sources that don’t have his animus.

The oldest biography of Gildas, written at a monastery in Brittany that was named for him after he had been canonized, says he was born in Scotland. It also says that his first monastery stood on a thin barren island – a good description of Lindisfarne but without a name attached. Again, a cloistered monk in Brittany wouldn’t necessarily know the name of the place – and if he obtained his information from oral tradition, the place name would have evaporated out in 200 years. The same thing happened to place names in the Samaritan Pentateuch, after the Assyrians destroyed the politics of the northern kingdom and cast their iron curtain between Israel and Judea for 200 years. There’s no other place in the Celtic islands that has the same description as Lindisfarne, Mona being rather round than long. So the monk of Brittany didn’t have all the data to hand, just enough to tantalize us.

Gildas learned the Welsh rite of Christian worship used in Britain and Ireland. The biography says that Gildas was asked to reform the Irish church, but it was written in the 800s. In Gildas’ time and for centuries afterward, missions from Ireland educated Christian clergy in Europe, who had lost many precious documents in the pagan migrations from the east. For Gildas to be the traveller claimed by this biographer, makes it impossible for him to have the cloistered Scottish viewpoint we find in Excidio. It also would not allow him to know of Custennin or any of the other kings he names.

“Gildas’” history tells of three “kings” known from no other source. They would have been subordinates of Arthur, if Gildas had connections to Arthurian culture. His Constantine is known to Welsh tradition as Custennin; as a Damnonian, he would have been from Scotland. Once again, we are confined to a territory from which Britain is south and west.

Now, what about the statement that the siege of Mons Badonicus (usually identified as Braydon Hill) happened near the Severn ostium, “mouth”? The “mouth” would seem to be Bristol; it was a Roman harbor called Portus Abonae, which probably derives from avon. But the Severn river is Afon Hafren, and turning it into “Sabrina” requires an h-s conversion not normal for Latin; the Latin Segontium is derived from afon seiont. A language that has an “h” in it, will sometimes have a Latin cognate using “f”: ferrum in Latin becomes hierro in Spanish, so hafren should become favren, pronounced “fawren”.

So we’re looking for a river mouth that Gildas converted into Sabrina. And we run into a reference by Gildas to Morcant Bulc, who fought in a siege on Lindisfarne itself as part of a coalition, to keep the Angles in line. There was also a battle at Din Guardi, now known as Bamburgh Castle.

Bamburgh is 16 miles from Tweedmouth. (The Tweed was known to the Welsh as Duabs, a cognate.) Tweedmouth comes out exactly at Berwick-on-Tweed (Duabsissis); the region was once known as Bryneich, which is referenced in Historia Brittonum, and it was ruled from Bamburgh. There you have an explanation for the -brin- portion of what Gildas says; it doesn’t explain the sa- prefix, but it doesn’t conflict with what we know of conversions to or from Latin.

But while Duabsissis was at the mouth of the Duabs, Braydon Hill is miles from Portus Abonae. The “ostium” phrase naming the “Severn” is suspect.

Angles lived in Bryneich during the late Roman period and may have been used as mercenaries. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an Angle gained power here by 547, just before Gildas’ death. And there you have it. Excidio is an expression of the rage of a Christian living in Bryneich, over a pagan Angle gaining power in the region, probably as a reward for faithful service to the Welsh-speaking British. Morcant Bulc fought as many as three battles, at Din Guardi (Bamburgh), Medcaut (Lindisfarne) and Duabsissis (Berwick) and still this Angle got picked for a government post. In “Gildas’” viewpoint, that has to be a failure of government.

Unless Gildas was in Bryneich at the time (not in Brittany), he wouldn’t have known about Morcant Bulc. The monastery in Brittany may have been named for St. Gildas, but that doesn’t mean he lived there any more than the legend can be trusted, that says Joseph of Arimathea founded an abbey at Glastonbury.

The classic proposed “Badon” is miles from the ostium, Portus Abonae. “Badon” need not be in the southwest since there’s no necessary connection to the Severn. It’s more likely to be in the east where the Anglo-Saxons had their pale of settlement, and the Saxons got dumped on their asses at least once. And this severs Custennin from the argument that he was a Dumnonian, that is, Welsh; the rest of the evidence suggests he was a Damnonian, that is, from Bryneich.

So we have a Scots (Irish) Gildas writing on Lindisfarne in the 500s CE about events around his monastery that didn’t sit right with him. What does that have to do with Arthurian legend? That’s where I get into the other favorite ancient literature of Arthurians.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 12, syntax 1

Goodwin has a long section on syntax but it is fixed to concepts that aren’t accurate, things like case labels or morphology having intrinsic meaning.

You, however, know that CONTEXT IS KING. The real way to understand how to line things up together (syntax) to get meaning, is to study the expression of Classical authors and see if they share common habits. I’m still reading Thucydides and I am starting to compare him with Xenophon. Study your favorite author to find out what his habits are. If we find common habits among them, that is “Classical Greek syntax”.

Maybe.

Because as I keep pointing out with Thucydides, his expression is strongly reminiscent of the features of a clearly oral tradition, the Tannakh or Jewish Bible, and in that case you can look for a number of things. I’ve already called some of them out.

1.         The association principle. This seems to guide Thucydides more strongly than the other two that apply to the Tannakh. Material is drawn together in Thucydides because it is associated together. This is the source of numerous problems with Jowett’s translation: he transposes material, breaking up the train of thought.

2.         The chronology. I pointed out places where Thucydides clearly edited his work, such as the early Book I reference to the plague that didn’t happen until late in the war. It’s not as extreme as in the Tannakh; I have a blog posting about how the slander stories in Numbers occurred in a different chronology than it would appear from their position in the text. Thucydides has less of a chronology issue than the Tannakh because he was writing at the time of the events he reports, instead of recording an oral tradition that survived up to several millennia.

3.         The frequency principle. This, too, is more a feature of a long-running oral tradition like Tannakh; the clumping together of most sacrificial rituals from Exodus through Leviticus is a sign of their frequency, but some rituals appear toward the end of Numbers and even in Deuteronmy, this being a sign of their rarity. Thucydides does not have this feature.

Those are principles of relatively high-level structure. We tend to think of syntax as a feature of sentences and their component clauses and phrases.

The main feature of Thucydides’ work is the topic order sentence. This is partly the outcome of association; a topic order sentence follows on from material that supplies the topic. Goodwin does not recognize the topic as a different issue from the subject of a sentence nor as a subtopic of subjects. This is one reason Jowett crashes around transposing topics and breaking up the sequence of ideas: nobody recognized the importance of topic.

Topic order sentences are a sign of an oral habit of thought. The disdain of Victorian scholars for oral literature and its records, such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, blinded them to the oral features of their favorite classical literature. Topic order is still ignored in language learning; most efforts aim at helping people write a language and read written material. This could be one reason learning to speak a second language is so difficult: spoken language is de-emphasized and turned into formulaic expressions. Failing to recognize it as primary and the descendant of oral culture in general, teachers can’t help students reproduce the fluidity and flow of somebody immersed in the language.

When you are told that somebody knows a lot of languages, you have a right to be skeptical. Being able to reproduce what you were taught, which often happens in classics, is a far different thing from using a language with fluency inside the culture of that language. And with Classical Greek, the culture of the language has died. But that’s no excuse for clinging to antiquated and incorrect learning material.

Sooo history -- Martin Luther and the Peasants' Revolt

There's a series of films in German on Youtube called Die Deutschen and there's a channel called Chronicle, and sometimes it's useful to see more than one viewpoint even if both are somewhat unfactual.

The Chronicle film on the Thirty Year's war starts off with a premise that takes a good deal of undereducation to put out, let alone support. Basically, it says even if Luther did nail his theses to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral, who could have read them? Then it goes on to pretend that the Peasants' Revolt was a consequence of the theses.

Well.

Here we are in 1517, and the Renaissance has been going on for more than 60 years. In 1453 when the Muslims conquered Constantinople, Christians fled to Europe and the scholars and clergy among them took along Greek language manuscripts. This is important because, to that point, Europe's editions of Aristotle, that pillar of the church, were in Latin. And if you know anything about me, you know that I know that translations sometimes aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

The Greek-speaking Byzantines taught European clergy and scholars to read Greek and then died. From then on Aristotle was grammatically described using Latin labels, and if you are reading my 21st Century Classical Greek thread, you know what a disaster that was in my opinion. On the other hand, it became popular for royalty and the rulers of non-royal territory of the Renaissance to read both Latin and Greek. Henry VIII was a Greek geek; so were his children. So were the Borgias. And so on. So for Luther to nail his theses to the cathedral door was not a useless stunt; it was an open invitation for the wealthy and powerful to wrest their lives out of the hands of a corrupt church and become truly independent of it, a direction history had been taking for the whole 500 years since the Crusades. 

But what was truly a stunt was translating the Bible into German. Most people everywhere in the world at that time were illiterate, and thereby hangs the tale. Luther's Bible was another stunt to attract the wealthy and powerful; it did nothing for the peasantry who couldn't read anyhow. The most the peasantry could get out of it was if the Bible was read TO them in German instead of Latin.

The Chronicle video shows Thomas Munzer, leader of the Peasants' Revolt, and Luther having a shouting match over going to war. Luther did not want the peasants jeopardizing his power base, which was pretty fragile (Henry VIII is only 8 years old when Luther hangs up his theses), but the peasants wanted to end their near-servitude. German peasants, particularly in the east, were basically serfs as the powerful tried to hold onto feudalism. Being illiterate, the peasants did not get the message that Luther put into his translation. This is a standard fact of the split between the literate and the illiterate or those who can read but don't, in every country and at all times, including the 21st century. The US MAGA movement is one example.

Literacy in Germany was a product of Luther's translation, and it did not get far down into the peasantry for 200 years.  The printing press helped, but the price of books was still well out of the reach of most people on the land or apprenticed to guildsmen. Die Deutschen shows that Frederick II of Prussia, in the heart of the Enlightenment, promoted literacy among his peasantry so they could be good soldiers, read their manual of arms and his proclamations. Likewise Enlightenment preachers in England promoted Sunday schools so that farmers' workers and landlords' tenants could read their Bibles and learn to be satisfied with their place in the class system.

There's a lot of bushwa out there about literacy and the effect of printed books on the public. Just because something is written or printed doesn't mean it has any effect on people who read, still less on people who don't. It's been that way since writing was invented over 6000 years ago. It's only a surprise to people today if they don't accurately understand how literacy works -- or not.

Twitter archives -- URGENT

I archived my tweets. I  used to do it regularly and I will do it one more time before the pay per tweet goes into effect. Here's what you do in Chrome. It should be similar on mobile.

Go to Settings. Under Your Account, my third choice is download an archive. You need your password and then you ask it to download your archive. Do this TODAY in case you've forgotten your password and need to change it. Also because you will get an email in about 24 hours.

When you get that email, you will get a link in it to download your archive. You will need your password again.

My archive downloaded to my C drive; I don't use the cloud. YMMV. 

When your archive is done downloading, it's a ZIP file. Extract all files to whereever you keep your data.

In February 2022, I got a .csv and a file called tweets that I could view in Excel. You won't get that. You'll get a bunch of stuff plus something with the Microsoft Edge logo if you run Windows. You can open that thing in Chrome and that's where your tweets will be.

Whoever you follow on Twitter, find out if they are moving to Post, Mastodon, or elsewhere. Set up an account with the service that will get you the most bang for your buck and find them there.

Or you could just pay whatever they charge you. 

Personally I think this will finally destroy Twitter. I tweeted with tags to a number of organizations about how this will deprive disadvantaged people of government and other information. They only have 6 days to file for an injunction.