21st Century Classical Greek -- faino

I’m going to start section 2, subsection 1 here a) to give you a feeling of progress; b) for another test of what you already know and c) to have you memorize an important verb.

So mark this text up in your own special way to identify words you know.

φαίνεται γὰρ ἡ νῦν Ἑλλὰς καλουμένη οὐ πάλαι βεβαίως οἰκουμένη, ἀλλὰ μεταναστάσεις τε οὖσαι τὰ πρότερα καὶ ῥᾳδίως ἕκαστοι τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀπολείποντες βιαζόμενοι ὑπό τινων αἰεὶ πλειόνων.

Learn nun as “now”, you will see it a lot.

Click on fainetai, look it up in Wiktionary, and learn the conjugation.

Thucydides uses versions of faino a lot to say that the evidence gives such-and-such an appearance.

The first problem with Jowett’s translation is that he ignores faino most of the time, so that Thucydides comes out as more assertive than he is. Thucydides’ audience comes from his own class and they may know as much about history as Thucydides does; he doesn’t want to antagonize them by basically saying “my way or the highway”.

It’s also possible that some of them contributed information; they would be offenced if  Thucydides said something that rejected their information. Mr. T is suggesting that he had alternative evidence so they don’t get mad at him.

Now for a poke at Goodwin. Remember he wanted you to use ou to negate adjectives that are specific. What is definite about ou palai ? It’s an adverb of time. Goodwin never discusses negation of adverbs. He probably thought ou applied to oikoumeni, and that’s what 3 of the 4 online translations show.

But to show that the region was inhabited in ancient times, Thucydides deals first with whether the inhabitants lived securely, using another adverb, bebaios, and we all know that adverbs can modify adverbs. So ou palai modifies bebaios, not oikoumeni.

In English, to avoid clumsy expression, we would say “It was, seemingly, not in ancient times that the land called Hellas was securely settled.” Thucydides tells us why not and ties it into his theme of I 1.3 about what small change previous wars were. In section 7 he turns to how things changed.

While Thucydides has been chunked into sections for time out of mind, he actually writes story arcs. This first one is about 6 sections long; there will be longer ones later. It’s perfectly reasonable that translators have missed the story arcs; they didn’t even catch the relationships between subsections much. They were too focused on morphology to look at context, and this promoted word-for-word substitution, the most error-prone method of translation of all time.

The first clause is in SVO order with the only definite verb being fainetai. Everybody knows about Hellas being the name of a place and having inhabitants, but Thucydides can’t get much more definite about these issues than a gerundive.

The second clause, after alla, also fails to pin down any migrations by using a conjugated verb. Thucydides gets the idea of migrations from the notion, which he will state explicitly later, that the “Herakleides” (AKA Dorians) took over the peninsula from the prior inhabitants.

We can’t translate this subsection into English without adding conjugated verbs. This should have been a sign that the gerundives had some equivalence to verbs, but none of the old grammars give them credit for replacing conjugated verbs. As a result, nobody tried to form an idea of why the material didn’t use conjugated verbs everywhere that English would. This is another example of how scholars weren’t really reading Greek, they were reading “Grenglish”.

21st Century Classical Greek -- -mai versus non-mai verbs

Now. Since I called the last post “negation 1”, you might think I should cover everything I learned about negation in a chunk. But I’d rather have you go sequentially through Thucydides. It lets me show you how he structured things, and that is going to bring out what’s wrong with Jowett’s translation. It does turn out later that most of what I have to say about conditional (“if-then”) statements clusters reviews 3 and 4. And there will be a consolidated roundup at the end of this thread. But how Thucydides structured his material is not discussed in any of the old grammars and it’s important to my contention that Thucydides wrote as he spoke, from the oral basis with which Greek material originated, reinforced by the theater and the agora and the basilica. If you know of an on-line work that does discuss these issues, I’d love to see the link.

Here’s another thing that none of the grammarians ever talk about, again, because they were looking at morphology, not at context, and they simply accepted that a given morphology of a given verb meant X without asking why that verb was there in the first place.

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.

When you click on ksumbainei, the Perseus Word Tool tells you that when used with an impersonal gerundive (“inf.”), you get “it happened to me to trust”.

But I told you gignomai means “happen”. So ou megala nomizo genesthai ought to mean “I thought they happened to not be great”.

But it’s also a pretty good demonstration of the split in use between all -mai verbs and all of the other verbs.

The -mai verbs are used to evaluate something (ou megala) and non-mai verbs are used for other purposes.

Ksumbainei pisteusai may mean “I happened”, but it’s not an evaluation, it’s soft-pedalling the deliberate decision Thucydides made not to trust some of his data.

I’ll point out other places where Thucydides could have used a -mai verb but used the other form with the same meaning, so that you know I’m not just making things up or seeing things that aren’t there.

21st Century Classical Greek -- negatives 1

Time to look at a very important part of language, negatives. Two negatives are in this third subsection.

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.

Oute…oute is neither…nor.

There are two ways to negate verbs, ou which we have here, and mi, μὴ.

One of the big problems with White is that he never discusses negation. It’s not listed in his table of contents; it’s not listed in his index. Leaving out such an important part of language is a serious flaw in a book that is preparing you to read Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, which is some 800 pages long in the Loeb Classics Library edition. You know that such a long work will definitely have negatives in it.

Goodwin claims that there are two forms of verb with which ou is used, but we can see here that ou negates megala, not a verb. Goodwin says ou occurs with adjectives when they are not part of a conditional statement and when they refer to definite persons or things. He gives one example of definite and one of non-definite. He puts the cart before the horse, as so many grammars do with autos: when an author wants to designate specific persons or things, he uses ou[k].

So in I 1.3 ou megala relates to the two ta’s at the start of the subsection, which relate to kinisis auti at the start of subsection 2, a specific action.

I am going to have to revisit the topic of negation more than once because Goodwin gets into things we haven’t had examples of yet and when we do, I’ll explain why the negation works the way it does.

For now, see section 1611, page 346 about impersonal gerundives. Goodwin admits that the context determines which negation to use by distinguishing between quoted speech and direct speech, and then saying that there are exceptions. He gives no examples and no citations so we are on our own. By analogy with what he has already said, we can expect ou with an i.g. in a specific context and mi in a context where you can’t be specific.

Go through your favorite author and see if what Goodwin says pans out. One thing is for sure, in subsection 3 we wouldn’t have known megala’s antecedent was specific until we got to the start of subsection 2.  You can’t rely on a narrow context to support Goodwin’s claims

21st Century Classical Greek -- end of section 1

So here are the other two subsections, all marked up.

Subject – verb – object

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

[3] 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.

Subsection 3 is less straightforward. The ta, as the word tool shows, could be either -ous or -oi case. Safos is an adverb, of course, and the position suggests that it modifies heurein. The clause finished with what looks like a predicate of “be”, but what “is impossible”?

If you remember, Goodwin discussed the -ous case as the subject of the impersonal gerundive. At first blush, you might think that’s what ta is, the subject of heurein. It’s not true. Heurein is exercising its impersonal gerundive right to be noun-y as well as verby. The finding is impossible. Finding what? That’s where the ta comes in, which means it’s the object, so the case is -ous.  Since the ta is definitely substantive, it can’t be modified by safos, which has to be modifying heurein. So now highlight heurein and bold the ta, and then in is in blue.

The counterpoint de clause is also not straightforward. It starts with a prepositional phrase relating to the “found”. The hon after it relates it to what happens in the de clause, which is skopounti moi pisteusai. But moi forms an idiom with ksumbainai, “I happened.” To this we have the complement skopounti, a gerundive, and pisteusai. As an imperfective eventive impersonal gerundive in executive voice, this can be the event of trusting – something. But it’s actually another complement to ksumbainai, “happened to believe”.

For the next part of the phrase, ou megala nomizo genesthai, we have to go to nomizo in the word tool, and look the whole way down the entry to II.4. Megala can be a whole lot of things; including a feminine in -ous case. With nomizo, we get “I believed it happened to not be great”.

What was not great? What’s the grammatical match? It goes the whole way back from megala to the two tas at the start of the subsection, and those go back to kinisis at the start of subsection 2. Megala works out to a dual number feminine in the -ous case; it’s dual because Thucydides is writing about ta pro auton, wars before the Peloponnesian war, some of which he will discuss, and ta eti palaitera, older wars, such as the Trojan War.

So Thucydides starts off this last clause by referring back to the evidence which is part of the first clause in this subsection, and also back to the event he started subsection 2 with. He reassures his audience that he considered his data carefully. And finally he delivers the verdict: nothing that happened before the Peloponnesian war, either in ancient times or more recently, either in war or other issues, had the scope of the war he is about to document.

If he put the verdict first, it would beg the question of how careful he was in his judgment. People in the audience gave him data, from their own experience or that of relatives, or they may have recommended written sources from their favorite authors. I’ve had people recommend sources to me, who were very hurt when I didn’t share their enthusiasm for something outdated with debunked information in it. Thucydides is trying to short-circuit arguments about that, but at last he has to tell the truth: most sources I used were too old and unclear to trust, and what I did trust, showed that what I’m writing about is indeed bigger than anything in history.

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.