21st century Classical Greek -- benefit, topic order

Book I section 13.2 lets me show how translators ruin themselves, by disrupting structures in the source document.

φαίνεται δὲ καὶ Σαμίοις Ἀμεινοκλῆς Κορίνθιος ναυπηγὸς ναῦς ποιήσας τέσσαρας: ἔτη δ᾽ ἐστὶ μάλιστα τριακόσια ἐς τὴν τελευτὴν τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ὅτε Ἀμεινοκλῆς Σαμίοις ἦλθεν.

You can see that the bolded word is in the -ois case. This is what Goodwin calls “benefit”; Ameinoklis built ships for the Samians. It’s another example of how case labels don’t work for every language. In Russian you would say dlya X and X would be in the genitive. In Biblical Hebrew, the preposition for benefit, l’, is also the marker for a purpose clause using an aspectless verb (formerly known as “infinitive”). And it is used in the “have” idiom, yesh l’X, which in Russian is u nego X.

Here is that note that I said showed that Thucydides edited his work at the end of the war. When he started writing, he could not know when the end of the Peloponnesian war would be. Granted that even though the war lasted 30 years, it’s a negligible percentage of 300, nearly as negligible as if the war had ended in only a couple of years as most people probably thought it would at the time. Thucydides tries to be precise, although his grammar shows he can’t be precise everywhere. I doubt he wrote this line sequentially with everything else. He was re-reading his material at the end of the war and, careful as he is, he put this note in to make sure people knew that he knew that Ameinocles didn’t build ships for the current war but for a much earlier one.

Thucydides is speaking of the Lelantine war of the 700s BCE between Miletus and Samos. Despite having the latest in military technology, the Samians lost. “Everybody knows” the Trojan War happened before that and so we are closing in on the replacement of kings by tyrants as happening before the 700s. Cypselus took power in Korinth in the 600s BCE. This is why Thucydides has to use progressive aspect in subsection 1.

The second clause in this subsection, eti d’ esti, is in topic order. Thucydides tells you the important fact and then tells you how it relates to the start of the subsection.

Topic order material is a sign of oral presentation; this is the order in which Thucydides thinks of things. Jowett the literate says “he went to Samos” first and then gives the chronological inforrmation.

This disrupts Thucydides’ well-rounded period, a term in a 1766 letter by an educated man named Beattie. Educated men were prone to copy the word formations in the Greek and Latin they studied at university, and it lead to some of those sentences in British  prose that sound so strange today because the ends of the “period” match but the middle seems to introduce something anomalous. Use of well-rounded periods was recommended in a book called Oratory Made Easy by Charles Hartley, a teacher of elocution and oratory (1870), but he also warns against too many of them because they are long sentences and tire the listener.

So Jowett’s transposition in this case is sort of a comment on the quality of his education – not up to the standards of his grandfather’s.

In subsection 4 Jowett does something even worse.

ναυμαχία τε παλαιτάτη ὧν ἴσμεν γίγνεται Κορινθίων πρὸς Κερκυραίους: ἔτη δὲ μάλιστα καὶ ταύτῃ ἑξήκοντα καὶ διακόσιά ἐστι μέχρι τοῦ αὐτοῦ χρόνου.

 ]Thucydides says that a prior war between Korinth and Kerkyraea (the significance of which will become clear in later sections) happened 260 years before tou autou khronou, before Mr. T is writing.

Jowett says it happened “about forty years later” than the Lelantine war. Tsk tsk. The math comes out the same but what Jowett does is why we are learning to read Greek for ourselves, now isn’t it?

21st Century Classical Greek -- subject of an impersonal gerundive

Book I section 13.2 gives us a good look at impersonal gerundives and I will go over what Goodwin says compared to how Thucydides uses them.

πρῶτοι δὲ Κορίνθιοι λέγονται ἐγγύτατα τοῦ νῦν τρόπου μεταχειρίσαι τὰ περὶ τὰς ναῦς, καὶ τριήρεις ἐν Κορίνθῳ πρῶτον τῆς Ἑλλάδος ναυπηγηθῆναι.

So the bolded words are imperfective eventive impersonal gerundives. The first is executive voice and the second is passive voice.

In our aspectual paradigm, these are substitutes for conjugated verbs. Further, the second one is an intransitive structure.

Note that the first one has a logical subject. It’s not a grammatical subject, despite being in the -oi case; it’s not the subject of legontai, “they say”, which is in base voice, not executive voice. The three English translations on Perseus, and the Smith translation for the Loeb Classics Library, agree that the Korinthioi didn’t say whatever it was. Legontai is an idiom for other people saying something.

So it is the Korinthians who metakheirisai’d, deliberately to bring about having ships, but Thucydides can’t be definite because he’s repeating information from up to 300 years before he was born.

When Goodwin claims that the subject of an “infinitive” is in the accusative, he’s wrong. It’s a categorical claim that only needs one contradictory example to defeat it, and that’s what we have here.

The other i.g. is passive voice and triireis is the grammatical subject and logical object. That’s two contradictory data points.

Knitting -- heels with short rows again

 So I gave you two videos on German short rows for sock heels.

They were in my posts on toe-up socks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVVveGqrUCI

There were several links here.

Recently I found a short row sock heel that is not German short rows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZahZE4GREr0

You don't have to worry about the funny little stitches. 

You do have to do something special so all the wraps don't show on the outside.

When you do that, you create the gusset.

So here's a photo of a pink sock with my old favorite way of doing the heel,

alongside a photo of a sock with the short rows in the white yarn for the heel.

It was the first time I tried this. I still had holes where the heel and gusset join, and if I do this again, I'll try and follow the instructions better. But you may like it because it seems less fussy than my old stand-by pattern, and it works top down or bottom up.

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- "can/could"

I'm working on something I call Narrating the Nakh, a companion to Narrating the Torah with similar features: Olrik’s principles; 21^st century Bible Hebrew; modern archaeology. And I came across a structure that looks like an oblique with an imperfect aspect verb.

In Biblical Hebrew, use of vav plus a perfect aspect verb has several functions, one of which is the oblique. In a subordinate clause, preceded by a statement of a general or specific truth, the oblique is immediately accepted as true, whether it’s a result, purpose, cause, effect, or condition.

Vav plus imperfect aspect is a narrative past in most cases, but I started to find it in non-past contexts and because the context is different, it’s not a narrative past.

See Samuel I 11:1.

וַיַּ֗עַל נָחָשׁ֙ הָֽעַמּוֹנִ֔י וַיִּ֖חַן עַל־יָבֵ֣ישׁ גִּלְעָ֑ד וַיֹּ֨אמְר֜וּ כָּל־אַנְשֵׁ֤י יָבֵישׁ֙ אֶל־נָחָ֔שׁ כְּרָת־לָ֥נוּ בְרִ֖ית וְנַֽעַבְדֶֽךָּ:

So we have our certainty epistemic followed by its narrative past. After the etnach we have a narrative past, an imperative, and v’naavdekha. Is it a true future tense promise to serve Nachash?

Well, no it’s not. The men of Yavesh Gilad have set a condition “make a covenant with us, and [then] we can serve you.” Remember, avad and eved are an exclusive personal services contract between two Jews or a Jew taking on a Canaanite servant. The men of Yavesh Gilad want Nachash to promise the same rights as they would have if they contracted their personal services to a Jew. Well, the condition he sets is unacceptable, consisting specifically of an injury which would release a Canaanite from an exclusive services contract. So the men of Yavesh Gilad send for help. Also see Samuel I 12:10 for the same verb; once Shmuel saves the men of Yavesh Gilad they will be able to be eveds to Gd again.

Samuel I 12:1:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר שְׁמוּאֵל֙ אֶל־כָּל־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל הִנֵּה֙ שָׁמַ֣עְתִּי בְקֹֽלְכֶ֔ם לְכֹ֥ל אֲשֶׁר־אֲמַרְתֶּ֖ם לִ֑י וָֽאַמְלִ֥יךְ עֲלֵיכֶ֖ם מֶֽלֶךְ:

So, “I could set up a king over you” because of obeying according to all you have said to me.

The old Latin grammars would want me to call this the potential aorist but I refuse to do that because it’s based on a tense grammar and Biblical Hebrew is an aspect grammar. Besides, it’s not just potential; it’s about conditions being fulfilled and then this form is used for something that hasn’t happened yet. That’s not a real future tense, which is a promise to do something unconditionally.

Notice that this is not the duplicate conditional, which requires an introductory aspectless verb from the same root and binyan as the imperfect verb; it states what will happen when the action becomes due and owing. That rests on Jewish law.

This new structure does not rest on Jewish law, it rests on things happening which probably no Jewish law addresses. The Law of Kings in Deuteronomy is about how the king has to behave once he is anointed. Here we have what has to happen before Shmuel will anoint a king.

Aside from this new structure, the grammar in Nakh is identical to Torah. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Nakh is part of the Jewish oral tradition. The fact that it is in Biblical Hebrew means it was written down during the first part of the 70 years of the captivity, while enough people still knew the grammar. The use of Biblical Aramaic in Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther and Daniel confirms that Biblical Hebrew literally died out toward the end of the Captivity.

This is different from the Sumerian Kings List which was copied from centuries-old lists of kings in the various city-states, after the 200 years of the Gutian takeover. The scribes of the Ur III dynasty no longer understood the old grammar – probably because of some hybridization with the Gutian Indo-European language – and they made mistakes that show the problem.

So once again, CONTEXT IS KING. The context is non-past, so the verb form can't be classed as narrative past. And the cultural context tells us what the difference is between this and a duplicate conditional. 

Gibbon -- the urban legend pt. 2

 Last time I gave you the four characteristics of urban legends that distinguish them from oral traditions, and I lumped the 10 faults committed by Gibbon into 3 of the four features of urban legends. 

This time I give you chapter 2 of volume 1, which has three features.

1)    More evidence that Gibbon could not access primary sources in Greek, but cited to editions we can't identify well enough to search for on the web.

2)    More classic Euro-centric bigotry, this time about "conquerors benefitting the conquered," the same argument used by enslavers of all times.

3)    Exaggerations typical of urban legends, side by side with outdated information also typical of urban legends.

This last is the really big one in this chapter. Gibbon buys into the urban legend that Mithridates the Great executed 80,000 Roman army personnel. At the time, a legion consisted of about a thousand men -- infantry and auxiliaries -- so this represents 80 legions. There is no outcry over this in surviving Latin literature, as there was over Varus' loss of three legions a century later. You can say all you want about the missing literature being just that, missing, as opposed to never having existed, but the earliest surviving citation is Plutarch and he says 150,000, an exaggeration showing that he relied on an urban legend. 

In fact a 2013 book shows that the population of Roman citizens (everybody in Italy) was just under 7 million in 28 BCE (from a review that gives the conclusion, https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014.02.45/). There is a standard quote that a standing army can never be more than 1% of the entire population (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed46.asp). If Hin's conclusion is anywhere close to correct, Mithridates destroyed 1.1% of the population of the Roman republic. That 7 million is a modern population estimate, comparable to Karl Beloch's estimate for Augustus' census. 

We want to believe that earlier sources are more accurate, because they are closer in time to the events, but obviously that's not the case.  Herodotus' chapters on the Persian War, citing Persian urban legends about the origins of the Greeks, are not accurate. Modern archaeology dooms Herodotus in almost every instance. Modern DNA destroys a claim by Gibbon which I will discuss in a future post.

And by the same token go to the information in this chapter's PDF on alfalfa, linen, and some other agricultural products. In every case, archaeology since 1995 shows that Gibbon is wrong.

Of course, we can't fault Gibbon for not knowing things that weren't known until 200 years after his death. We can only fault 21st century writers or teachers who fail to present the facts at the same time as they lecture on Gibbon. It's disinformation. Anybody who takes a course on Roman history and finds that Gibbon is the main text, or that the professor presents Gibbon as truth, should protest in front of the whole class, and inform the department and dean that disinformation is not acceptable under the guise of academic freedom. But maybe all the historians at all the universities in the US have waked up and none of them teach Gibbon as true.

It is characteristic of urban legends that later versions will have exaggerations even worse than earlier versions. It's exciting and attracts attention. What urban legends never do is update their information. On my Fact-Checking blog I have examples of urban legends that have not been updated in 10, 100, 200 and even 2000 years. 

History cannot claim an exception as being descriptive. Astronomy is descriptive -- you can't run hands-on experiments with quasars -- but it adopts updates as they are peer-reviewed and confirmed.

History cannot claim an exception as being a liberal art. Sociology is in the liberal arts college; psychology can also be in that college. Both of them rely on updated peer-reviewed information.

History cannot claim an exception as a personal choice, aka academic freedom. It is disingenuous if not disreputable to award grades, let alone promote students to advanced studies, based on how well they learn falsehoods -- which is actually happening in another liberal arts field, religious studies, by incorporating Documentary Hypothesis.

So it's not a matter of restricting academic freedom. It's... it's... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U

Now. If you read the lonnnggg footnote at the end of the PDF that I give a link to later, you will probably get the impression that I think there was all this stuff floating around and what survived was just a small percentage of all of it. It's not what I think; it's a dead cert. We know that some 80 of Aeschylus' plays disappeared; we know that Agatharchides wrote 49 volumes about Europe none of which survived. You probably all know about Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice, but did you know about the works of Mary Brunton? Jane almost entitled her work Self-Control, but she heard that Brunton had already published a novel under that title. So Jane took a phrase from Fanny Burney's Cecilia, which you also may not know about, and the rest is history. (Brunton is available online now, but only in soft-copy; even Valancourt Books doesn't publish her novels.)

So it's a dead cert that there was lots of literature floating around in Greek that we don't have any more, and it's highly probable that some of the work between 100 and 400 CE disappeared because it was judged heretical by one ecumenical council or another. And that is what the footnote means.

Saskia Hin, The Demography of Roman Italy: Population Dynamics in an Ancient Conquest Society (201 BCE – 14 CE). Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

The link for this post: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FrwfjEr2OGm0AWF5xReO3pZjd3VCdvi3/view?usp=sharing

21st Century Classical Greek -- ergative 2

Book I section 12.3 may have another ergative structure; it’s worth examining.

Βοιωτοί τε γὰρ οἱ νῦν ἑξηκοστῷ ἔτει μετὰ Ἰλίου ἅλωσιν ἐξ Ἄρνης ἀναστάντες ὑπὸ Θεσσαλῶν τὴν νῦν μὲν Βοιωτίαν, πρότερον δὲ Καδμηίδα γῆν καλουμένην ᾤκισαν (ἦν δὲ αὐτῶν καὶ ἀποδασμὸς πρότερον ἐν τῇ γῇ ταύτῃ, ἀφ᾽ ὧν καὶ ἐς Ἴλιον ἐστράτευσαν), Δωριῆς τε ὀγδοηκοστῷ ἔτει ξὺν Ἡρακλείδαις Πελοπόννησον ἔσχον.

Anastantes is executive voice. It comes from histimi. The verb has a second aorist, which is used here in a personal gerundive. And it has the hupo plus -on case of an animate agent.

So an ergative structure doesn’t need a conjugated verb. It’s very possible to use a less-definite personal gerundive with a middle-transitive structure. It just makes the action doubly descriptive, since an intransitive has descriptive nuances.

Notice the last sentence in this subsection. If the “Dorian invasion” represents the spread of Indo-European Greek over the Peloponnese, the event that Thucydides is talking about happened about 1100 BCE. About this same time, turmoil drove the Israelites to build settlements on bare ground (instead of clearing and rebuilding on an old tell) in the highlands of the Holy Land. The turmoil included the raid by Merneptah for grain that is recorded on his stele, naming the ethnic group Israel as living in the Holy Land alongside the Canaanites. The Midianite attack recorded in Judges in the story of Gideon is another example. Finally, the Peleshet/Ahiyyawa attack that took the Ark of the Covenant captive was a backwash from the attacks that destroyed Troy VIIb, Hattusas, and Ugarit.

The hilltop settlements have two common features. They have locally made pottery; the Israelites did not trade with the lowlands for this necessary item. They stayed on their hilltops so long that differing pottery styles developed in the north and south extremities.

The other feature is that not one of these settlements has pig bones anywhere. Wild pigs were a staple (2%) of the diet the entire length of the Mediterranean coast from Neanderthal times to 900 BCE, when their bones were found in an abbatoir in Dor. They still exist; in 2010 CE, in the 7^th year of a drought, wild pigs started attacking crops.

But in the 1100s BCE, the hilltop settlements not only didn’t eat wild pig, they didn’t use it for anything else – if they had taken off and sold the skins the bones would have gone into the trash along with the meat. By isolating themselves from normal commerce, they had no opportunity to sell the pigs to lowlanders. If their dogs dragged bones in from the fields, those were trashed somewhere – but not in the middens.

The Israelites are the only population of that time known to prohibit pigs. That is, if Torah was in force at the time. My blog lays out the evidence that it was, and my book Narrating the Torah goes into more detail.

21st Century Classical Greek -- caveat on computerized language

I want to make sure that you understand how to examine hoste clauses for nuance.

You can’t do it with an app. You have to touch all the examples yourself.

There’s a paper online purportedly examining a concept in Biblical Hebrew which in fact is false, has been adopted from Arabic, and can be safely ditched. There’s a computer analysis in the paper, but it’s based on old grammer, not 21^st century concepts. I contacted the author and pointed this out to him. He didn’t know anything about modality in Biblical Hebrew.

In the old days we used to call this GIGO. The programmer can only program based on what she knows, and if her knowledge is out of date, she hasn’t produced a useful analysis.

That’s just the first problem.

The second problem is that computers do not understand context. People have been trying to create computers that know language. It has been 40 years since my first contact with these efforts and it’s still not happening.

This is part of the problem with Google Translate. Putting in a given word and getting an answer does not make a good translation. That’s that word-for-word substitution stuff I already condemned. In fact a neighbor of mine who teaches French and Spanish had to give a student like a D at best and it took the kid twice as long to finish the assignment, using Google Translate, compared to learning the material and doing the homework from memory.

Computers invariably get idioms wrong. That’s an issue of context.

And if the computer is programmed wrong, that adds to the problem. I’ve seen entries on Google Translate that look as if somebody is deliberately entering false data.

The only thing a computer can do for you is a) let you download text you can search (full text, not a PDF) b) let you search the Greek of the text for hoste (copy one example and paste it into the search function) c) let you mark the found items for study.

You should not, repeat not, excerpt the found items and put them into a spreadsheet. That disrupts context. The most that the spreadsheet will do is let you list the citations of the examples.

But for prepping the data to find all the material to examine, a digitized searchable text is far and away better than what the old scholars had.