Tuesday, June 13, 2023

21st Century Classical Greek -- special topic 5

Grammars will tell you that our -ous case, used with time, refers to an expanse of time while -on with time measures off a period of time. But what would you think of Thucydides III 92.1.

ὑπὸ δὲ τὸν χρόνον τοῦτον Λακεδαιμόνιοι Ἡράκλειαν τὴν ἐν Τραχινίᾳ ἀποικίαν καθίσταντο ἀπὸ τοιᾶσδε γνώμης.

About this time the Lacedaemonians founded their colony of Heraclea in Trachis, their object being the following.

Upo is the preposition in an ergative structure, which introduces the agent in -on case. But LSJ admits you can use it with the -ous case to mean under, pretty much the same as -on case. Based on that, it wants every use to mean physically under something or subordinated to something. And then it says with time, don't translate it.

Which would mean that the Perseus translator is wrong when he uses a perfectly normal English phrase instead of just saying "that time". 

The instruction not to translate it may be related to LSJ entries for verbs with the note "acc. loci". When the -ous case is used of a location, as opposed to movement, it confuses grammarians. They are thinking in Grenglish and they want it to use a preposition. There is absolutely no reason why people who speak a language on the street should not use it the same way, whether writing or speaking. But later grammarians couldn't cope with that so they made things up. 

Not only that, but for a point in time, the grammarians expect the -ois case. So if this bit in Thucydides refers to a point in time, that also confuses the grammarians. 

The point is that when a preposition can be used with more than one case, it often has similar meanings with each case. Nobody has done the homework to show what is going on. 

a) It  could be that past grammarians have not studied the surviving material closely enough to detect nuance, which I strongly believe after my last year of work. 

b) It could be that different writers favor different prepositions. 

c) It could be that there's really no distinction: what you should do is list all the possible prepositions with any nuances revealed by what class? right, the CONTEXT -- but again, this would take that comprehensive study of the material that nobody has done yet.

And it really does have to be a comprehensive study of the surviving material. In writing that handbook, I went through citations used by Goodwin. 

1/ About half of his examples have no citation so he can't prove any author used Greek that way. 

2/ Of the rest, at least 2/3 either a/ don't support what he tries to tell us or b/ contradict what he tries to tell us or c/ actually contain a different point of grammar than he uses them for. 

Goodwin can't prove that Classical Greek works the way he says it does, and neither can the 2019 grammar from Cambridge.

I used plain vanilla search tools with Greek text of the documents in Microsoft Word and I found citations Goodwin did not use that contradict him. You owe it to yourself, if you still have the grammar you used when you studied Greek, to prove to yourself whether you got ripped off by having to memorize things that weren't true. 

And if you really want to be a rebel, find out what your school is teaching from now, examine it, and tell them whether they are ripping off current students. We all have to stick together and protest when schools grade us on how well we learn lies.

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