21st Century Classical Greek -- case labels

For our first look at the third subsection, once again, go through and identify everything we’ve already talked about.

τὰ γὰρ πρὸ αὐτῶν καὶ τὰ ἔτι παλαίτερα σαφῶς μὲν εὑρεῖν διὰ χρόνου πλῆθος ἀδύνατα ἦν, ἐκ δὲ τεκμηρίων ὧν ἐπὶ μακρότατον σκοποῦντί μοι πιστεῦσαι ξυμβαίνει οὐ μεγάλα νομίζω γενέσθαι οὔτε κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους οὔτε ἐς τὰ ἄλλα.

1)         The syntax particle gar

2)         The definite article ta, which is feminine singular, with kinisis from subsection 2 as its antecedent.

3)         auton in genitive plural, object of the preposition pro.

4)         palaitera, a comparative adjective also with kinisis as an antecedent.

5)         heurein, which you should be able to tell is an imperfective eventive impersonal gerundive. If you know what eureka means, you have an idea of what heurein means.

6)         in, which you know from memorizing eimi.

7)         tekmirion, a noun related to the previous tekmairomenos, object of the preposition ek which ought to look familiar if you know about the prefix exo-, “out of”.

8)         makrotaton, a superlative adjective, object of epi; epi makrotaton “as much as possible”.

9)         genesthai, which you know from memorizing gignomai.

I’ll wrap up the grammar of this subsection next week because the analysis goes hand in hand with the structure and it’s pretty complicated. That discussion will show you how the structural context affects the necessary grammatical assignments.

Our next big leap is case labels. I’m going to re-label the noun cases as follows:

Nominative becomes -oi;

Genitive becomes -on (meaning omega nu);

Dative becomes -ois;

Accusative becomes -ous.

Using the old case labels is based on a misconception that they are useful. Every language that has a case structure, whether it’s morphological or periphrastic, uses cases differently.

For example, there is no fifth case for instrumental in Greek – and no separate morphology in Biblical Hebrew or Arabic, two other aspectual languages older than Greek, but also originating in NE Anatolia, the homeland of the Indo-European peoples (as genetic evidence shows). The two Semitic languages use periphrasis, with agglutinated prepositions.

Classical Greek uses two of its four surviving cases for instrumental in different situations.

Russian, on the other hand, which is a modern aspectual Indo-European language, has an instrumental morphology distinct from all of its other cases.

On the other other hand, the preposition used for instrumental in Biblical Hebrew is also used for locative case – which in Russian is another separate case morphology (total six) and in Greek requires a non-agglutinated preposition.

Greek uses a specific case morphology for “of”; so does Russian, which uses the same case in “for [the benefit of]”, but Greek uses a different case morphology for “benefit”. In BH a specific grammar means “of” but “for” uses a preposition.

Case labels don’t mean the same thing in all languages and using the same labels for all languages creates misconceptions. So I’m changing the labels in Classical Greek, which will reveal more information that the grammars don’t have – that no grammar has to date, as far as I have found from the Internet.

21st Century Classical Greek -- reflexive pronouns

In your wildest dreams, you never suspected it would take over 4 months to go through one subsection of Thucydides. Finally we are going to move on. Our next review is going to be lesson 39 and by then we will change some more terminology; it will eventually let us ignore several pages of Goodwin.

For now, take subsection 2 of section 1, Book I of Thucydides and show yourself how much you’ve learned.

κίνησις γὰρ αὕτη μεγίστη δὴ τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἐγένετο καὶ μέρει τινὶ τῶν βαρβάρων, ὡς δὲ εἰπεῖν καὶ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀνθρώπων.

So review this for what you already know:

1)         The syntax particle gar.

2)         The dative plural definite article tois, which means hellisin is dative plural.

3)         egeneto, the imperfective eventive base voice of gignomai. We can’t have executive voice here; gignomai doesn’t have one and the alternative is strict intransitivity. In the imperfective, the old grammars called this voice “middle” and defined it as reflexive. An inanimate object like kinisis can’t act reflexively.

4)         kai

5)         ton barbaron, genitive plural.

6)         hos, the relative conjunction.

7)         anthropon, genitive plural.

8)         eipein, an impersonal gerundive in imperfective eventive, executive voice.

The phrase hos de eipein means “that is to say.” The executive i.g. is used of an event which happens deliberately but cannot be pinned down to any specific person saying it, so you can’t even use a personal gerundive which requires an antecedent to match in number and gender.

Now, if you know some Greek already, you probably looked at auti and thought of a reflexive pronoun, autos. Go to White, page 235, sections 760 and 761, and memorize the reflexive and reciprocal pronouns. You will see that the reciprocal already occurred in subsection 1.

Here’s a summary of White’s description of how to use autos.

1.                  Autos o X is “X himself” plus whatever he did: “X himself executed the prisoners” as opposed to somebody else doing it. Not X executing himself (committing suicide).

2.                  However, o autos X is “the same X” or “the X I just mentioned” plus the predicate, as opposed to somebody else who might have taken the predicate action.

3.                  A 1^st singular verb plus autos in some gender is “I myself did X.”

4.                  Autos in an oblique case (not nominative) is the object pronoun or a demonstrative, auton is “them, that”.

In this subsection auti megisti is “the greatest”, with the emphasis on “the”.

But it is not reflexive. So put that to bed.

The structure of this sentence is not straight SVO.

1.                  After the S (which is what?) comes a phrase describing the S, an appositive.

2.                  After the V (which is what?) comes kai plus a new noun phrase in dative just like the end of the appositive, which means that the appositive also applies to this noun phrasse.

3.                  Hos starts an idiom, which is followed by kai again, meaning that the end of the sentence is also covered by the appositive.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Review 1

In your wildest dreams, you never suspected it would take 4 months to go through one section of Thucydides, when there are nearly a thousand sections in the whole work.

Here’s a look at how much you’ve learned.

Conjugation of eimi, “be”

Conjugation of gignomai, “happen”

These two conjugations are gateways to recognizing all their prefixed forms.

The aspectual table and the conjugational endings for the base voice.

Aspect             Eventive                                  Conceptual

Imperfective    μην/ο/το/μεθα/σθε/ντο            μαι/ει/ται/μεθα/σθε/νται

Progressive      μην/ου/το/μεθα/σθε/ντο          μαι/ει/ται/μεθα/σθε/νται

Perfective        μην/σο/το/μεθα/σθε/ντο          μαι/σαι/ται/μεθα/σθε/νται

I used this table of conjugational endings strictly to show how little morphological difference there is between “middle” and “middle-passive”. I do not want you to learn paradigms; they will always let you down at some point.

Learn the actual verbs.

The uses of the aspects.

Imperfective:

1.         Simple expression of an action.

2.         Repetition, to restore a result that has worn off or been nullified.

3.         Reversal, usually of direction of motion.

Progressive

1.         Process.

2.         Repetition due to or forming a habit.

3.         Existence of a condition, situation or habit.

Perfective

1.         Result of an action expressed in a verb.

2.         Permanent existence, for example, of a poet’s finished writings.

The nuances of the flavors:

1.         Eventive: an action.

2.         Conceptual: a habit or situation; a permanent result; an action that has not happened yet.

You have objective definitions for the voices.

1.         Executive: action performed deliberately and voluntarily (was “active voice”).

2.         Passive: used in fully intransitive structures, sometimes with a descriptive nuance. The grammatical subject is the logical object of the verb.

3.         Base: everything else.

The difference in voice use by -mai and non-mai verbs, as well as in the aspects: there is no passive voice for progressive or perfective aspects in non-mai verbs, and there is no executive voice for -mai verbs.

The endings of the personal gerundives in all three voices.

1)         -antes, -ontes, and -untes are the endings in executive voice.

2)         -entes is the ending in passive voice.

3)         -men- between the root and the personal ending in base voice.

The endings of the impersonal gerundives in all three voices.

1)         -ein is the progressive conceptual i.g in executive voice; -sthai otherwise. There is no progressive eventive i.g. morphology.

2)         -sai is the imperfective conceptual in executive voice; -sthai otherwise.

3)         ­-ein is the imperfective eventive for executive voice; -sthai otherwise.

4)         -nai is the ending for the perfective conceptual executive voice; -sthai otherwise.

The uses of gerundives.

1)         Adjectives

2)         Substantives, particularly with the definite article.

3)         Substitute for conjugated verb, to indicate less definiteness and rather a description of the action or a naming of the action, than a statement that it happened.

Declension of definite article. This will help you identify the case of any definite noun, including gerundives that are turned into nouns by the definite article and personal gerundives as adjectives. The plurals of most nouns are identical to the article and so you can identify as much as 80% of noun cases from this.

The anti-passive structure used to avoid changing the case of a noun which is the object of one verbal form and the subject of another, in contrast to a passive structure which uses a noun as the grammatical subject and logical object of a single verb to express intransitivity.

Case information:

1.                    The accusative case as the subject of an impersonal gerundive when it is part of an anti-passive structure. The noun is the object of a verbal as well as the subject of the impersonal gerundive.

2.                    The genitive case for a noun that modifies another noun.

3.                    The dative case for instrumental of an inanimate object.

Cases are crucial to determining the meaning of a verb, which is the opposite of what old grammars teach – that certain categories of verbs take certain cases.

Factors in the structure of Thucydides’ prose.

4.                    Make it comprehensible.

5.                    Make it memorable.

6.                    Get audience buy-in with a number of devices.

He uses three tools for comprehension.

1.                    Syntax particles to chunk things.

2.                    Street-level grammar, even infrequent things like anti-passives.

3.                    Simple compared to poetry; nothing obscure or flowery.

For memorability, there is a separate set of tools.

1.                    References to previous material, sometimes with  topic order sentences.

2.                    Parallelism and rounded periods.

3.                  Repetitions after sidebars. I’ll point these out when we get to them but the fact is Torah does the same thing and it is demonstrably suited to oral presentation.

For audience buy-in, Thucydides does three things.

1.                  Clearly marks the actions he finds important with conjugated verbs to avoid confusing them with too many things to focus on.

2.                    Uses grammar to avoid seeming arrogant in stating his opinions.

3.                  Sticks to things they have personal knowledge of, unlike Herodotus who starts out by appealing to Persian history.

These factors parallel material in Axel Olrik’s Principles of Oral Narrative Research, showing that Thucydides grew up with and operated in an oral environment and incorporated its habits into his writing.

Three different uses of nouns:

1.                    Subject.

2.                    Topic.

3.                    Agent.

I’ve destroyed

1)         The cognitive dissonance of the label “[tense] infinitive”

2)         The concept that morphology identifies reflexivity.

3)         The concept that morphology identifies causality.

4)         The “[noun case] absolute”

5)         Any need to explain why a “present tense” exists in a past context.

6)         Categories of verbs as requiring specific cases of their objects.

That is a hell of a lot of material, and you have mastered it in less than five months.

21st Century Classical Greek -- a breather

You never realized there was so much information in just over 100 words.

But remember, a lot of what I said relied on external context:

1.                  The political makeup of the Greeks.

2.                  Lexicons and grammar books.

3.                  Personal experience.

I am putting you through some complicated gymnastics.

1.                  Rewriting the grammar that you may have thought you knew if you studied Greek before, or introducing you to some cutting-edge grammar if this is your first experience with Greek.

2.                  Making it impossible for you to take existing grammar books at face value, not just because of changing all the labels, but also because I am pointing out where those books are incorrect about the data, or incomplete. This includes eliminating the concept of verb categories that demand objects in specific cases.

3.                  Making you study lexicon entries instead of just grabbing the explanation at the top. You have to know the verb.

And I’m not letting you pick a meaning for a word and then go on to the next word. I’ve seen this kind of word-for-word substitution, and it’s partly responsible for the horrible Septuagint. You will never appreciate just how horrible the Septuagint is until you learn Biblical Hebrew, although you can get the Reader’s Digest version on another thread of this blog.

I’m also making you memorize things. I will post subject-matter reviews from time to time and do a roundup, but I won’t link from those back to the original lesson. They are reminders of what you should have memorized, not indices to the lessons. I know that I’m a bad person for making you memorize, but you will see in upcoming lessons that it could be worse, and some 21^st century scholars of koine Greek are publishing that it’s time to stop doing things worse.

Keep in mind that I have already eliminated some memorization. You’ll never have to worry about the “future perfect”; there’s no “imperfect tense”; you won’t have to watch  out for the “genitive absolute”; your brain won’t go “sproinnnng” over the concept of a “[tense] infinitive” or the use of a “present tense” in a past situation.

To this point, I’m getting as many as 35 pageviews per post, 20 when the post first goes up and the rest later. Somebody is sticking with me in the hope that I will eventually fall flat on my face. Somebody is probably also sticking with me cos they like new stuff or cos they can torment professors with questions they can’t answer. I’m a born troublemaker and have been for 60 years. Take that for what it’s worth.

21st Century Classical Greek -- the rest of the structure

So I said that Thucydides goes back and forth between two topics. Is there a pattern?

Here’s the markup of the structure of the first clause. Subject – verb – object. Let’s look at the references to Subject and object.

Θουκυδίδης Ἀθηναῖος ξυνέγραψε τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων, ὡς ἐπολέμησαν πρὸς ἀλλήλους, ἀρξάμενος εὐθὺς καθισταμένου καὶ ἐλπίσας μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ ἀξιολογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων, τεκμαιρόμενος ὅτι ἀκμάζοντές τε ᾖσαν ἐς αὐτὸν ἀμφότεροι παρασκευῇ τῇ πάσῃ καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ὁρῶν ξυνιστάμενον πρὸς ἑκατέρους, τὸ μὲν εὐθύς, τὸ δὲ καὶ διανοούμενον.

Now look at akmazontes. I can’t relate it to the original subject or to allo Hellinikon to any of the previous verbal forms. The gerundive is the predicate of isan and to allo is the object of horon. What’s more, the subject of isan is something else in the sentence.

So now I’ll mark that subject, amfoteroi. You know what grammar isan is, so you know that this is an equational clause. Hoti starts a new clause, with its own subject.

At the end, when it goes back to Thucydides’ perception of the alliances, it refers to Hellenes. Now, aren’t all the Greeks Hellenes? Well, yes, and it’s also true that Athins and Attika were on Peloponnesian soil. What Thucydides has in mind are a) the Peloponnesian treaty of which Athins was a member; and b) the fact referred to later (it’s part of the cause of the war) that some polises had not signed the treaty.

Sometimes there’s almost as much information in what Thucydides doesn’t say, as in what he does say.

Two high-frequency grammar points in this subsection.

The -on case phrase is a noun modifying another noun. Every language does this. It’s called s’mikhut (construct state) in Hebrew and idafa in Arabic (ezafe in Persian).

After the secondary subject amfoteroi is a phrase in -ois case. This is the instrumental case for an inanimate object. The instrumental of an animate object is hupo plus the -on case; this also marks an agent in a structure none of the old grammars cover and which I will come to later.

21st Century Classical Greek -- parsing a section

So our first subsection is kind of long and into it, Thucydides packs why he did what he did. The first clause is pretty straightforward. Subject – verb – object. The object is even in the -ous case formerly known as accusative – but it drives the meaning of the verb in that context. When you look at lexicon entries, you have to pay attention to case indications or you may choose the wrong subentry and get the wrong verb meaning. This is part of what I call “knowing the verb”.

So the hos that comes after the comma, what does that relate to? Look up the case in the word tool if you don’t remember.

Θουκυδίδης Ἀθηναῖος ξυνέγραψε τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων, ὡς ἐπολέμησαν πρὸς ἀλλήλους, ἀρξάμενος εὐθὺς καθισταμένου καὶ ἐλπίσας μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ ἀξιολογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων, τεκμαιρόμενος ὅτι ἀκμάζοντές τε ᾖσαν ἐς αὐτὸν ἀμφότεροι παρασκευῇ τῇ πάσῃ καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ὁρῶν ξυνιστάμενον πρὸς ἑκατέρους, τὸ μὲν εὐθύς, τὸ δὲ καὶ διανοούμενον.

Remember, you will often have to ignore the pink bar in the Word Tool. In this case, we’re going to parse through things. We’re going to ignore the pink bar as coming only from Autenreith. Those voters must have been fans of his.

Both of the top selections want hos to be in the -ous case, which means it ought to relate to ton polemon. But both of them also want it to be plural, and ton polemon is singular. So we can’t reconcile the grammar in those cases.

That leaves us with choice 3. Section A wants it to be an adverb of manner, and we’re not talking about the manner of doing something in this phrase, we’re giving facts about the war. Section B lets us use it as a conjunction to relate a fact to something else. So that’s what we want, “which they fought against each other.”

Why would Thucydides say “which they fought against each other” when he has named only two combatants? Well, remember your history. Thucydides was the child or grandchild of men who fought in the Persian War, which the Peloponnesians and Athinaians fought against the Persians. Thucydides knows that everybody in his audience knows about this war. So after bringing these two divisions of Greeks up, he says “I’m going to talk, not about that old war, but about the one they fought against each other.”

Next we have arksamenos and I said before that being in the same gender and number as Thucydides, this refers back to him. This is one of those personal gerundives that carry action as a reference, a sort of description.

Jump to kai, which is one of our syntax markers and elpisas again refers back to Thucydides’ action. It even has an -ous case object, which is part of an anti-passive. The object refers back to ton polemon; so does aksiologotaton.

Akmazontes, being plural, refers back to the Peloponnesians and Athinaians who fought the war. Notice that it is executive voice, so this was deliberate stockpiling. Also notice that akmazontes is the predicate of isan, a progressive eventive; the stockpiling required several acquisitions. Triremes were expensive armaments, and they didn’t have deficit funding in those days.

Horon refers back to Thucydides, and its object is to allo Hellenikon, which is the antecedent for ksunistamenon, and then we have these alliances divided into two parts: euthus with men and dianooumenon with de.

I am not going to go over every subsection in this detail. What we learned from this subsection is:

1)         Thucydides may start out with SVO structure, but he hangs things off it in a specific order to get his ideas across.

2)         He carries subtext in text that may seem to be redundant. There may also seem to be missing subtext that you can only get if you know Greek history.

3)         The material skips back and forth between references to the subject and to the object. The case of words can help us figure out what each phrase refers to.

21st Century Classical Greek -- noun functions

My good old 8^th grade English teacher has long since gone to her reward. She made us diagram sentences. If you’ve never experienced that, you might be able to find some web resources about it. At any rate I cringe sometimes when I hear bad grammar, but just so you know, some of the kids in my 8^th grade class never got it. It’s not an issue of when you went to school, it’s other stuff.

At any rate, the basic sentence, as you know, is subject – verb – predicate, or in dissertations, subject – verb – object (SVO). This is what we have in our first clause in Thucydides.

But a sentence does not have to start with a subject. The subject is the antecedent for the number and gender of a conjugated verb or a verb derivative. The subject Thucydides is the antecedent for both ksunegrapse and arksamenos.

Thucydides sometimes starts a clause with a topic. Sometimes the topic relates to the previous section and has the sense of “as for the above-mentioned X,” and Mr. T goes on to give information about it. This is a marker of his oral mental orientation. It gives the audience a reason to pay attention to the following material, which is likely to be new information about a previously discussed topic.

Finally, there is the concept of agent. It’s crucial to a later post on a piece of grammar that none of the old books discuss, but which is known to exist in a number of languages. In some of those languages, it is the only way to have an intransitive expression. Remember, I said that passive morphology required a structure that was intransitive. I also said that the grammatical subject was the logical object. I will show in a later post that a passive structure is capable of naming an agent. That may seem like a new concept to you, but at that time I will show that such a thing is not unknown in English.

In transitive structures subject and agent are often the same thing (I’m hedging my bets) but intransitive structures have a subject for the conjugated verb which is different from the agent.

Besides subject and topic-order clauses, there’s the equational sentence. In an aspectual language, this is noun – copula – predicate. In progressive aspect, the copula can drop out. This happens in Biblical Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian. I’ll point it out if it happens in Greek.

The designator for a clause is “SVO”, but the object is not necessarily in “accusative case”. That sounds just wrong, but it’s important in Greek. The meaning of a verb depends on the context, and the context includes any substantive or descriptive expressions, regardless of case. When you use the lexicon, you will see subentries that begin with “c. dat.” This means that if the object is in the dative, the verb has a different meaning compared to when there is no object, or when the object is in a different case.

The old grammars try to ignore this by talking about “verbs of X” where X is such things as fearing, asking, etc. and assigning to them a specific case of nouns. Where these verb categories lead, is the student learning only one meaning of a verb and using it everywhere that verb appears, regardless of the object case. The results can be painfully wrong.

This is why I gave you that second mantra besides “context is king”; “know the verb.” You won’t understand what Thucydides is talking about unless you always take the object case into account.

By telling you that verb categories like “fearing” are invalid and lead to incorrect understanding of a text, I have eliminated as many as a dozen pages of Goodwin.