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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 if all you know is Attic. OTOH, if you know the vocabulary and grammar, I’m told that the syntax is child’s play.
The furthest away linguistically is Aeolic, and people don’t often bother to learn the dialect differences because Aeolic is so obscure. I did, so I actually find Aeolic easier than Epic.
Like Dimitra said, Xenophon has the reputation of being the easiest classical author, and Thucydides the hardest. I spend more time reading Byzantine learnèd texts, and unfortunately for me many of them chose to emulate Thucydides.
In the New Testament, Mark and John are very simple and modern linguistically. Paul OTOH is more learnèd, and can be convoluted. Then again, I have trouble understanding Paul in English as well.
Of the Byzantines, special mention goes out to the poetry of Theodore Metochites. It’s pretend Homeric, but he exaggerates all the Homeric idiosyncrasies he can: there’s not an <ο> he won’t try to spell as <ου>. I’m glad Michael Featherstone has made a career of translating his poems, coz I ain’t volunteering.
What is the etymology of “archetypal”?
As the Googles will tell you, from Greek arkhetypon (ἀρχέτυπον): arkhē, meaning start, beginning, and typos, stamp, impression (originally: a blow). Literally: an initial stamp, an initial impression.
And the meaning the word had was pretty close to “archetype” from the beginning: LSJ
Adjective: “first-moulded as a pattern or model, archetypal”, used by Philo to refer to a seal, then “exemplary, ideal” by Soranus, to refer to a midwife.
Noun: “archetype, pattern, model”, used by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (contemporary of Philo); “a portrait [of Dido] as she really was” in the Anthologia Graeca.
So initially an archetype referred to the very first pressing of a seal on something—which is as close to the ideal pattern of the seal as possible. The more you use the seal, the more it wears out, just like a 10th-generation photocopy. From there, it was a short leap to the notion of the archetype: the initial model of everything.
And if Philo is one of the first persons attested to have used the word, he’s already using the metaphorical extension in his Allegorical Interpretation, III:
Now, Bezaleel, being interpreted, means God in his shadow. But the shadow of God is his word, which he used like an instrument when he was making the world. And this shadow, and, as it were, model, is the archetype of other things.
ἑρμηνεύεται οὖν Βεσελεὴλ ἐν σκιᾷ θεοῦ· σκιὰ θεοῦ δὲ ὁ λόγος αὐτοῦ ἐστιν, ᾧ καθάπερ ὀργάνῳ προσχρησάμενος ἐκοσμοποίει. αὕτη δὲ ἡ σκιὰ καὶ τὸ ὡσανεὶ ἀπεικόνισμα ἑτέρων ἐστὶν ἀρχέτυπον
On this account you will find the tabernacle and all its furniture to have been made in the first instance by Moses, and again subsequently by Bezaleel. For Moses fashioned the archetypal forms, and Bezaleel made the imitations of them.
διὰ τοῦθ’ εὑρήσεις τὴν σκηνὴν καὶ τὰ σκεύη πάντα αὐτῆς πρότερον μὲν ὑπὸ Μωυσέως, αὖθις δ’ ὑπὸ | Βεσελεὴλ κατασκευαζόμενα· Μωυσῆς μὲν γὰρ τὰ ἀρχέτυπα τεχνιτεύει, Βεσελεὴλ δὲ τὰ τούτων μιμήματα·
What is the difference between Illocutionary act and Illocutionary force?
Per Illocutionary act and What is an illocutionary act? , it’s always been messy. One take is:
The illocutionary act is a speech act: something that the speaker does by speaking. It often expresses an intention that the world matches what the speaker says—that their assertions are accurate, their promises sincere, their commands obeyed. But it doesn’t guarantee that the intention is realised. Illocutionary acts are usually defined in categories.
The illocutionary force is how your speech act ends up changing the world. Your intention as a speaker is that the illocutionary force matches the illocutionary act; but if the act misfires, it might not.
What are the difference between illocutionary acts and implicature given the sense that both suggest implied meaning or are they just the same?
Implicature is a kind of implied meaning. It’s a default assumption underlying what you are saying, though it can be cancelled out.
An illocutionary act is what kind of change in the world you are trying to realise through what you are saying. The implied meaning is not really part of it; it’s more about intent.
Is there anywhere on the Internet a scheme of the Greek names and of the elements of which they are formed?
Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, University of Oxford , the online dictionary of all attested Ancient Greek names (which are overwhelmingly from inscriptions) has some materials on their publications list and announcements list, but nothing as methodical as what you have in the Wikipedia page you gave.
The most awesome Dr. W. PAPE’s Wörterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen is a dictionary of all attested Ancient Greek names as of 1911, which means it is more on the literary side, and its has an introductory chapter on how names are formed, pp xvii-xxxii, including the elements names are formed from. Unfortunately, you have to be able to read German, and Fraktur at that. If you can read Greek though, you’ll understand what’s going on.
The Wikipedia page Ancient Greek personal name does have an overview, though not a schema.
What are the pros and cons of the Erasmian pronunciation?
For this answer, bear in mind that there are three current pronunciations of Ancient Greek:
- Erasmus’ reconstruction of Ancient Greek phonology, as modified in practice for teaching Greek in Western schools: Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching
- The scholarly reconstruction of Ancient Greek phonology: Ancient Greek phonology
- Modern Greek pronunciation applied to Ancient Greek (“Reuchlinian” pronunciation): Johann Reuchlin
I will differentiate in the following between Erasmian (as taught) and Reconstruction. Erasmian as taught tends to make the following concessions. (Happy to be corrected.)
- Usually stress rather than pitch accent
- Often fricatives rather than aspirated stops
- Nativisation of diphthongs
- Some distortions in the German version
- Even more distortions in the French version
Pros of Erasmian:
- It’s a stable system with respect to the various periods of Greek. Greek pronunciation varied by era: Homeric was different to Classical Attic, the dialects likely differed, and there was significant change between Classical and Koine Greek. With Erasmian (or Modern Greek), you only need to learn one pronunciation. So long as you don’t care about historical accuracy.
- It’s somewhat close to the scholarly reconstruction of Greek; so a lot of the phonology and morphology of Ancient Greek makes much more sense. With Modern pronunciation, augments and contraction are just magical mappings between letters, that you learn by rote. In fact, they make as little sense as English spelling, for pretty much the same reason.
Cons of Erasmian:
- It’s not quite fully there with the scholarly reconstruction of Greek; so some of the phonology and morphology of Ancient Greek still doesn’t make sense. Particularly with diphthongs, and aspiration, if your local Erasmian doesn’t do them accurately.
- Extreme variability from country to country, because of the concessions each country’s teaching system makes to the local language.
- Speak in Erasmian to a Greek, and they’ll look at you like a space alien. Or even worse, a German. Now, if you’re speaking Ancient Greek to a Greek, you deserve to be looked at like a space alien. But they will genuinely have no idea what you are saying, or what language you are saying it in. Even diehard turncoats like me cannot help themselves from reading Ancient Greek out with modern pronunciation, if they speak Modern Greek: we need all the help we can get.
- It’s quite far from Koine. Koine was still in flux, and some critical changes were underway when the bit of Koine most people care about (New Testament) was spoken. But overall, Koine was much closer to Modern Greek than Homeric.
In conclusion, the reconstructed Greek I’ve liked the best. Most recordings of Ancient Greek in scholarly reconstruction are of Greek poetry. Because they stylise (some might say, overdo) the pitch accent and the quantity, they end up sounding like yodelling Martians. My favourite reconstructor does this too when he reads poetry; but mercifully, he also reads prose. And when he reads prose, he is the only person I’ve heard who sounds like he’s speaking a human language.
It helps that he’s Greek. His phonology is not Modern Greek, mind you; but I think it helps a lot that, at least in this recording, his intonation is. I give you Ioannis Stratakis:
What is the equivalent of Do Re Mi for other languages/cultures?
In the 1832 revision of Byzantine music, Chrysanthus of Prusa came up with a Greek equivalent of solfège, using the same derivation from acrostics of a hymn. So: Pa Vou Ga Di Ke Zo Ni.
To my surprise, there’s no decent online source on this (https://thmodocumentation.files…. p. 6 has the info in Greek).
EDIT: I say acrostic, but it was a rigged acrostic for the occasion. Chrysanthus’ actual intent was to put the first seven letters of the Greek alphabet into a set of CV syllables:
πΑ Βου Γα Δε κΕ Ζω νΗ
What is the name for the ‘condition’ that sometimes occurs when people wake from a coma and can speak a foreign language without any prior study?
There is indeed Foreign accent syndrome . And the simplest explanation is the easiest: people wake up with a kind of speech disorder, which listeners match to whatever accents they are familiar with. It does not mean they are speaking a different languages, or that they have been exposed to another accent natively. Pareidolia, the Wikipedia page politely calls it.
As the Wikipedia article adds,
Despite an unconfirmed news report in 2010 that a Croatian speaker has gained the ability to speak fluent German after emergence from a coma,[5] there has been no verified case where a patient’s foreign language skills have improved after a brain injury.
So “speaking a foreign language” outright doesn’t happen. And if someone was going to wake up from a coma speaking German, Croatia is more plausible than I dunno, Madagascar. Like John Nurse’s answer says, you don’t know a new language out of thin air.
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. It is the authoritative text of the Orthodox church, but noone involved was making an attempt to reconstruct the original text.
- The other two major families of New Testament manuscripts are the Alexandrian text-type and the Western text-type.
- Textual critics, who are trying to reconstruct the original text, tend to prefer the Alexandrian type, at least for the Gospels. But this is reconstruction, and reconstruction based on sometimes subjective criteria (which nonetheless make sense when you think about them.)
What does the Romanian language sound like to a foreigner?
My prejudice going in, as someone exposed through Greek linguistics to written Aromanian language (which I know is not quite the same thing):
- Too many diphthongs
- Central vowels? How odd
- It’s Romance, it’s just got some odd sound changes
My prejudice on hearing this:
- Too many diphthongs.
- I can’t hear the Romance at all. I’m sure it’s there, but I can’t pick it up. Apart from the final Bună seara (bona sera!)
- The intonation and phonology does sound Slavicish.
- A lot more nasal than I expected (hence the Portuguese that other respondents are picking up on.)
- They weren’t joking with that –lui suffix.
- Yeah, central vowels. Gives it that Russian tinge.
- Too many diphthongs.