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Category: Literature
With knowledge of modern Greek what historical literature could I read?
Hm. I keep disagreeing that you’d understand all of the New Testament. Mark and John, sure; Paul, not so much. Byzantine learned literature: forget it. It’s not identical to Attic Greek, but you’ll need Attic Greek (and a decoder ring) to make sense of it. Byzantine Vernacular literature (1100 onward): sure, but knowing some dialect, […]
Are memes a novel linguistic category of proverbs?
Hm. In this subculture, sure. Adage at least, if not proverb. The fragmentation of culture in the Anglosphere, and the lack of common cultural reference points as a result, is a strange thing. It feels unprecedented. You can’t fall back on common literary references any more. The Anglosphere thinks traditional wisdom is old hat and […]
Who are the hardest Greek and Latin authors to read?
Second hand answer, based more on what I’ve heard than what I’ve read. Agreed with Dimitra Triantafyllidou in general, but it’d be good to hear from more classicists. Homer is extremely far away from Attic in time and (to some extent) dialect. So in terms of vocabulary and grammar, it might as well be Phrygian […]
What is the best Greek New Testament?
The Textus Receptus is the traditional Orthodox Greek bible, as passed down from Byzantine copyist through Byzantine copyist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By… ), into one particular manuscript that Erasmus got hold of, and missing one page that Erasmus translated from the Vulgate. It is distinguished for being the first widely disseminated Greek text in the age of printing. […]
What does the Greek proverb “nothing done with intelligence is done without speech” emphasize? And how to interpret it culturally?
I don’t have the answer, but this will help narrow it down: This is not a proverb as such, but is a quotation from a speech by the orator Isocrates. Nicocles, section 9: οὐδὲν τῶν φρονίμως πραττομένων εὑρήσομεν ἀλόγως γιγνόμενον The emphasis out of context is not quite as obvious, because the same word logos […]
What does “Kata ton daimona eaytoy” mean and why does it have more than one meaning?
Thank you to Achilleas Vortselas for doing most of the work. The proximate source is possibly the album of Rotting Christ, as he explains. But as the Wikipedia page about the album, Κατά τον δαίμονα εαυτού, says, the phrase occurs on Jim Morrison’s tombstone: Jim Morrison . (The OP knew this too, if I can […]
What are the major characteristics of the poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy?
A major characteristic of Cavafy which does *not* come across in the most popular translation (Sherrard & Keeley’s) is the linguistic eclectisism, which adds to the overall feeling of restraint and detachment. Especially when everyone else writing in Greek at the time was idolising the Volkisch ideal of Demotic, his playful alternation of contemporary slang […]
How is rhyme used in different languages?
Sporadically in Classical Greek and Latin, as a rhetorical technique for both prose and poetry, rather than a basis of verse: Homeoteleuton. Systematically in Arabic and Chinese, but I don’t know much about them. In Europe, rhyme emerges as a structural feature of verse (as opposed to an occasional device) in the Late Middle Ages. […]
How much writing from ancient Greece is preserved? Is it a finite amount that someone could potentially read?
While there are 105 million words in the TLG, most of them are Byzantine. I did a count of the words in the corpus in Lerna VIc: A correction of word form counts in 2009; because there is not massive growth in the number of known ancient texts, the counts still apply. If we define […]
TLG Updates, May 2010
The TLG has just released the latest updates to its text collection. This is what has been added, from the oldest to the most recent texts, with Early Modern Greek texts separate: Philodemus (i BC): On Anger (ed. Indelli, 1988) Philodemus is a Hellenistic philosopher, who we know about mainly thanks to Mt Vesuvius, carbonising […]