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Lerna IIIa: Why we do not count word instances
This blogpost in the ongoing thread on the Lernaean Text and counting words in Greek (see Lerna II, Lerna I) may be misdirected to the readership of this blog. It goes through basic notions in linguistics that some of you will be familiar enough with to be annoyed at. And given how the Lernaean text has been propagated, this post should be in Greek. Then again, Nikos Sarantakos has been posting brilliantly about it in Greek for a decade—not that this has singed off any of the heads of the Hydra, because it really is a Hydra. From Lerna.
Still, I have to ritually cast out the implications of “my language has more words than your language, nyuh”, before I start counting the words of Greek on the record. And obvious statements are worth writing down too. Especially despite them not being obvious down at the fevered swamps of Lerna. Besides, I have a mission statement for the blog: “making Greek more googleable” (through English).
I arrived at this mission statement in corresponding with my one-time student Matt Treyvaud, who has long been making Japanese more googleable at No-Sword. Read ye his blog, for it is hale: thou hast exceeded thy sensei! 🙂
The previous post already goes into reasons why the size of the corpus you’re using doesn’t mean all that much. The millions of times /malaka/ gets said daily (let alone the hundreds of millions of times /fʌkɪŋ/ gets said) does not outweigh the smaller number of words surviving from Greek antiquity. The fact that five times more people speak French than Dutch does not make French a five times better language. The fact that the Mahabharata is ten times longer than the Iliad does not make it an inherently better poem. Nor an inherently worse poem.
We could go on with this. Let’s. And let’s go to the real point of promoting the size of the TLG corpus in the Lernaean text: the fact that this is not a count of any old words, but of the words of Classical Greek literature.
Size as a metric for literary quality. Doesn’t sound convincing, does it? Of course, that’s not why the figure of 90 million got inserted: it got inserted because the writers really had no idea what the difference is between a word instance count and a lemma count. Among all the other things they had no idea about. But let’s spend some paragraphs on this strawman anyway.
Reading the erudite though self-important Esperanto literary journal Literatura Foiro, I came across a quote from Italo Calvino that obviously a widely spoken language would produce greater literature than a small language like Bulgarian. I don’t know anything about Italo Calvino, and after that quote, I didn’t care to. I did recently ask a friend who did know something about Italo Calvino, and it makes sense, given his conscious cosmopolitanism, that Italian would be better at producing the kind of literature he valued than would Bulgarian. The response to that of course is, English would be a lot better still, if contemporary cosmopolitanism is your primary aesthetic criterion. It’s not the only aesthetic criterion in existence, and it’s not like Calvino wrote in English anyway; so I wouldn’t use population counts or readership size or extent of bilingualism to invalidate as inferior the literature of Bulgarian. Or Italian. Or Greek. Or Esperanto.
Besides, what’s “greatness” about? Esperantists were hankering for an Epic of their own, and were overjoyed when William Auld gave them The Infant Race (La Infana Raso) in 1956—although, it being 1956, the cantos it sounded like were Pound’s not Alighieri’s, and it eulogised the perpetuation of the species, not the rage of the son of Thetis. The poem is good; Auld did good short poems too, though they’re not why he kept being nominated for the Nobel Prize. But the jewel of Esperanto Modernism was Victor Sadler’s Self-Criticism (Memkritiko) in 1968; and it was a jewel because it thought Small, not Big. Greek readers whose eyes are glazing over about now might want to compare how much pound per verse you get out of Palamas and Kazantzakis, versus Cavafy and Karyotakis. The fact that they wrote Big is not an argument against Palamas and Kazantzakis, any more than it is against the Mahabharata. But it decidedly isn’t an argument against Cavafy and Karyotakis, either.
Even within the TLG’s ambit, the size of the Byzantine corpus is bigger than the Ancient corpus. A lot bigger. All up, it’d be at least 10 times bigger, depending on how you count. Now, that does not mean the Byzantine corpus is worthless: judgement has been severe on Byzantine literature, and the artificiality of the learnèd language did not help, but a thousand years of writing did not produce nothing. Still, students don’t enrol in Ancient Greek classes to read Theodore Prodromus or John Chrysostom. It would be cool if they did, but they don’t. They enrol to read Plato and Homer, or Mark and Paul. If they do read Prodromus and Chrysostom, it’s after they’ve read Plato and Mark. And there’s a lot less of Plato, or Mark, than of John Chrysostom.
Which brings us back to the actual Classical Greek corpus. As we’ll see, the TLG is not just Classical but Byzantine Greek, and the actual Classical Greek corpus that has survived is not 90 million words: not even close. What did survive, survived precisely because of how great its impact was, and the impact was out of proportion to its word count. Nor is the actual Classical Greek corpus particularly prolix: at its best, it used words carefully and frugally. It wasn’t in a race to come up with lots of words: Aristophanes has a little fun now and again, but he doesn’t go to town like Constantine of Rhodes did
The literary corpus from Homer to Aristotle is 5 million words, not 90. Do we really want to say that makes it 18 times less important?
OK, we now put such grocers’ calculations aside. And we move to other grocers’ calculation in following posts. (Lerna IIIa is the first of four.)
To take us out, some Constantine of Rhodes, which I cited in the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds, pp. 91-92, to illustrate… well, the race to come up with lots of words. Leo Choerosphactes, you must have really gotten beneath this guy’s skin:
λαρυγγοφλασκοξεστοχανδοεκπότα!
κασαλβοπορωομαχλοπροικτεπεμβάτα!
ὀλεθροβιβλιογαλσογραμματοφθόρε!
σολοικοβαττοβαρβαροσκυτογράφε!
καὶ ψευδομυθοσαυροπλασματοπλόκε!
ἑλληνοθρησκοχριστοβλασφημοτρόπε!
καὶ παντοτολμοψευδομηχανορρόφε!
καὶ τρωκτοφερνοπροικοχρηματοφθόρε!
ἀρρητοποιονυκτεροσκοτεργάτα!
καὶ νεκροτυμβοκλεπτολωποεκδύτα!You flask-in-gullet–pint–mouth-gaping–gulper!
You harlot-whore–lewd-beggar–shirt-lifter!
Disastrous-book–false-letter–ruiner!
Solecist-babbling–barbarous-hide–writer!
Fake-fairytale–and–cracked-creation–monger!
You pagan-creed–and–Christ-blaspheming-type!
All-daring–and–mendacious–mal-intriguer!
You bride-gift-gnawing–dowry-money–waster!
Acts-unspeakable–nightly-darkness–worker!
You gravesite-corpses-robbing–clothes-despoiler!
Lerna II: Definitions
I’ve started a series of posts on counting words in Greek (see: Lerna I). This is the kind of thing that revokes your linguistics cabal membership card, so I have to add that the posts are really about the journey to counting words, and the questions that come up along the way, rather than the destination. There’ll be at least a couple of posts about why the destination doesn’t make a lot of sense. I also don’t hold out any hope that any heads of the Hydra this chops off will stay chopped off: too many people Want To Believe that there are 200 times more words in Greek than English; and if IT professionals can be duped by a text claiming that computers can only communicate with each other in Ancient Greek, no amount of numbers will convince them to the contrary.
(I owe a lot of these insights to the commenters at Team Fortier, aka the magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog’s host and its commenters, and this thread is of course a shout-out to them.)
In this post, some definitions, to introduce the concepts we’re counting. Many of you will already know all of this, but I’m writing for an undefined audience here.
Word counts
An individual instance of a word is a token—or an instance. The count of instances is what you get when you hit Word Count on Word, or wc -w
on Unix. They’re what you’re aiming towards when you have a 1,000-word essay.
Now, counting word instances in a language doesn’t prove much of anything. The larger the population of language-speakers, the more words spoken in a language. By that token, since there have been more speakers of English in the history of the world than there have been speakers of Greek, then there have been more word instances of English than of Greek, case closed, thank you for playing. Like human population, the count of word instances ever spoken has gone up exponentially (so far), and until now the number of words ever spoken has dwarfed the number of words ever written. A Google researcher guesstimated in 2007 that there were 100 trillion words (written words) in Google’s cache; and that count isn’t going down. Many a wag commented that half those words are PORN or XXX; but rest assured that most of those words are still in English.
You wanna talk to me about the 90 million words of Greek?
That’s unfair, I hear you say? Because the words of English are barbarous and the words of Greek inspired, and half those 100 trillion words are PORN or XXX anyway? Well, with 15 million Greek speakers alive today, the number of times someone says μ#@#$# daily exceeds the word count of all of Ancient Greek literature. Come again? How dare I debase Our Ancient Ancestors (ΑΗΠ) to the gutter talk of our modern decrepitude? As if no philosophy is ever discussed in Modern Greek; and as if everyone who ever spoke Ancient Greek, Attic Doric or Pamphylian, was in Socratic dialogue mode 24/7, and never once abused their fellows. And if you want your word count of Ancient Greek free of scurrility, then get to work: time and censors have rid us of a lot of antick filth, but there’s still some Hipponax and Aristophanes they’ve spared for you to expunge.
Trust me, word counts is not really the game you want to get into to prove the superiority of Greekdom. It’s a game you can’t win, and a game you shouldn’t be trying to win anyway. There are more serious things than this that you can do with your enthusiasm for Hellenism.
Of course, those aren’t the calculations we go into when we count words, and those kinds of counts are of little interest to anyone, with the possible exception of computer models of language change. When we do go about counting words (in the process of doing something else), there are two kinds of construct we deal with. What a language allows in potentiality, as a system; and what evidence of language use you actually have in your records, as a sample. The old Saussurean langue/parole opposition, in other words.
If you’re dealing with language as a theoretical system, the number of words you can put together with it is infinite. And it’s no less infinite whether you’re dealing with Greek, English, or Umbu-Ungu. So word counts don’t even come into it. If you’re dealing with some concrete records of a language, on the other hand, you’re using a corpus: a body of texts assembled for linguistic research. The corpus is not going to represent all possibilities of a language, which are after all infinite. But typically it will represent enough to tell you what is going on in a langue. Or a range of langues, depending on what’s gone into the corpus, and how you define your language.
Corpora don’t normally try or need to be exhaustive, but they do need to be large enough to tell you stuff, and small enough to be feasible—especially if you’re putting not just words into them, but markup. The British National Corpus, for instance, has 100 million words of British spoken and written text, and it’s annotated for morphology and syntax. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 350 million words. With the internet, of course, what’s small enough to be feasible has grown a little. (See Google, 100 Trillion.)
As you have no doubt gathered, I work for the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, and the TLG has been building a corpus of literary Greek for close to 40 years. Like any corpus, the TLG has a word count, and that word count is now well over 90 million words. That’s the count that has made its way to the Lernaean text, as had earlier counts in earlier viral strains of the text. But of course, the TLG is a corpus: it’s the subset of all words in the Greek language that happened to have been
- written down
- survived to the present day
- considered of literary or linguistic interest
- published in a scholarly edition
- digitised for the University of California to date
- date before Modern times. (The cutoff is moving forwards from 1453, but won’t soon go past 1669.)
There have been a lot more Greek words in history than that. Then again, like we said, there’s been a lot more English words in history than that too. So on a global scale, the number 90 million does not prove superiority or perfection. If there is value in the texts of Classical Greek, that value does not come from quantity.
Wordforms
When dictionaries count words, word instances are not what they count. They don’t count wordforms either, but let’s start with wordforms anyway.
There’s lots of words in text, but most words get used more than once, and some words get used a *lot* more than once. If you want to count words, the first constructive thing to do is to count how many of those are distinct words, wordforms. That’s the list of words that begins to tell you what the language is actually coming up with as a system.
Having a million words of English in a corpus doesn’t tell you much in itself, precisely because a small number of common, functional wordforms accounts for a lot of word instances. In those million words of English, you’ll find 70,000 of those words are “the”, another 36,000 are “of”, and 135 distinct wordforms are enough to account for half your word count: there is an inverse proportionality of word frequency to word frequency ranking, as Zipf’s Law finds. That’s why tag clouds routinely take out stopwords: you don’t need to be told that your text contains a lot of instances of “the” and “of”.
You can see that principle at work by checking out this tag cloud, generated by Notis Toufexis for an excerpt of Ptochoprodromos. The biggest words in the Worlde tag cloud are καὶ, νὰ, τὰ, “and, to, the”. They’re the biggest by far, because they’re so common in Early Modern Greek: but you have to squint past them to see the content words that actually reveal Ptochoprodromos’ frame of mind: ἀνάθεμαν, τεχνίτην, κρασίν, στάμενον “damn, artisan, wine, coin”.
No different in the TLG corpus of course; of the most frequent wordforms in the corpus, you don’t hit a verb until #43 εἶναι “to be”, a noun until #103 Θεοῦ “of God” (as we’ll see, there’s a *lot* of Christian texts in the TLG), and an unambiguous adjective until #158 ἄλλων “of others” and #162 πολλά “many”. That’s a lot of particles and pronouns and articles to go through before you get a content word.
We can see the repetitiveness of word forms in practice in Ancient Greek. Here’s the first 1000 words of Thucydides, resplendent in 3 point Alexander font:
Lots of red words. Now, let’s blue out all repetitions of word forms in the passage:
Of the 1000 words, 558 are unique. So 1000 words translates to 558 wordforms. As you can imagine, the more text you have, the more you’re going to repeat words, so the 90-odd million word instances of the TLG corpus translate to 1.5 million distinct strings. (And as we’ll see when we look at those counts more closely, not all 1.5 million wordforms are equal.)
1.5 million is smaller than 90 million, I’d like to point out.
Lemmata
We’re not done though. Dictionaries of English don’t list dog, dog’s, dogs as separate words, nor take, takes, took, taken. Dictionaries of Greek don’t list κύων, κυνός, κυνί as separate, nor λαμβάνω, λαμβάνει, ἔλαβον, εἰλημμένος. These are grammatical variants of the same word, and outside the grammatical function they serve in a sentence, they don’t means something different. So they’re considered the same word underlyingly: the same lexeme, or dictionary word, grouped in a dictionary under the same lemma, or headword.
That’s not all the wordforms you conflate under a lemma. Some wordforms don’t differ grammatically, but are merely phonological alternates: the distinction between εἱσί, εἰσι, and εἰσιν in Ancient Greek, or κυσί, κυσίν, κυσὶν depends only on the sounds of the following word. (There’s not a lot of this in English, but the difference between a and an is the same principle.) This kind of variation, you could fold into the morphological variation (inflection) we’ve just seen; but they don’t carry the same weight. Ancient Greek allows five cases and three numbers for its nouns, so “dog” can theoretically appear in 15 forms. (In reality, it’s never more than 11 forms, even if there’s 15 grammatical meanings.) But the phonological variation of κυσί, κυσίν, κυσὶν does not contribute to that count.
Some wordforms get conflated under the same lemma because they differ from each other only as spelling alternates. You’d be hard put to say conjurer and conjuror, let alone colour and color, are distinct lexemes. Spelling variation already happens in Ancient Greek—e.g. writing iota adscripts vs. subscripts, or the spelling variation between λειπ- and λιπ- in compounds. Once the language has changed enough that the spelling is no longer phonetic—and once editors aren’t as concerned to normalise texts—you get a lot of spelling variation: what you might choose to call “misspellings”, if that was a productive thing to do. (If you’re respecting what the editors chose not to normalise, then it isn’t: you deal with the words as you find them.)
We don’t get misspellings in our text of Thucydides, but we do get lots of grammatical variants. The words left in red above, as unique wordforms, include Ἀθηναῖος “Athenian” and Ἀθηναίων “of Athenians”, μέγας “great (masc.)” and μεγίστη “greatest (fem.)”, ᾤκουν “they dwelled” and οἰκουμένη “dwelled in (fem.)”. If we shade those grammatical variants in green, and leave red just for distinct lemmata, we get something a lot less red than we started with:
1000 words, 558 wordforms, 409 lemmata. And of course the more text you have, the more lemmata you’re going to repeat. The 1.5 million odd wordforms of the TLG as a corpus boil down to the neighbourhood of 200,000 lemmata.
It’s a neighbourhood, and counting lemmata is a very problematic thing to do. Moreover, that’s a count specific to a corpus: the bigger your corpus, obviously, the more lemmata it’s going to contain, especially as the TLG adds more Early Modern Greek texts—although the Law of Diminishing Returns does apply. And of course, if you’re thinking about langue and not parole—what is possible in a language rather than what you happen to have recorded—then any counts are pointless: you can make up words in any language, and people do, all the time. Some languages let you make up words more readily than others do: German more than French, Greek more than Latin, Sanskrit more than Greek. That doesn’t really prove much of course. In fact, none of these counts really proves that much. But that’s a topic for a separate post.
Still, when dictionaries count words, they work off a corpus, and dictionary words—lemmata—is what they count. When the Lernaean text talks about 490,000 words of English, what they’re counting are lemmata. Basic decency tells you to compare lemma counts and lemma counts, not word instance counts and lemma counts. Common sense tells you that the lemma count of Greek is going to be in the same order of magnitude as English, not 200 times greater: and common sense, away from the fevered swamps of Lerna, is correct.
Nonetheless, counting lemmata is problematic. You’ll see 490,000 cited for English; you’ll also see 172,000, 615,000, and a million. I said around 200,000 lemmata for Greek, but I said 227,000 last year, in some contexts I should be saying 116,000, and in some much shakier contexts discussed below, I could even speak of 1.5 million (but won’t). I’ll go into the reasons why, and what aspects of Greek they reflect, in future posts. But I’ll give some background on why counting lemmata is difficult.
Derived lemmata
In many languages, a new word can be made up based on an old word. So given employ in English, you can derive other words—other lemmata: employer, employee, employment, employable, employability. Some of the rules for forming new words are live in the language: given ginormous, you can form ginormousness, and given abdominoplasty, you can form abdominoplastic. Some of those rules are frozen in time, and can’t be used to make up new words now; truth comes from true, but you can’t get coolth from cool. (OK, you can, but if the style guide calls it “tiresomely jocular”, that tells you something’s wrong with trying to reintroduce -th as a suffix.)
Greek can derive lexemes from other lexemes, just like English can. In fact, because a lot of legitimate derived lemmata are not included in published dictionaries, the TLG lemmatiser allows words to be recognised based on these derivation rules. Any verb can, in theory, generate a couple of dozen nouns and adjectives; so if you crank those rules all the way to eleven, you could say that Greek in theory has over 1.5 million lexemes. Not even a hundredth of those potential lexemes are of any use in Greek text, though: they really are lexemes only in theory, and the theory only occasionally translates into practice. I’d like to think noone is going to start quoting me as proving Greek has 1.5 million lexemes after all. I’d *like* to think…
Anyway: concerned to save space, and to lump related forms together, many dictionaries list derived lemmata like this in the same entry as the original form. See how the dictionary.com dictionaries treat cleverness, for example. LSJ does this a lot: the entry for Ἀντίγονος “Antigonus” also includes Ἀντιγόνειος and Ἀντιγονικός “Antigonian”, Ἀντιγονίς “an Antigonus cup”, and Ἀντιγονίζω “to side with Antigonus”. That’s four or five lexemes, even if they’re all related. But that means that the count of headwords in a dictionary is not the same as the count of lexemes.
Variants
So far, the variation between wordforms under a lemma has been only grammatical or spelling; and as long as you’re looking at a single, uniform version of a language, that’s mostly enough to make sense of it. But a lemma can also encompass variation that, strictly speaking, involves different-sounding words still meaning the same thing. And the more broad the definition of the language is, the more such variation you’re going to have to deal with.
So some wordforms get conflated because they’re pronounced similarly rather than identically. In English, take embed and imbed. They sound and look different, but mean the same, and dictionaries will not bother to define them separately: at most, the entry for imbed will be something along the lines of “see embed“. There is a lot more of this in Greek, whether because the stems look different, or the endings look different. There’s no essential difference between δωδεκάμηνος, δυοδεκάμηνος, and δυοκαιδεκάμηνος for “twelve-monthly”; so it’s a judgement call whether to consider them as the same lemma or different. ἰσόσταθμος and ἰσοσταθμής mean the same thing, “equal in weight”. Should they count as the same lemma? That’s not obvious either, because the declension of the two is distinct—but LSJ don’t see a reason to give them separate definitions.
In strictly morphological terms, ἰσόσταθμος and ἰσοσταθμής, and δυοδεκάμηνος and δυοκαιδεκάμηνος are distinct lexemes. But dictionaries tend to conflate those lexemes, especially as they’re driven by semantics. So more often than not, ἰσόσταθμος and ἰσοσταθμής are going to turn up in the same dictionary entry, which in effect treats them as the same. That doesn’t mean that everything has to treat them as the same—as we saw with derived lemmata. But it is a consideration.
Beyond that, Ancient Greek covers a range of dialects, and several centuries of language change, and that inflates the variation under the same lemma. So combing wool gets to be all of κνάπτω, γνάπτω, and κνάμπτω: κνάπτω seems to be the original Attic form, γνάπτω Ionic (and later Attic). δυσευνάτωρ is just the Doric for Attic δυσευνήτωρ; if you’re going to include both in your lexicon, you’re not going to treat them as distinct lemmata. The longer the timespan of your lexicon, the more merging in you’ll be doing of wordforms that vary across time—until the change is so great that it no longer makes sense to. Modern Greek μπορώ “I can” derives from Ancient εὐπορέω “I prosper”, but noone looking for instances of εὐπορέω in text is well served by getting hits for μπορώ.
On the other hand, Ancient ἀνήρ “man” regularly developed into Modern άντρας, and if your dictionary is going to span both Ancient and Modern Greek, it should treat them as variants of the same lemma.
That of course brings us to the delicate issue of whether a lexicon has any business listing both ἀνήρ and άντρας in the same tome. (It’d have to be ἄντρας of course if it did: you wouldn’t allow different accentuation rules in the same tome.) You won’t find any dictionaries listing Latin homo and Italian uomo as the same word, because they’re not regarded as the same language. Greek is, but it’s not untoward to say, that’s not exclusively or even primary for linguistic reasons. (Those extralinguistic reasons are of course a lot of the motivation behind the Lernaean text to begin with.)
Outside Dimitrakos’ dictionary, noone has attempted to have the one dictionary cover the whole of the τρισχιλιετοῦς*, and there’s reasons for that too. The TLG lemma search engine does have to deal with the entire corpus, Ancient and Not, so it does do those conflations—not without problems. The counts I’ll be giving in subsequent posts will reflect those conflations; but there is also more to say about why those conflations are problematic within linguistics.
[GLOSS: τρισχιλιετοῦς is the archaic genitive of τρισχιλιετής, “three-thousand year long”, an epithet for the Greek language favoured by those who emphasise its continuity. It’s also favoured by those on the other side of the debate, who regard Modern Greek as autonomous from the Ancient Grammar: the archaic genitive is uncomfortable enough in the Modern language (see again Sarantakos in Greek on how), that they believe the word’s very grammar supports *their* side of the argument.]
Where are the Tsakonian villages in Turkey?
I’m revising my paper on Tsakonian lexicostatistics, that I took a month off my PhD to write in 1997. (No idea what I’ll do with it yet.) As part of that, I needed to provide an updated map of where Tsakonian was spoken, including the villages in the Propontis, Havoutsi (Χαβουτσί) and Vatika (Βάτικα) (aka Mousatsa Μουσάτσα). Of course, these were the Greek names, and they don’t have Greek names any more. Costakis monograph on the villages has distances from towns and a sketch map, but no latitude/longitude (Κωστάκης, Θ.Π. 1979. Βάτικα και Χαβουτσί: Τα τσακωνοχώρια της Προποντίδας. (Βιθυνία 1) Αθήνα: Κέντρο Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών.) Google Maps doesn’t speak pre-1922 either.
Luckily for me, a PDF of the Turkish Bulletin of the Mineral Research and Exploration 121 (1999) had an article on the geology of the Gönen (ancient Asepus) Delta, including a map in Fig.4 (p.8). So now, I know that Havoutsi is Havutça, and Vatika aka Mousatsa is Misakça. (Αs I would have found out in Costakis’ monograph, had I kept reading.) After 1922, the Vatikiots ended up in Servia (Σέρβια), near Kozani. The Havoutsiots ended up in Hionato (Χιονάτο, at the time Garleni), near Kastoria.
This now lets me put a map of Tsakonophonie—also including Vatika, in far south Laconia, which sounds suspiciously like Vatika on the Propontis, and may be circumstantial evidence that Tsakonian used to be spoken far further south than it is now.
View Tsakonophonie in a larger map
Allemannic description of Tsakonian
I’d like the record to show that the Allemannic Wikipedia (as in the dialects of Switzerland, Southwest Germany, Western Austria) have an article on Tsakonian with stuff not seen elsewhere online, including some photos of Tsakonian greetings, and a list of villages with their Tsakonian names. In fact, they’re using a source I don’t happen to have (Vagenas’ history of Tsakonia). [EDIT: Strike that, I do have it.] Their article on Greek ain’t bad either.
Wikipedia’s full of surprises like that. The Serbian article on the Greek “political” verseform has a much better grasp of the verseform’s Byzantine practice than the English or Greek article.
Lerna I: 5000 × 3 ≠ 8500
I mentioned in the other place the Lernaean text, which fulminates that Greek has 90 million words, and English a mere 490,000. The text, of course, comes from people who have seen the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae’s word counts, and can’t tell between a word count and a word list. Still, it’s a wonder DARPANET could even come up with the internet, with English so obviously impoverished.
Nikos Sarantakos has long tracked the origins and extent of the Lernaean, and its appearance in a speech by a member of the Academy of Athens led to much discussion among the Fortiers. (That’s what I choose to call Nikos’ readership, since his surname is a patronymic referring to the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, Άγιοι Σαράντα.) In the end, a couple of letters to the editor went out, first from a team of Fortiers, then just by himself.
Letters to the editor don’t really help, as the Fortiers found. The first letter got a response from a retired sports administrator, fulminating about “a team of known or unknown persons, whose scholarly knowledge of Greek is impossible to confirm”, before launching into all the greatest hits of Lerna, complete with Ibycus, Packard, and McDonald misspelled. The second got a response from an administrator in Athens Uni, with the obligatory conspiracy theory about Team Fortier (which now does exist), and reasserting that “linguists at the peak of their field and hellenists of international renown assert with evidence that the Greek language from Homeric times until today—unitary, undivided and uninterrupted in all its manifestations, is the richest in the world. This is obvious from the dictionaries (e.g. Stephanus, Liddell-Scott, the Adrdados dictionary with triple the lemmata than Liddell-Scott, etc.)”
Theodore Andreakos, you don’t even know what Imycus looks like, and Seraphim Dedousis, you don’t know what dictionaries do. DGE will be double to triple the size of LSJ (if and when it finishes), but that’s because they’re spending triple the pages going through the detailed definitions and citations of words. They’re going through the TLG’s word list, so they’re including lemmata LSJ didn’t, but noone has ever said it was going to be triple the lemma count: in the introduction to volume 1, they say that it contains 8500 lemmata to LSJ’s 5000. And 8500 is not triple 5000 in my understanding of arithmetic.
DGE are substantially overlapping with Lampe and Trapp; that’s not a bad thing, the more the merrier, especially if DGE has a more global outlook on the vocabulary than either LSJ or Lampe, because it has a larger purview than either. Still, DGE is not necessarily adding words no lexicographer has ever seen before. I’ve manually added all DGE lemmata for antiquity (up to ii AD) that show up in the TLG corpus that LSJ, Lampe and Trapp didn’t include. DGE is up to ἐκπελεκάω, by which point LSJ is up to 34,000 headwords. The number of missing DGE lemmata I found in the texts and added? 198.
That’s naughty of me: the TLG does not do non-literary papyri, and that’s where most of the new ancient words come from. But it’s not taking us to 350,000 lemmata (which you’d need to triple LSJ). To be fair, I note that they have published a supplement volume on the magical papyri. Since the TLG does include those texts, I went through the supplement as well; that brings us up to… 279 added lemmata.
I’ll let you know if the remaining 89.8 million lemmata turn up somewhere…
Analogy in third declension -ης nominals
If you’re blogging about language, and want a readership broader than two linguists to follow you, lexicon is easy to blog about: people get words. Grammar is harder to blog about: people get grammar only when they’ve been told they’re doing something wrong. And the operation of analogy on the declension of Ancient Greek—well, that’s an uphill sell at the best of times. Especially as convoluted as this is going to get. This… is going to lose people fast.
Still, I said I owe the Hattics more Ancient Greek, so here’s an observation of a well-known oddity in Ancient Greek declension, an obvious and wrong explanation for it, and some reasons why it might not be so wrong after all. I’m sure someone’s come up with it before—me, for example, in a presentation on analogy by Brian Joseph four years ago. But it’s a nice grammatical story. If you’re into that kind of thing.
Declensions: I’m going to have to start with sketching declensions, so bear with me for a while; the Classicists among you can start skimming. Ancient Greek has three declensions for its nominals, which make sense once you do internal reconstruction and follow it through. (The Roman and Byzantines started but didn’t follow through, which is why they thought they had fifty declensions. Once they saw Latin had it down to five, they revised it to ten. Greek grammar took a while to get straight.)
The first declension has stems ending in -ā-. The second declension has stems ending in -o-. The third declension doesn’t have a vowel ending; and when it does, it acts like it doesn’t. (I’m going to keep saying first declension and third declension here, so I’m going to abbreviate them to Decl1 and Decl3.)
With masculine nouns, there is an ambiguity. Masculine Decl1 nouns in Attic normally have their singular nominatives end in -/ɛːs/ (ης). There are masculine Decl3 nouns that also end in -/ɛːs/. But because the declensions are different, the other cases of the nouns are quite different.
Erm, I’ll use IPA for this, and Attic. θύτης “sacrificer” and αἱρησιτείχης “taker of cities”. The Greek-speakers and Classicists will be non-plussed, but come on, you already know how these are declined:
Decl1 | Decl3 | |
---|---|---|
Nom Sg | tʰýtɛːs | hairɛːsiteíkʰɛːs |
Gen Sg | tʰýtoː | hairɛːsiteíkʰoːs |
Dat Sg | tʰýtɛːi | hairɛːsiteíkʰei |
Acc Sg | tʰýtɛːn | hairɛːsiteíkʰɛː |
Voc Sg | tʰýta | hairɛːsíteikʰes |
Nom Du | tʰýtaː | hairɛːsiteíkʰeː |
Gen Du | tʰýtain | hairɛːsiteikʰoîn |
Nom Pl | tʰytai | hairɛːsiteíkʰeːs |
Gen Pl | tʰytɔ̂ːn | hairɛːsiteíkʰɔ̂ːn |
Dat Pl | tʰýtais | hairɛːsiteíkʰesi |
Acc Pl | tʰýtaːs | hairɛːsiteíkʰeːs |
If you learn your noun paradigms the old fashioned way, you dutifully learned that there are Decl3 nouns in -ης, and the example you used was probably τριήρης “trireme”, and you got names like Ἀριστοφάνης and Εὐμένης mentioned for good measure.
You then learned your adjective paradigms, and you found that there are no Decl1 masculine adjectives, because Decl1 is used to mark feminine adjectives. But there are Decl3 adjectives, with their masculine and feminine in -ης (and their neuter in -ες). The adjectives in -ης decline just like αἱρησιτείχης does: ἠχώδης ἠχώδους ἠχώδει ɛːkʰɔ́ːdɛːs, ɛːkʰɔ́ːdoːs, ɛːkʰɔ́ːdei…. Well, that’s no big deal, there’s adjectives and nouns ending in -ος too: there was just one bunch of declensions to go around.
Decl3 Distribution: But if you look back critically at the examples you’re given of nouns in -ης, you’ll notice something odd about them. Let me see if I can show how. I’m going to go through the noun stems registered in the TLG lemmatiser that would end in -ης or -ος, and eliminate all post-classical stems. See what you notice:
Proper names | Common nouns | Adjectives | |
---|---|---|---|
Decl1 (-ης/-ας) | 5614 | 5531 | 0 |
Decl3 (-ης) | 665 | 40 | 5531 |
Decl2 (-ος) | 12569 | 8826 | 52825 |
That should make you pause.
- In Decl2, adjectives to common nouns are 4:1, and proper to common nouns are 1.5:1.
- Decl1 nominals don’t get to be adjectives in the masculine, and are equally split between proper and common nouns
- Decl3 nominals in -ης are 138:1 adjectives to common nouns, and 16:1 proper to common nouns.
So -ης in Decl3 is overwhelmingly about adjectives. When it’s not about adjectives, it’s about proper names. And those proper names are descriptive compounds. Ἀριστοφάνης: “Excellent-looking”. Εὐμένης: “Good-minded”. Σωκράτης: “Healthy-strengthed”. When you look at the common nouns left, well, they’re also descriptive compunds. αἱρησιτείχης: “city-taking”. τριήρης: “three-fitted”. In fact, LSJ defines τριήρης “trireme” in terms that should not by now be a surprise: τριήρης (sc. ναῦς), ἡ “trimeme (namely ‘ship’), fem.” Sounds like a three-fitted ship. And indeed: -ήρης: “an Adj. termin.” Decl3 nouns in -ης? No such thing. Those are adjectives. Including the proper names. The handful of common nouns are just adjectives that get used as nouns.
This is no great news: Smyth’s grammar almost tells you as much:
Masculine stems in ες with the nominative in -ης are proper names; the feminine τριήρης trireme is an adjective used substantively (properly, triply fitted; ἡ τριήρης (ναῦς) ‘ship with three banks of oars’).
And Kühner-Blass, a real grammar, does tell you. (I’ll link to version 3 and not to version 4 of Perseus for the text, which is far from an upgrade: the smallest link target they have is 4.8 MB on a single web page? What are they thinking?)
Hierher gehören die neutralen Substantive auf ας, G. α-ος, auf ος, G. ε-ος, die Adjektive auf ης (St. ες), sowie die Eigennamen auf [35 different suffixes], welche substantivierte Adjektive auf ης sind, einige sonstige substantivierte Adjektive, wie ἡ τριήρης
But all that’s not the point of this post. The point is this.
Name plurals: Greek proper names should be identifying an individual uniquely, especially as they had no surnames (so nothing like “the Joneses”). But Greek literature got into the habit of using plurals of proper names, with Plato and Aristophanes, to refer to “Famous Person and people of their ilk”; e.g. “the Platos of this world”. Smyth is too small to tell you about it, but it’s mentioned in Kühner-Blass, at the end of the same page. So Plato Symposium 218b mentions Aristophaneses:
καὶ ὁρῶν αὖ Φαίδρους, Ἀγάθωνας,Ἐρυξιμάχους, Παυσανίας, Ἀριστοδήμους τε καὶ Ἀριστοφάνας: Σωκράτη δὲ αὐτὸν τί δεῖ λέγειν, καὶ ὅσοι ἄλλοι;
I have only to look around me, and there are Phaedruses, Agathons, Eryximachuses, Pausaniases, Aristodemuses, and Aristophaneses–I need not mention Socrates himself–and all the rest of them.
Now you’ll notice something odd about Aristophaneses. Its plural accusative is not /aristopʰáneːs/ but /aristopʰánaːs/. That’s not Decl3, it’s Decl1. ZOMG, this sounds like a pretty cool analogy. I’m going to tell you the story I’d worked out in my head. Then, why Kühner-Blass says no, you dolt, it’s obviously wrong, and this is not an analogy at all. And in the end, I’m going to propose it kind of is after all.
If this was an analogy, this would be the story.
- I need a plural for Aristophanes, stat.
- What the hell *is* the plural of Aristophanes?
- Um, names don’t have plurals, so I can’t decline it in my head.
- Adjectives in -ης have plurals, and following that pattern, we should get Ἀριστοφάνεις.
- But come on, this isn’t an adjective, like “Excellent-looking” or something. It’s a noun. Right?
- And the only nouns I can think of right now, that I can get a plural from, are Decl1 nouns. Like θύτας.
- Because I’ve blanked out on triremes and takers of cities being nouns. Nah, they’re adjectives too.
- So it’s Ἀριστοφάνας.
Or more simply: I have to come up with a new plural. I don’t model the plural after adjectives, because I no longer feel Aristophanes to be an adjective, but after nouns. And the only nouns I know of ending in -ης and taking plurals are Decl1 nouns.
Not so: A nice story about markedness and category shift, that is completely and utterly wrong. Kühner-Blass say why in notes 8 and 10 in the same section:
- Working from the proto-Greek for the Decl3, the accusative plural of the adjective should be /eas/. In fact that’s the accusative ending used in Homer: ἀολλέας, ἐϋπλεκέας.
- (It’s even messier, because vowel-stems like this should have had */ans/ not */as/, but I’m going to dodge that.)
- This /eas/ should contract in Attic to /ɛːs/.
- But Attic did not use the original accusative plural ending. It uses the nominative ending, /eːs/ < /ees/, for the accusative as well: nominative hairɛːsiteíkʰeːs, accusative hairɛːsiteíkʰeːs, and not hairɛːsiteíkʰɛːs (τοὺς αἱρεσιτείχεις not τοὺς αἱρεσιτείχης).
- Kühner-Blass present /ea/ > /eː/ in their list of contractions, “ε + α = ει (st. η) im Akk. Pl. der III. Dekl. auf εας”. They then admit that this is analogy: “indem der kontrahierte Akk. Pl. sich gern nach der Form des Nominatives richtet; vergl. Choerob. in Bekk. Anecd. III. p. 1191: ὅτι ὁμοφωνία ἐστὶ τῆς αἰτιατικῆς τῶν πληθυντικῶν πρὸς τὴν εὐθεῖαν τῶν πληθυντικῶν”
- Why the analogy? For starters, this is as close as a nominative and an accusative masculine plural would ever have got in Attic Greek if the analogy didn’t happen: /eːs/ vs. /ɛːs/. For second, an accusative plural in /ɛːs/ would sound identical to the nominative singular; that’s not enough reason to prevent analogy, but it might reinforce people avoiding /ɛːs/.
- /ea/ should have gone to /ɛː/, but outside this accusative plural, Attic otherwise contracts /ea/ to /aː/ in inflections. Kühner-Blass give a range of reasons why: for /ostéa/ > /ostâː/, analogy with the uncontracted neuter, for /kléea/ > /kléaː/, the Attic rule of alpha after epsilon; for /kʰruséas/ > /kʰrusâːs/, avoiding the genitive singular /kʰrusɛ̂ːs/ (again, not a strong reason). The compelling parallel though was in the plural pronouns: nominative /hemées, humées/ > /hemêːs, humêːs/ “we, ye”, accusative /heméas, huméas/ > /hemâːs, humâːs/ “us, you”. Not /hemêːs/ vs. */hemɛ̂ːs/ (ἡμεῖς vs. *ἡμῆς): that kind of close similarity does not get to survive in pronouns, which is why when /hemêːs, humêːs/ became /eˈmis yˈmis/, analogy shunted /yˈmis/ across to /eˈsis/.
- So if you didn’t want the accusative plural of Ἀριστοφάνης to be Ἀριστοφάνης, you had two choices. One, slip across to the nominative plural Ἀριστοφάνεις. Two, imitate Decl2 contract adjectives like χρυσᾶς—or more importantly, ἡμᾶς ὑμᾶς, and adopt Ἀριστοφάνας. Which lets you keep a distinct accusative plural.
- There is at least one Attic inscription which did just that with a normal Decl3 adjective, /pseudâːs/ ψευδᾶς. Otherwise though, the only place the disambiguating /aːs/ ending turns up in Decl3 is proper name plurals, and adjectives ending in -ετής “-year-old”.
- Those “-year-old” are reason enough to establish that this is not Decl1 creeping in by analogy, as Kühner-Blass harrumph: “Anmerk. 10. Dagegen der Akk. Pl. Ἀριστοφάνας Plat. Symp. 218, b ist nicht als Übergang in die I. Deklination aufzufassen, vgl. Anm. 8 [on ψευδᾶς], und den Grammatikern nicht zu glauben, die ohne Belege auch andere Kasus nach der I. Deklination bilden: οἱ Δημοσθέναι, οἱ Ἀριστοφάναι (Herodian L. II, 697). Vgl. § 148, Anm. 7 τριακοντούτας u. dergl., bei welchen Wörtern übrigens (Hdn. I, 81) in der Femininbildung auf -ις sich wirklich eine Analogie mit denen auf -της I. Deklination zeigt.”
- Let’s unpack this. We only get to see these endings in the accusative plural: not just in names like Aristophaneses, but also in adjectives like τριακοντούτας “thirty-year-olds”, which is also Plato. You don’t see in Attic Greek a nominative Ἀριστοφάναι or τριακοντοῦται, or a dative Ἀριστοφάναις, τριακοντούταις. Ἀριστοφάνας only coincidentally looks like a Decl1 form: it’s really the Decl3 ending, with exceptional phonology.
- The Roman-era grammarians like Herodian, always happy to establish a rule where there is none, came to the same conclusion I did: the plural of names like Aristophanes is Decl1. So they tell you that the plural nominative of Ἀριστοφάνης is Ἀριστοφάναι, and the plural nominative of Δημοσθένης is Δημοσθέναι. But they’re just making that up.
True enough, Diogenes Laertius has the Decl3 plurals Ἀντισθένεις Ἀριστοτέλεις Ξενοκράτεις Διογένεις, Didymus the Grammarian has Ἀριστομήδεις, Aelian Ξενοφάνεις, and Plutarch Σωκράτεις. Once Attic Greek was just a written language, though, the epigones went along with what the grammarians told them. Plutarch already had Decl1 Σωφάναι, Synesius has Κλεισθέναι, Theophilus of Antioch Διογέναι, and Theophylact of Ochrid Ἀριστοφάναι.
Doch: OK, we’ll concede that this is all hypercorrection and pedantry and artificial. But Kühner-Blass also note that those same “-year-old” compounds get routinely declined in Decl1 post-Classically: ὀκτωκαιδεκέτην (18yo), ἐνενηκοντούτην (90yo) in Dio Chrysostom, δωδεκαετῇ (12yo) in Josephus, ἑκατοντούταις (100yo) in Philostratus, τεσσαρακοντοῦται (40yo) in Eusebius. That’s the same analogy as Ἀριστοφάναι, but it doesn’t look as artificial any more. It’s starting to look like Greek was already inclined to regard the “-year-old” compounds as Decl1.
There’s a piece of older evidence that it did. The masculine “-year-old” compounds in -έτης have feminine counterparts ending in -έτις: τριακοντούτης “30yo man”, τριακοντοῦτις “30yo woman”. By analogy to πολίτης “townsman” πολῖτις “townswoman”, Kühner-Blass notes. But feminines in -τις are not derived from masculine Decl3 adjectives in -της. They don’t need to: the masculine adjective in -της already gets used as a feminine as well, so ἀνάντης is both masculine and feminine for “up-hill”. No, feminines in -τις are derived from masculine Decl1 nouns. Like πολίτης. And forms like ἑπτέτις “7yo girl” and τριακοντοῦτις “30yo woman” don’t show up as late as Plutarch and Josephus. They’re already there in Thucydides and Aristophanes and Plato and Xenophon.
So where are we? We have what are basically adjectives and adjectival proper names in -ης in Decl3. We have nouns in -ης in Decl1. We have an accusative plural for the adjectives that would case trouble. It goes to the nominative plural by default, to deal with that trouble. For names and “-year-old” compounds though, it goes to a form that looks like the Decl1 nouns instead. It’s not a Decl1 ending: it only occurs in the accusative, and there’s reason enough within the Decl3 for that ending. Especially with the analogy with pronouns ἠμᾶς ὐμᾶς.
But the three instances where the accusative plural looks like a Decl1 noun… are the instances where the Decl3 stem doesn’t look like an adjective. Personal pronouns are going to do desperate things to avoid ambiguity; but personal pronouns are like nouns, not like adjectives. Proper names may have started as descriptions, but now they identify individuals, like nouns do. And thirty-year-olds are people: if τριακοντούτης was an adjective, Plato would have no reason to coin a feminine adjective τριακοντοῦτις. Don’t get me wrong, grammatically Plato is still declining τριακοντούτης in Decl3: you have to wait till Josephus for that to break down. But in his derivational morphology, he’s treating it like a Decl1 noun.
I can accept that contracting /ea/ to /aː/ in τριακοντούτας is morphophonology that has nothing to do with Decl1. But isn’t it convenient that this exceptional contraction happens only in the adjectives that look most like nouns anyway, proper names and “-year-old” compounds?
Kühner-Blass lays out all this evidence to say the Decl1 take on Ἀριστοφάνας is wrong—mentioning τριακοντοῦτις as an aside (“übrigens”). I don’t think it is an aside, I think it proves that people were slowly starting to think of these noun-like adjectives in noun-like morphology. In Attic Greek, this happened only with the morphologically ambiguous accusative plural /aːs/; but every analogy has to begin somewhere.
Modern Greek reversal: As a coda, the Modern plural of Aristophanes has its own analogical story. The third declension is dead, though learnèd loans have half-heartedly revived some adjectives, which people are at a loss to decline. (Sarantakos in Greek has more on that.) Aristophanes and Demosthenes are treated as first declension nouns in the mainstream.
When it comes to plurals, the contemporary language has a choice. The modern default is to go from -ης to -ες: ψεύτης ψεύτες, μαθητής μαθητές. But for agentive nouns in -τής, that looks to be a recent, artificial levelling. The traditional plural of -τής was -τάδες, and that survives in colloquial use: μαθητής μαθητάδες.
But if a word was a late coinage or import into Greek and ended in -ής, its plural wasn’t -ές or -άδες. Newfangled words, being unfamiliar, took a morphologically more transparent ending, and kept the thematic vowel: -ήδες. So καδής καδήδες (kadı, Ottoman judge), καφετζής καφετζήδες (café owner), πεταλωτής πεταλωτήδες (farrier); βαρκάρης βαρκάρηδες (boatman), μανάβης μανάβηδες (greengrocer). Modern Greek kinda-sorta has masculine adjectives ending in -ης (feminine -α), and they have the newfangled ending too: ζηλιάρης ζηλιάρηδες “jealous”, ζηλιάρα ζηλιάρες.
So we have two old plurals, -ες and -άδες, of which the former is beating back the latter; and we have a newfangled-word plural, which ain’t going nowhere: μαθητάδες has become μαθητές, but μανάβηδες is not becoming μανάβες. (Modern Greek speakers, stop guffawing at the very notion it could.)
What’s the plural of Κωστής “Con” and Νικολής “Cole”? And Αριστοφάνης? You got it: Κωστήδες Νικολήδες Αριστοφάνηδες. New-fangled word plural. It’s not the names that are new-fangled; it’s the notion that they should have a plural. Ancient Greek took the plural of Aristophanes in the direction of a less marked inflection: the adjective was becoming a noun. Modern Greek takes the plural of Aristophanes in the direction of a more marked inflection: it’s an unfamiliar kind of noun. And when it gets there, Αριστοφάνηδες patterns with ζηλιάρηδες. So it’s back in the company of adjectives.
Um… yeah. God wot how many of you got this far.
pessos and pinsus: a pedimental peculiarity
Sorry about that title. I promise not to do that too often.
Over the last several months, I’ve been contributing translations to the Suda On Line project. (See writeup of project.) The Suda is a 10th century encyclopaedia cum dictionary, and often preserves information about Ancient Greece not available elsewhere. It also provides a lot of information that is available in better nick elsewhere; it oftentimes gets confused or garbled; it quotes the Classics in readings that we have not accepted, usually with good reason; and its lexicon component is as interesting for how it misfires in the chain of transmission, back through Photius and Hesychius to Apollonius and Timaeus and Herodian, as it is for any actual definitions. It gives some stuff to cite, plenty of stuff to chuckle about, and the occasional jolting realisation of how tenuous our knowledge of antiquity is: more of our Ancient Greek dictionary definitions than we’d like to think are based on matter as tenuous as this.
The Managing Eds of Suda On Line, stuck with the task of picking up after my teetering command of Greek syntax, also know that I have a couple of dictionaries at my disposal. So I got a query a couple of days ago on what my dictionaries said about πινσός αnd πεσσός. This is a shaggy dog story in response to that, which will take a little bit to go through: the executive summary is, the dictionary etymologies say they are related as architectural terms, but πινσός must be as Latin as it looks.
πεσσός
Let’s start with the Suda entry. It reads:
Πισός. καὶ Πινσός: Πεσὸς δὲ παρὰ Προκοπίῳ.
pisós. And pinsós: but pesós in Procopius.
Eeyup. Well, start with Procopius. On Buildings (De Aedificiis) is his work on the building projects of Justinian, and De Aedif. 1.1.37 mentions πεσσός, with two sigmas. Suda routinely gets double consonants wrong, which tells you gemination was dying or dead in at least some variants of Greek by then; so that’s not a problem. Especially because the Vatican and Laurentian manuscripts of Procopius spell the word with one sigma anyway. And πε(σ)σός in Procopius is an architectural term for the piers at the base of the dome of Hagia Sophia:
κατὰ δὲ τὰ τοῦ νεὼ μέσα λόφοι χειροποίητοι ἐπανεστήκασι τέσσαρες, οὓς καλοῦσι πεσσούς, δύο μὲν πρὸς βορρᾶν, δύο δὲ πρὸς ἄνεμον νότον, ἀντίοι τε καὶ ἴσοι ἀλλήλοις, κίονας ἐν μέσῳ ἑκάτεροι κατὰ τέσσαρας μάλιστα ἔχοντες. πεποίηνται δὲ οἱ λόφοι λίθοις εὐμεγέθεσι σύνθετοι, λογάδην μὲν συνειλεγμένοις, ἐς ἀλλήλους δὲ πρὸς τῶν λιθολόγων ἐπισταμένως ἐναρμοσθεῖσιν, ἐς ὕψος μέγα. εἰκάσαις ἂν αὐτοὺς εἶναι σκοπέλους ὀρῶν ἀποτόμους. ἐπὶ τούτοις δὲ ἀψῖδες τέσσαρες ἐν τετραπλεύρῳ ἀνέχουσι· καὶ αὐτῶν τὰ μὲν ἄκρα ξύνδυο ξυνιόντα εἰς ἄλληλα ἐν τῇ ὑπερβολῇ ἠρήρεισται τῶν λόφων τούτων, τὰ δὲ δὴ ἄλλα ἐπηρμένα εἰς ἀπέραντον ὕψος ᾐώρηται.
And in the centre of the church stand four man-made eminences (λόφοι), which they call piers (πεσσοί), two on the north side and two on the south, opposite and equal to each other, each pair having between them just four columns. The piers (λόφοι) are composed of huge stones joined together, carefully selected and skilfully fitted to one another by the masons, and rising to a great height. One might suppose that they were sheer mountain-peaks. From these spring four arches (ἀψῖδες) [= pendentives] which rise over the four sides of a square, and their ends come together in pairs and are made fast to each other on top of these piers (λόφοι), while the other portions rise and soar to an infinite height. (Loeb 1940 translation)
This is sense III recorded for πεσσός in Liddell-Scott. It is also noted in the Oxyrhynchus papyri (on which more soon), and Strabo 16.1.5, describing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon:
διόπερ τῶν ἑπτὰ θεαμάτων λέγεται καὶ τοῦτο καὶ ὁ κρεμαστὸς κῆπος ἔχων ἐν τετραγώνῳ σχήματι ἑκάστην πλευρὰν τεττάρων πλέθρων· συνέχεται δὲ ψαλιδώμασι καμαρωτοῖς ἐπὶ πεττῶν ἱδρυμένοις κυβοειδῶν ἄλλοις ἐπ’ ἄλλοις· οἱ δὲ πεττοὶ κοῖλοι πλήρεις γῆς ὥστε δέξασθαι φυτὰ δένδρων τῶν μεγίστων, ἐξ ὀπτῆς πλίνθου καὶ ἀσφάλτου κατεσκευασμένοι καὶ αὐτοὶ καὶ αἱ ψαλίδες καὶ τὰ καμαρώματα.
and it is on this account that this and the hanging garden are called one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The garden is quadrangular in shape, and each side is four plethra in length. It consists of arched vaults, which are situated, one after another, on checkered, cube-like foundations. The checkered foundations, which are hollowed out, are covered so deep with earth that they admit of the largest of trees, having been constructed of baked brick and asphalt — the foundations themselves and the vaults and the arches. (Loeb 1932 translation)
The pessoi look like doing the same job as in Hagia Sophia; they are big cubic squares of masonry supporting vaults. Strabo is early enough that we can assume this to be a Greek word, and not some sort of loanword. (Keep that in mind for later.)
This not the primary meaning of πεσσός, and the other meanings are not quite on the same plane:
- I: oval-shaped stone for playing draughts or backgammon. By extension, the game played with the stones, or the board it is played on.
- II: medicated plug of wool or lint to be introduced into the vagina, anus, etc., pessary; any oval body; ticket indicating attendance at an assembly; bolt of a door.
- IV: dark edge of the pupil (in the eye).
So, I.1: Small round pebble as in checkers piece. I.2: Checkerboard. I.3: Checkers the game. II.1: Small round ball of wool as in buttplug for medical use. II.2. Small round anything. II.3. Small (round?) something used as ticket. II.4. Door bolt. IV: Small round ball around pupil of eye.
III: Whopping great big cubic slab of stone that vaults rise heavenwards on.
That looks wrong. It also looked wrong to the Loeb translator of Strabo, which is why he suspected the reference in III was to a checkerboard texture. Now I wasn’t in Babylon, and neither was he, but that looks like guesswork to me. The door bolt also looks out of place, although there may be a story there involving small round things. I was going to say that the definition LSJ actually gives for III, “cubic mass of building, terrace”, was bogus—until I looked up the 144 AD police report by Diemous daughter of Colluthus from the Oxyrhyncus (POxy.1272):
… ἀπέκλε̣[ισα τὴν θύ]ρ̣[αν τῆς …] οἰκίας μου καὶ τὴν τοῦ πεσσοῦ θύ[ραν, καὶ ἐ]π̣ανελθοῦσα εὗρον ὃ εἶχ[ο]ν ἐν τῷ [πεσσῷ π]ανάριον ἐξηλωμένον βαστα[χθέ]ν̣τ̣ων ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ κλαλίων χρυσῶν [δύο ὁ]λκῆς μναιαίων τεσσάρων καὶ Βήσι[ος χρ]υ̣σ̣οῦ καὶ κλαλίων ἀργυρῶν μ̣εγ̣ά̣[λω]ν δύο καὶ τὴν τοῦ πεσσοῦ θύραν ἐπηρ[μ]ένην.
I shut up the [door] of my house and the door of the terrace, [and] on my return I found that a box which I had in the [terrace] had been unfastened and that there had been abstracted from it [two] gold bracelets of the weight of four minae, a gold figure of Bes, and two large silver bracelets, and that the door of the terrace had been lifted.
With a fairly weighty note:
For the signification of πεσσός see P.Munich 11.20, 27, notes, and cf. 9.33, 12.16, 22, P.Brit.Mus. 210.19 (Journ. Phil. xxii, p. 272), 978.10 (iii, p. 233), 1023.19 (iii, p. 268), Flor. 5.9.
Alright, alright, you win: I’m not going to go following up on 120-year old journals my library won’t have anyway, I’ll take their word for it that a πεσσός is a terrace as well as a pier. The terrace would have also been a whopping great big cubic slab of stone anyway, even without the heavenward vaults.
(I hope the Modern Greek speakers among you picked up on ξηλωμένο in there. And “abstracted” sounds quite PC Plod, doesn’t it: “By ‘appenstance, I appre’ended one Erato, neighbour of Diemous, abstracting said gold figure of Bess from the premisses.” Though βασταχθέντων doesn’t deserve such an un’appy end. It’s a Koine meaning of βαστάζω, “carry (off), steal”, LSJ s.v. III, and it shows up in John 20:15 and John 12:6. “I appre’ended one Judas Iscariot as ‘e was in the process of ‘elping ‘imself to the contents of said money bag.”)
Still, for all that, sense III of πεσσός looks out of place compared to sense I, enough to make you cast around for alternative explanations of the word. Hesychius records πέσ[σ]ος as “mountain. Cypriots: place; Aeolians: field. Some people: flat ground.” That’s as bad as Suda’s entry (especially the τινες “some people” bit, which is classic Hesychius). Although Procopius’ synonym for πεσσός is λόφος, lit. “hill”, it’s hard to take this on board. Not impossible—anything’s possible; but hard, especially given how obscure Hesychius’ sources can be.
The similarity of πεσσός to “pedestal” might suggest something with feet, let’s see… πέδη “fetters”, πέδον “field”, πέζα “foot, instep, bottom of something”… well, maybe πέζα, and maybe πέδον. You could tell an equally tenuous story with:
- πέζα “bottom of something” > πεσσός “bottom of vault”;
- πέδον “field” > πέσσον “field” > πεσσός “flat base of vault”;
- or πέσσον “field—or mountain” > πεσσός “pier in architecture, aka λόφος ‘hill’ “.
But i BC is a bit late for Proto-Greek *dj to be alternating between /ss/ and /zd/. Is it not, ye divinities of Greek etymology, Frisk and Chantraine?
Yes, pedē, pedon and pezda all come from *ped/pod-, as you’d expect: “foot (trap)”, “footing”, “foot thing” (*ped-ya). Anyway, pessos is not Hellenic, and Chantraine rejects the guesses Frisk cites—not that Frisk is any more enthused about them (Aramaic pīs(s)ā “stone, little board”, Indic pāśaḥ “cube”, pāśī ~ pāṣī “stone”, Armenian yesan “whetstone”).
But we’ll leave πεσσός aside for now, because incredibly, that’s not the major problem with Suda’s rattling off of πισός πινσός πεσός. The major problem is whether πινσός is the same word as πεσσός.
(Or how long Chantraine is going to remain available on BitTorrent… Online Frisk entry, if you can stand pre-Unicode font failage.)
πινσός
Around the time of Procopius, a new word shows up for a column used to hold up a vault. LSJ glancingly notices it in the scholia to Pindar O.2.146: “= πεσσός ΙΙΙ, cubical block of masonry”.
κίονα δὲ οὐ στύλον λέγει· ἀλλ’ ἔστι παντὶ οἴκῳ τόπος στύλος λεγόμενος, ἐφ’ οὗ κεῖνται οἱ πινσοὶ καὶ λέγεται ὅλην ἔχειν τὴν οἰκίαν.
He [Pindar] says kiōn not stulos (for “column”); but in every house there is a place called the stulos, on which the pinsoi lie, and it is said to hold up the whole house.
The glancing mention is because of LSJ policy with scholia. LS (pre J) systematically wound back its coverage of Byzantine Greek through the 19th century; but it has to keep definitions of words used in the Byzantine commentaries on Classical works: without those words, we can’t make sense of the Classics. The words the Byzantine commentaries use to explain Ancient Greek are, of course, Byzantine Greek, so LSJ doesn’t do a great job in understanding them. An example we noticed while writing the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds (p. 264): Eustathius of Thessalonica uses στοίχημα, straightforwardly in its modern sense of “a bet”, to explain Iliad 4.769 περιδώμεθον “we wager”. But LSJ don’t know any Modern Greek, nor any Byzantine Greek (in which στοίχημα originally meant a pact, or an agreement). Eustathius’ is the only instance they notice, and they guesstimate from the context that στοίχημα means “deposit”.
Lampe’s dictionary (ii-viii AD) does not notice πινσός, but luckily the word is in the early pi’s, so we have both Trapp’s and Kriaras’ definition in print. Trapp (ix-xv AD) defines it as “(supporting) column”, and records it in Delehaye’s collection of the Stylite Saints (with the textual variant πεσσούς), Dobschütz’s collection of Images of Christ, John Moschus (vii AD), Theophanes the Confessor (ix AD), and on it goes. Trapp also notes the variant forms πίνσος in Constantine Porphyrogennitus, and πισσός in Julian of Ascalon (vi AD), the Barberini Euchologion (viii AD), and on that goes too. Constantine of Rhodes (x AD) also has πινσόπυργος, “a tower reinforced with supporting columns”. By this stage, we’re not on Diemous’ terrace any more: the pinsos is exclusively a column propping up other things, including the pendentives of Hagia Sophia, house columns, and towers. Constantine of Rhodes’ towers are in a description of the Church of the Holy Apostles, so they’re presumably piers as well.
The word also makes it to the Early Modern Vernacular, and Kriaras (xii-xvii AD) gives it the more expansive definition “(Architect.) a bulky square built column which usually supports arches and domes”. Unsurprisingly, most of the instances are in the Narrative on the Building of Hagia Sophia (very occasionally as πίνσος, πίσος, or πισσός), but it also turns up in Digenes, the Rod of the Archpriests, and the Account of the city by Theodore (?).
εποίησε και τους πινσούς το μήκος πενταπήχεις
αντί κιόνων έστησε τούτους εν τῳ τρικλίνῳ
έθηκε πλίνθους τέσσαρας εφ’ έκαστον πινσόν τε
And making piers, five cubits each in length,
he set them in the dining hall as columns,
and onto every pier he placed four slabs.(Digenes Z 3851)
Kriaras cite TLG for the first appearance of πινσός in iv AD. Mpf, Gregory of Nyssa (“a pinsos of her house”), but a spurious text, so it doesn’t prove iv AD. Then John Moschus (vii AD), fragments of the Spiritual Meadow in an x AD mansucript; then Theophanes the Confessor. The stylites from Trapp’s first reference were all the rage in v AD and vi AD; let’s say vi AD to be on the safe side. Which is Procopius’ time.
So, we have a word that means the same thing as πεσσός III, that turns up in the descriptions of the same blocks of masonry in the same Great Cathedral, that gets conflated with πεσσός III in at least one text, and that Suda includes in its word dump next to πε(σ)σός III. Surely it’s the same word, right? LSJ thinks so. And both Trapp and Kriaras have no problem with a straightforward “πινσός > πεσσός”. The first guess seems to have been Charles Du Cange, in his commentary on Paul the Silentary: “there is little to constitute the origin of the word, other than Greek πεσσός, which means the same as κύβος”. And who’d gainsay it?
Well, me. Not just because Du Cange’s semantics is off. (Dude, it’s not a “cube”, as in dice that you’d play on a pessoi board. It’s slightly ginormouser than that.) But also because /ns/ is not a Greek cluster. OK, let me qualify that: any /ns/ in Proto-Greek got mooshed to /ss/ or /ːs/ (hence Proto-Greek *pansa > Attic πᾶσα, Doric παῖσα; why else did you think the feminine of πᾶν, παντός has no /n/ in it?) Any /ns/ you see in the Classical language is at the boundary between a root and an affix, and isn’t part of a root: ἔν-στασις, μαλάκυν-σις. If you see an /ns/ in a Greek root, it’s come from the West. Like Modern πένσα “pliers”, which the dictionaries take back to French peince, presumably via a Venetian *pensa. Or in the case of Byzantine Greek, like ἀδμηνσίων ~ ἀδμισσίων, δεμονστρατίων, δεπονσάτωρ, δηφένσωρ, δισπενσάτωρ ~ δεπενσάτωρ ~ δισπεντζέρης. Which makes you look at πίνσος askance.
Now it’s possible for Byzantines, who had plenty of Latin words with /ns/ around them, to insert an /ns/ where it didn’t belong. When Catherine Roth of Suda On Line brought the issue up with my dictionaries, she mentioned κιστέρνα “cistern”, which Suda (and in fact, most Byzantine authors) hyperlatinised to κινστέρνα. From teh googles, it looks like Portuguese and Romanian had the same idea. But Latinise πεσσός? And switch the vowel to ι on top? I’m not seeing a good reason for it.
Now, if pinsus means something sensible in Latin, we’re in business. The most excellent news is, it shows up in Vitruvius On Architecture. The most not so excellent news is, pinsus is just Latin for “compacted”, and Vitruvius is talking about smashing up pavement, not raising columns heavenwards:
Deinde rudus inducatur et vectibus ligneis, decuriis inductis, crebriter pinsatione solidetur, et id non minus pinsum absolutum crassitudine sit dodrantis
Next, lay the mixture of broken stone, bring on your gangs, and beat it again and again with wooden beetles into a solid mass, and let it be not less than three quarters of a foot in thickness when the beating is finished (Vitruvius Pollio De Architectura 7.1.3, 1914 Loeb Translation)
Google Books hints that at least in Britain and/or Ireland, mediaeval Latin pinsus just meant “hard”. Which pavement pounded by gangs of ten (decurii) would be.
So what do I think is going on with “πισός. And πινσός: but πεσός”? Of the three, πισός could be a variant of πινσός, merging /ns/ to /ss/ (as done elsewhere, because /ns/ really wasn’t at home in Greek; e.g. ἀδμηνσίων ~ ἀδμισσίων, ἰνστιγάτωρ ~ ἰστιγάτωρ, κομπενσατίων ~ κομπεσσατίων). But Suda is sloppy enough with its hoovering up in alphabetic order, that this could just be a variant accentuation of πίσος, “pea”. I don’t know, and neither does anyone but Mr Suidas.
For all that πεσσός is as Greek as a non-Hellenic word can be, I’m having trouble accepting that it could switch to πινσός on its own. But when πινσός turned up in Greek, people thought they were interchangeable words, and there’s no good reason to think they ever meant anything different.
At least, not while πεσσός meant a pier or terrace or column or whatever else, from Strabo through Diemous to Procopius, and raised from the dead again in our days, like so much Standard Modern Greek vocabulary: as far as Kriaras’ sources are concerned, πεσσός is just backgammon and suppositories. And even those sources were probably reanimating the dead themselves.
My surmise is that πινσός came into Greek as pinsus, maybe even as a term of the trade for concrete; it sounded like πεσσός, and its meaning was close enough that it could slip into usage replacing πεσσός—which was too tied to backgammon and suppositories to make sense for architecture. So πεσσός was Latinised, but it was Latinised in the direction of an existing and relevant word, not just with a random n-insertion.
Well, OK, the meaning is not that close; the piers of Hagia Sophia are ashlar and brick (Sir Banister Fletcher’s a History of Architecture, Architectural Press, 1996, p. 310), not crushed stone. And house columns aren’t crushed stone either. But it’s the best I can come up with. If anyone out there knows any better…
Judaeo-Greek Torah: Comment from Krivoruchko
Julia Krivoruchko, from the Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism project at Cambridge, has just responded extensively on my post on the Judaeo-Greek Torah and the controversy between Hesseling and Belleli on publishing it. (Matters which, as I already knew, she knows a lot more about than I do.) Because it’s not clear to me that Google is paying enough attention to Blogspot comments, I’m reproducing it here, with gratitude.
❦❦❦
In rather random order:
A. Peri tis ousias:
- The bibliography which I put on the “Jewish languages research site” never aimed to be complete, it is just a small sample.
- Both versions of Jonah will be on line soon as a part of the GBBJ project. In fact, they already are on line in beta-version, password protected, with all their vocabulary, cross-referencing etc. We cannot publish the images because of the copyright issues. And of course, Hesseling has never published the facsimile.
- “Sephardim arrived in the Ottoman Empire: their language was still Foreign”, etc. This traditional manner of referring to (non-Hebrew) languages has nothing to do with knowing or not knowing a language, its being new or old or whatever. And why capitalize?
My article “The Constantinople Pentateuch within the context of Septuagint Studies”, in XIII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Ljubljana, 2007; ed. Melvin K. H. Peters, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008, pp. 255-276, touches upon the issue.
- The style of the Constantinopolitan and other JG translations is discussed in the introductory chapter to my edition of the JG glossary to the Prophets, to appear soon. The new book of N. de Lange, to appear in Mohr-Siebeck, should be also useful. As I am in hurry to finish the book before the project ends, I would rather postpone the discussion to the moment when it appears.
- I cannot recall who wrote about the dialect feature that you have mentioned as a Constantinopolitan feature. Could you please drop me a reference? Not urgent.
- It is nice to see you have discovered parts of B-H story yourself. However, it is not new. I gave a short talk on the VIII EAJS, mostly about the variant readings of Constantinopolitan Pentateuch, and a longer one on the Joint Seminar of the IOSCS Hexapla Project and GBBJ. The later included also extensive materials about the history of Belleli–Hesseling dialog and their perceptions of the text. This longer version will be published soon.
I have in my plans a biographical article on Belleli in Greek and I have already collected some material for it.
- It seems strange that you do not seem to take into consideration that the connector you are interested in may well be ὡς.
B: Peri ton allon:
- Why use the artificial and ideologically burdened term “Yevanic”? JG is bad, but tolerable; still better “sociolect”, “dialect”, “variant”, etc.
- Why use the ideologically loaded term Aliyah? What is wrong with “immigration” or “emigration”? Are you a Zionist?
- I have not read Valetas, but I do not see what is wrong in the quotation you adduce, and I do not understand your commentary. Perhaps I misunderstand the whole context. I’d get the book and read it.
“It would not occur to Valetas of course that the reason someone might know Hebrew yet be fluent in Greek was that Romaniote Jews spoke Greek.” Why would it not occur to him? This looks to me precisely what he thought. The existence of Romaniotes was a fact of common knowledge. The man wrote quite plainly that Ο μεταφραστής είναι Έλληνας, που γνώριζε τα εβραϊκά. Or you believe that Ellinas and Evraios were mutually exclusive for Valetas and he meant a Christian? If he was a true man of the left, as you have written, he could be quite uninterested in distinguishing the Greek-speakers as to their religion.
Once again, my thanks again to Julia for the clarifications and further information. Brief reax:
- Α.3. The way I read the frontispiece, Ladino was being named as Foreign in distinction to Greek, and not just Hebrew, which to me sounded like it was “extra-foreign”, and not merely a conventional reference. (Translation “into the Greek language and the Foreign language, the two languages used by the people of our nation in captivity”.) So the capitalisation was my trick to emphasise the “Other”-ing, as it seemed to me, of the newly arrived language.
- A.5. Constantinopolitan never got enough attention in Greek dialectology (it looked too boringly standard), but διω is all over Psichari, and that’s why I associate it with Constantinople. I find it does extend through to Macedonia though: Kontossopoulos (2000:100): “In Macedonia, Thrace and Tinos one hears the form να δι̯ω for the subjunctive of the verb βλέπω, while in Central Greece and Thessaly one hears να ιδώ and in some regions, like Trikeri in Thessaly, να ιδού.” p. 113 In Eastern Thrace, “the subjunctive να ιδής is pronounced να δγης. as in all Northern Greece and Asia Minor.” The argument is not to disprove say Serres, so much as that the twofer of southern vowels and δι̯ω points to Constantinople, and not the Aegean as was initially guessed.
- A.6. It’d be foolish of me to claim I discovered the controversy (just as well I didn’t 🙂 What incensed me enough to post though, was that as far as I can tell, Early Modern Greek scholarship has not been aware enough of the issue. Belleli’s review is not in either the Kriaras dictionary bibliography or in Apostolopoulos’ (1994), and they are both meant to be exhaustive. I decided to at least let Google know about it; and now you’re letting Google know about good information about it. 🙂
- A.7. ὡς is intriguing as a possibility, and it had not occurred to me at all (because of course I’m taking both Hesseling and Belleli’s transcriptions uncritically). I still think ὅς is likelier, but it’s hard to rule ὡς out. I’ll expand below.
- B.1. I’m not using “Yevanic”; but that’s the term both Wikipedia and Ethnologue happen to use, and part of the point of the post is to be Googlable with terms at least some people do use. That the relation of Judaeo-Greek to Greek is nothing like that of Yiddish to German is obvious if you’ve seen any Judaeo-Greek texts, but casually using the term does not make that obvious, I agree.
- B.2. If I was a gung-ho Zionist, I don’t know if I’d have even provided a Wikipedia link to Aliyah, I would have assumed it’s obvious! 🙂 But the death of Judaeo-Greek was itself an ideological matter as much as anything else: Israeli Romaniotes chose to go to Israel and speak Hebrew, and that to them was Aliyah. I don’t think “migration” is the right kind of neutral here.
- There’s not much more context to Valetas than I gave, and yes, I may have maliciously misread him. I certainly misremembered his “troglodyte” attack against those who thought he shouldn’t be interfering in the final nus of texts. (He did use the word on the same page, but it was against those disputing the authenticity of Makriyannis’ Memoirs.) And there were plenty of communists who made a point of ignoring ethnic differences, including instances from the Greek Civil War underway at the time.
But—bearing in mind what he said about Simon Portius, “a great Greek *despite* being Catholic”, and the overall Herderian defensiveness of the text, I’m disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. If Valetas accepted Jews were Greeks, why even say the “Polites Graphikos” was Greek at all (and go to the trouble of inventing a Greek name for him)? He didn’t feel the need to specify an ethnicity for the Greek Orthodox writers. The phrasing “A Greek familiar with Hebrew” doesn’t sound like “Romaniote who used Hebrew regularly in liturgical practice” to me either, but I could be overreading there.
As to the relativiser (A.3): the propensity of translating Hebrew asher ~ she with an indeclinable /os/ starts in the Cairo Genizah, and is absent in Symmachus and Aquila; so some time between 300 and 1200. The conclusion that both Hesseling and Belleli came to was that this was the Classical relativiser ὅς, indeclinable. A surprisingly inflexible thing to do, especially as ὅς was already retreating from the spoken language even at the time of the New Testament. The alternative is that it is the generic connective ὡς.
Now, ὡς was way generic. It could mean “as”, “because”, “that”, “when”, “where”. asher had a similar range of meanings; so would που. In fact, Monteil (1963:405) mused that, if you were learning Greek in a hurry in Classical Athens, you could do worse than to just say ὡς all the time. Karin Hult also did research on the syntax of 5th century AD Greek, and from what I remember established that ὡς must still have been a going concern. My hesitation with seeing ὡς underlying the biblical translations is, while asher was still primarily a relativiser, the only sense ὡς was not used as in Greek was as a relativiser. (Unlike as in dialectal English!) So if ὅς is too simple-minded a rendering of asher, ὡς seems to me too sophisticated, ignoring by far the most salient meaning of asher. But that’s a hunch, not a proof.
- Apostolopoulos, Ph. 1994. Inventaire Méthodique de Linguistique Byzantine (Grec Médiéval). Salonique: Vanias.
- Kontossopoulos, Nikolaos G. 2000. Διάλεκτοι και ιδιώματα της Νέας Ελληνικής 3rd ed. Athens: Γρηγόρης.
- Monteil, P. 1963. La Phrase Relative en Grec Ancien. (Etudes et Commentaires XLVII) Paris: Klincksieck.
- Hult, K. 1990. Syntactic Variation in Greek of the 5th Century AD. (Studia Græca et Latina Gothoburgensia LII) Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
Response to Kaplanis on Early Modern monotonic
These are my reactions to Kaplanis’ paper on using the monotonic for Early Modern texts.
Vernacular Polytonic is Absurd: Nolo Contendere
To start with, I agree with the position that applying the polytonic to Modern Greek is capricious and arbitrary and a blockage for learners. Triantafyllidis was the linguist Kaplanis cited (with tildes for circumflexes) in his testimony on the “Trial of Accents”, and he reiterated the objections I had summarised, with further examples and cases. The particular instance Triantafyllidis was gleeful to latch on to was, the Academy couldn’t get its story straight on when to circumflex, either in its successive recommendations, or within a single recommendation. This made for an unlearnable system.
Nor does learning polytonic have many clear benefits to the literariness of your Standard Modern Greek. People brought up in the monotonic can still read polytonic texts passively, even if they can’t produce them. The circumflexes don’t give them much etymological or morphophonological benefit at all, the way that historical spelling does in Greek or English (more so in English than Greek, I suspect). The aspirates do help people work out etymologies a bit; but to be frank, these days the initial <h>’s are almost as accessible to Greek students via English as via polytonic.
So cudgelling 21st century Greek to an accentuation that died out two millenia ago is inherently kind of silly. And inasmuch as the language of 1200 is structurally the same as the language of 2009, at least in its accentuation, it’s as silly to cudgel 1200 Greek into polytonic. Vernacular Greek from 1200 is just as legible in monotonic, and less bother to write down, especially since people have less recall, and less patience to learn, the shifting polytonic rules for the vernacular. (That’s why people go to software now—and don’t have enough familiarity with the polytonic in their wetware, to proofread what the software has come up with.)
Mixed texts
There’s a minor linguistic catch, and a major extralinguistic catch I’ll come back to. The minor linguistic catch is, that Greek was seldom purely vernacular as written down, particularly before the Cretan Renaissance. Of course, because of the Church if not diglossia, spoken Greek was probably not always purely vernacular either—though I think the orthodox opinion, that the written vernacular had more archaic Greek than did the spoken vernacular, has not yet been disproven. And the closer we get to Ancient Greek, the more linguistic sense the polytonic makes. This holds not only for the Greek of 400 BC Ancient Athens, but also for the learnèd Greek of 1400 Constantinople, written in an approximation of Ancient Greek: not because those Constantinopolitans would have read it out loud with pitch accent and /h/, but because what they wrote was in a language where those distinctions mattered, even if they themselves didn’t realise it. Learnèd Greek was, after all, a written language.
But just as polytonic goes through gradiations, as people tried to apply it more practically to the Modern Language, so too are there degrees of fit of the monotonic to increasingly archaic Greek—or at least, to different levels of mixing of Ancient and Modern Greek. Straight monotonic will be just about fine with the Cretan Renaissance. Or at least, any tweaks to make standard monotonic fit better to 1700 Cretan don’t need to move towards the polytonic, for the texts to be more easily readable or accurate to their phonology: it’s morphologically odd stress accents like έρχομέστα that you need to accomodate, not written pitch accents. But earlier texts, which mix in more datives and futures, at least in formulaic use, need some tweaking of the accentuation to deal with them. Kriaras was an aggressive promoter of the Demotic, and starting to use monotonic in an Early Modern dictionary in 1977 was a decidedly activist gesture; but he did accent monosyllabic relativisers, and readmitted the iota subscript.
If we go further in the relative mix of Ancient and Vernacular, we move from a text that can basically be monotonic, with the occasional archaism that monotonic can accommodate, to a text that should basically be polytonic, with the occasional vernacularism. That occasional vernacularism could stick out macaronically, by switching between polytonic and monotonic: people haven’t really done that to date, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world, and actually, it would send out an interesting message. (More on the messages the accentuation sends, later.) Or, they could leave the whole text in polytonic, because after all, there is a convention for polytonicising the Demotic, and it won’t be absurd in small doses of the occasional sentence.
So when Anna Comnena or George Cedrenus cite a sentence of the vernacular in an archaic text, we won’t monotonicise the remaining five hundred pages to accommodate the one sentence. When John Cantacuzene cites vernacular letters to the Sultan of Cairo, in an otherwise archaic text, we won’t monotonicise the remaining text either. We could monotonicise the letters, because after all they do stick out from his text as being in a separate language. Or we could just shrug for the sake of consistency, and put them in polytonic too. We might want to use 1960 polytonic rules and not 1300 Ancient rules, because those are vernacular texts; of course, Cantacuzene didn’t use 1960 rules, and then the question is whether we’re allowed to normalise what Cantacuzene and his contemporaries wrote. We probably are allowed to, and we do normalise manuscripts a fair bit. Two polytonic norms in the same text is somewhat odd, though, and a bit more glaringly anachronistic than just switching to monotonic, or accenting the vernacular letters like Cantacuzene would have done, in Ancient fashion.
The real problem is when the mixture is more equal. There aren’t many such texts, but they do exist: The Mass of the Beardless Man (Spanos) is the clearest example. It’s a parody of the mass, so it has an ancient substrate; but there is a lot of vernacular Greek piled on top of it. It spills over, Queneau-style, into parodies of other genres, including saint’s lives and wedding contracts; and those other parodies have more or less vernacular in them. How do you accent a text like that? Eideneier used polytonic, because he doesn’t do Early Modern monotonic. But with a basically archaic departure point, I think that’s the correct thing to do. Not only for strictly linguistic reasons, but also for the “extralinguistic” reasons I go into later.
How broad the vernacular canon is is going to depend on who’s asking, and to what end. A literary canon is going to be on the narrow side, and is going to hesitate about John Camaterus. (It will probably hesitate about the Proto-Bulgarian inscriptions as well.) A linguistic canon is going to grab whatever it can, especially the further back one goes. The TLG lemmatiser has to apply quite different rules to the vernacular, and refuses to confuse Ancient Greek with the vernacular to avoid specious ambiguity. So it casts its net as wide as anyone has. Camaterus is in, though I did draw the line at Michael Panaretus, whose vernacularisms did seem to be just lexical.
Normalisation
All things being equal, texts in the same tradition should have the same orthography, especially as they are increasingly machine-searched rather than eyeballed. Not every text does invent its own orthography from scratch, and refusing to emend is indeed cowardice (ατολμία) rather than respect, given that the spelling and accentuation of the manuscripts is so chaotic. The recent edition of the Historia Imperatorum by Iadevaia is particularly egregious in its failure to normalise. There are multiple manuscripts, so she’s hardly preserving a single manuscript’s reading, diplomatically. The result is oddball to read, and unsearchable on computer, to no real benefit. The audience who care about the original spelling mistakes is much smaller than the audience who want a readable and searchable text. Since we have had no edition of the text at all, we did not need the first edition ever to be an unsearchable mix-and-match transcription. And the audience that does care about the original spelling mistakes isn’t served anyway, since the different spellings of the different manuscripts have not been noted.
Even if there was just one manuscript, that’s not what we do with texts. If the texts are on papyrus or stone, reflecting the contemporary pronunciation, we tend to leave them alone—although we do normalise the local alphabets to the late Classical norm. But the extended ancient literary texts, which have come to us via mediaeval scribes, are normalised to what we believe correct Ancient Greek was. (We know Ancient Greek better than the mediaeval scribes, right?) And for most contexts and audiences, spelling normalisation is more important than preserving spelling eccentricities. The audiences that do care about spelling eccentricities… well, they can get photographs. (That’s a pretty elitist take, I have to say: only university scholars of good standing have had access traditionally, and they used to have to schlep over to Paris or Mt Athos to do it. The interwebs, and the possibility of digital reproduction, may eventually help here.)
I will note about normalising accentuation, that the Byzantines get the circumflex and acute mixed up where a Modern polytonicist might hesitate—in the penult, when the accent depends on the stem, rather than the ultima where it is a matter of grammar, or the antepenult, where it’s always meant to be acute. We don’t see ἆνθρωπος in their editions, and you don’t see τῆς καλής that often; but you’ll see κύμα for κῦμα routinely. So the learnèd Byzantines’ confusion in the penult does not reject the polytonic, the way the random accentuation of the vernacular could be argued to. It just illustrates why the polytonic wasn’t such a good idea by then. Still, editors do not often fix those mediaeval acutes: they do allow the texts to reflect the Byzantine confusion. It led Maas not to bother circumflexing anything at all. And it disrupts the need for consistency, which all other things being equal is desirable.
For my part, I have routinely had to add alternate stems to the TLG lemmatiser, to deal with these “wrong” accents, because the stems were not being accented with ancient quantity. But I do not believe this means these basically archaic texts should be monotonicised. And I don’t believe those texts should have been normalised to Ancient quantity either. It’s a minor enough deviation (affecting just lexicon and not morphology), that it doesn’t disrupt the basics of polytonic, the way the vernacular hesitations do. And it tells us something about Byzantine learnèd Greek.
And as far as the Early Modern vernacular is concerned, yes, editors should Sin No More with their orthography, and settle on a norm, all other things being equal. But there is a 150-year backlog of editions of Early Modern Greek texts, predating any normalisation of Demotic spelling, and until they’re all redigitised and respelled by someone, we will keep having to deal with heterogeneous orthography. (The TLG is not going to be doing that respelling: it’s a bit too interventionist to fit in their mission statement, and doing the conflating in the lemmatiser rather than the texts is the more hands-off way of doing it.)
And as long as we’re stuck with heterogeneous spellings—let along accentuations—the case for normalisation in editions is less pressing. It is pressing for a dictionary, or other words of secondary scholarship; and Kriaras has made its choices. They haven’t reprinted the first volumes that had appeared in polytonic though, or the next few volumes that appeared in Kriaras’ version of monotonic, before the 1982 standard was settled. Consistency is a good thing, but it’s not so urgent that we drop everything else that we’re doing.
Intervention
The extent to which editors have intervened with the language of the Early Modern texts, to make it more digestible to modern eyes, has not been yelled about enough. Granted, the source manuscripts are messy enough that you have to do something to make sense of them. And the scribes do often enough display signs of stupidity—or if you like, neglect; there are textual variants that just don’t make sense, and you can confidently say they don’t make sense if an alternate reading does. (Assuming of course you’re well-informed enough to make a sound judgement.) But that makes you mistrust everything the scribe writes: not just their spelling and their wording, but their morphology and their metre. But just because many a scribe had a tin ear does not mean that Early Modern metre is identical to the modern Political verse: it isn’t, and many an editor has systematically edited away anapests, not realising that the mediaeval verse allowed them.
The same goes for morphology, for the phonology of loanwords, or indeed for the integrity of the texts themselves. Kaplanis singles out Alexiou’s edition of the War of Crete; there’s also plenty to look askance at in his Escorial Digenes—even though it was precisely Alexiou’s interventionism that first made the Escorial Digenes legible, and revived scholarly interest in it. And as to the linguistic anachronisms of the edition of the War of Troy… well, suffice it to remind people that, no, this edition does not prove θα was being used in 1400: it does indeed still date from 1700; and if you’re using the text for linguistic research, make sure you’re checking the original readings in the app crit. (You should of course be doing that in general.)
What Kaplanis says is common sense, and is practice elsewhere: normalise the spelling as you will, leave the phonology alone. Normalising the accentuation of vernacular texts from 1200 is not going to do any real violence to the linguistics of the texts; nor will normalising the spelling, especially because Modern spelling is still basically historical. So you don’t have to grapple with the issue of when gemination died out in Standard Greek—and not Cyprus; Greek is still spelled as if gemination survives everywhere.
Still, there’s something uncomfortable about the spelling normalisation. I came up with a much too uncharitable phrasing when I was trying to explain the issues to a friend: “We respect 17th century Cretan. That’s why we publish it in 21st century orthography.” Of course, that’s because we have set up a categorial opposition between the three practices surviving in use: Ancient, Monotonic, and Demotic Polytonic. And we deride the lack of unity of Demotic Polytonic. We have no constituency pushing for 17th century norms: people want to see texts through a normalisation someone is using now, and Kaplanis says so explicitly—”we aren’t publishing these texts for a hypothetical 17th century scholar”. Not that there was much of a norm in the 17th century, to judge from the autograph manuscripts. (But what about the printers? If anyone was going to impose normalisation, it wouldn’t be the authors.)
But not every language’s philologists do the same thing: we modernise Shakespeare’s spelling, but not Chaucher’s, Montaigne’s but not the Chanson de Roland’s. In fact, in a roundabout way, using the monotonic for Ptochoprodromos and Cornaro is doing the same thing as is using the polytonic for them, in the opposite direction. They are both assertions of cultural continuity. And they should be seen as ideological statements, not just linguistic statements.
Arbitrariness of norms
Kaplanis argues that the two 17th century autographs in Greek script are as chaotic as the scribes before them, so they weren’t taking the polytonic seriously; and he also wonders whether, given the option of monotonic rather than the absurdities of historical accentuation, they wouldn’t have jumped at the chance. The third manuscript is in Latin script, as appears to have been the norm in Crete. It may be that the Veneto-Cretans had no idea about Greek script, although given that the Orthodox church survived Venetian rule, I doubt it. It may be that it was an ideological choice, aligning with Venice and Western learning rather than antiquity; that is more than likely, given how Ancient Greek deities are Italianised in the texts. But it also relieved them of all the absurd choices of Greek script: not just the accentuation, but the iotacisms and the omegas and the impossibility of distinguishing /d nd nt/ in their multitudinous Italian loanwords, and all of it.
Latin script is not a legitimate choice for anyone publishing these texts now, just like IPA isn’t a legitimate choice. But it’s not linguistics determining that choice. You can write Greek in Italian orthography, and that’s exactly what Foscolo did. Whether we put in circumflexes or omegas when we reprint his work, we’re imposing our own normalisations on his text. Not that we shouldn’t be normalising it: there are good reasons to do it, primary being that we shouldn’t have to transform our readership into Veneto-Cretans to read these texts today. But an omega/omicron distinction is no more intrinsic to Foscolo than a circumflex/acute distinction. Doing the former and not the latter is not motivated by linguistics, or being responsible to his text. It’s being responsible to our audience.
Which is what I meant above. If you spell Foscolo with the fully Ancient paraphenalia, you assert that he’s Their text—the ancestors’, not Ours. If you spell Foscolo in monotonic, you assert that he’s Our text, and that our language isn’t the same as Theirs. Not *too* dissimilar, though—it’s just the accents and a few endings that have been brought into line. But autonomous. If you really wanted to break with the past completely, you would follow the 1920 Soviets and have a phonetic Greek alphabet. Or you could print Foscolo as you found it, in Italian orthography.
But with monotonic, you’re compromising between what we say and what the Ancients wrote. It’s less of a compromise than the Demotic polytonic, which was unstable and unlearnable and deluding itself that the pitch accents of 200 BC still mattered. But it’s still pretending that the 200 BC distinction between omicron and omega matters. Demotic polytonic ultimately dealt with the absurdities of having to choose by defaulting to the unmarked acute when in doubt, which makes it look compromised; but the historical orthography persisting under monotonic also now tends to less marked choices when the etymology is murky or a new transliteration: αβγό now not αυγό, Μπρίτνι Σπιρς not Μπρίτνυ Σπηρς; and Ρήγκαν became Ρίγκαν within my lifetime. The difference between implementing historical orthography with polytonic and implementing it with monotonic is a matter of degree. It’s less absurd, sure, but it still forces you to rote-learn: IPA, it is not, and the argument is not about linguistic correctness, because noone is advocating IPA here.
Difference of degree is fine when you’re choosing an orthography, precisely because this is not purely a linguistic issue. The compromises the orthography makes are counter to what Psichari, in his neogrammarian rigour, grumbled about the way Demotic was going: “linguistics admits no compromises”. Inasmuch as linguistics is a unitary algebra of phonemes and morphemes, no, it doesn’t. But Psichari’s neogrammatically correct Demotic did not prevail: Standard Modern Greek has compromises with the learned language aplenty, enough to make its phonology absurd. The spelling of Greek is just as compromised, and the Purists needled Psichari because he wouldn’t take the logical next step there. And both have happened because language does not only go the way it lists as an abstract system: languages are spoken by people and societies, and it serves their ideologies. That too is what language is about, even though it’s something linguists usually abstract away from methodologically.
Language serves ideologies on paper no less than it does in soundwaves—probably more so. There’s nothing linguistically wrong with the Gothic or Glagolitic scripts, but noone particularly wants to learn how to read them, and the Germans and Russians feel entitled to claim them as their heritage, by making them readable to their fellows, in Latin and Cyrillic. They tinker with the transliteration enough to be linguistically responsible: hvair had to be added for Gothic, and djerv for Cyrillic. But the concern was to make Wulfila legible to Bismarck, not to Alaric. It’s the readership of one’s fellows that matters.
That argues for Early Modern monotonic on the basis of familiarity and readership, and that will become a more and more compelling case as less Modern Greeks can use the polytonic. But as long as polytonic can be read passively, it is no deal-breaker—just as monotonic Homer in snippets in the press is no deal-maker.
It’s still true that the polytonic is more of a rallying point than the spelling—that editors, especially non-Greek editors, are happy to use contemporary spelling but not the monotonic. After all, it is a more obvious visual cue than subjunctive -ῃ, and a more obvious visual break from Learnèd Greek. And it’s true that there’s nothing scholarly about polytonicising the texts. I don’t believe it’s true that there’s something massively more scholarly about monotonicising them, though: there was a conventionalised polytonic orthography by 1960 just as there is a conventionalised monotonic orthography today, and you could choose either as the basis for consistency (which realistically won’t happen anyway). You’re making more work for yourself as an editor by choosing thirty-year-old squiggles and increasingly inaccessible norms; but you’re not absolved of all normalisation and decision-making by going monotonic.
The real choice comes down to, whose texts you want to assert they are. That’s the generations-old Greek debate about their past, a discomfort that did not finish when Puristic Greek was abolished in ’76. In the case of non-Greek editors, though, I think things are far simpler than Kaplanis makes out in his psychoanalysis. Monotonic asserts “they’re Our texts”. A German has less motive and investment to say so than a Greek—even a German as progressive and monotonicist in his approach to Modern Greek as Hans Eideneier. He has less reason to dispute what has been the default thinking, that anything before 1800 is not “Ours”, but “Theirs”—even if its morphology and lexicon are close to contemporary. Kaplanis suggests the prestige of polytonic might be able to get texts printed more easily in Hesperia (as some Greeks chuckle to call the West). But that is certainly going to be less and less of an argument, as it is trumped by the annoyances of polytonic online. (They are surmountable with minimal effort, and Kaplanis could really have done better than the tildes in his online text; but it is more work to type polytonic than monotonic, and I don’t bother to myself unless there’s a real point to it. So Lord Krum goes to monotonic.) At any rate, I don’t think classicists look at Chortatzes, with its mixture of Italian and Cretan affricates, and think any better of it just because it’s polytonic.
Do I have a conclusion? Not really. Polytonic is not linguistically correct for most Early Modern texts (though not all). Monotonic is only more correct, it is not a phonemic transcription from God. The unthinking choice of polytonic is not scholarly, but habit and ideology. But unless you leave Foscolo in his Italianate Greeklish, it’s all ideology. It would be nice if what was the dominant faction in 2000 acknowledged that it was habit and ideology, not scholarliness and respect, that dictated their choices. Not that there’s anything wrong with habit and ideology. At all. Don’t fret: the monotonic will slowly prevail in this domain too—hopefully applied intelligently to the pre-modern language. But honestly, given the morass of legacy 1870 spellings in the backlog of editions in the corpus, a couple more polytonic editions aren’t going to make things worse.
And to be honest, for my work with the TLG, it’ll be Kechagioglou’s monotonic, not Eideneier’s polytonic, that will stick out as the inconsistency, and make me put in extra hours. Not that this means Kechagioglou shouldn’t have monotonicised. It just means it’s all messy, and I was going to have to put in the extra hours anyway.
Like commenter Sapere Aude said over at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog: «Άβυσσος το spelling αυτού του weird lingo…»
Kaplanis on Polytonic in Early Modern Greek editions
So. I’m going to summarise the Mona Lisa with a doodle, and Tasos Kaplanis’ paper on Polytonic in Early Modern Greek editions with a dot point summary. It’s my summary, not his, and I invite comment on whether it’s a fair summary (including from him).
In all, I sort of agree intellectually with his conclusion; I don’t emotionally, but as he says, that’s not a scholarly argument. I take issue with several of the premisses, and I do not consider this primarily an intellectual issue anyway. I’ll come back to this later, but I’ll let the commenter petrovgr (also summarised here) speak for me for now.
Section 1
- The congress participants mostly objected to the prospect of monotonic Early Modern editions, without substantial arguments.
- The field refuses to embrace any uniform editorial practice: each text has its own problems, but surely not its own orthography. That’s not the texts’ problem, it’s ours. We can’t have mathematical axioms in our discipline, but we can have more scholarly ways to edit texts.
Section 2
- What do we edit: We’re dealing with vernacular texts between the 12th and 19th century. That literature is not uniform, but it has the same underlying language.
- Yes, their language isn’t uniform, and is mixed. But, as Kapsomenos has argued, so was the spoken language they correspond to.
- And we also admit we’re a bit heuristic about what we include and exclude from the vernacular canon. John Camaterus is a borderline case, although I’m reluctant to be too liberal in including texts. The occasional Demotic passage or some Demotic lexicon aren’t enough to call a text vernacular.
- How do we edit: We intervene much too much in our texts still, convinced we know metre better than the authors, we are more literate than them, and we know Cretan dialect better than them. But we really should be taking the texts’ language at face value unless that becomes untenable. We should be conservative about emending, and we should never emend silently—unless it’s the spelling: the phonology, morphology and syntax are off limits.
- Stylianos Alexiou & Martha Aposkiti have been particularly egregious about levelling the text of Bugnali’s [Μπουνιαλής] War of Crete.
- Who do we edit for: Specialists, and that’s why Alexiou/Aposkiti’s levelling of Bugnali’s language is so bad: specialists do include linguists. But we shouldn’t be excluding a more general audience. We do sometimes make a different edition for each type of audience (scholarly vs. popularising), which is a good thing. Diplomatic editions (transcriptions) are not that useful to either, and photo-reproductions should not be taking the place of editing the text.
Section 3
- Why monotonic, modern orthography, and modern punctuation: The first Early Modern text in monotonic was published in 1986, and there were several published in the ’90s, notably from Kechagioglou.
- Of course, Kriaras’ dictionary has been monotonic since 1977, and in uniform orthography based on Standard Modern Greek.
- But most editors stick with either ancient or polytonic Demotic accentuation. Including all non-Greek editors. Holton and Olsen were intending to do monotonic editions, but they haven’t come out yet. Bakker & van Gemert have stopped using ancient accentuation and orthography, after criticisms from Greek scholars, but dismiss the monotonic in one sentence. Eideneier refuses to use monotonic in his editions, even though he has been teaching Modern Greek in monotonic since 1976.
- Van Gemert has defended using a mediaeval orthography. I doubt there’s any such thing as a well-defined consistent practice. The only recurrent practices are things like writing prepositional prefixes separately from verbs, and noone wants to do that anyway.
- Our readers are going to be more familiar with monotonic than polytonic, and with the spelling conventions of Standard Modern Greek. Of course, that’s not a compelling argument: newspapers publish excerpts of Homer in monotonic, but that’s arbitrary, and we should preserve Ancient prosody through the polytonic in Homer. Still, 12th to 19th century Modern Greek is a long way away away from Homer.
- Defenders of the polytonic for our texts appeal to their historical truth. But linguistically, the only historical truth is that pitch accent died out in Greek two millenia ago, replaced by stress accent, which is what monotonic conveys. In fact Maas declined to use the circumflex in his editions of Byzantine learned texts for the same reason.
- Confronted with that linguistic truth, defenders of the polytonic say that the tradition they appeal to is orthographic, not phonetic, and that the State-imposed monotonic is a prescription inapplicable to the old poets.
- The orthographic tradition of the texts is a mess, it’s utterly random. Is that the orthographic tradition we’re supposed to respect? No, they want to uphold the traditional spelling, not the manuscripts’, and that’s they’re complaining about the modern prescription. Well, if the scribes had the option of monotonic, they may well have taken it; but if we’re going to orthographically normalise the texts anyway, to make them readable by modern readers, we should be using modern conventions, which are the only linguistically correct way of dealing with the vernacular.
- Monotonic is unproblematic; spelling is more problematic, because of the mixture of ancient, mediaeval, and dialectal elements outside the scope of modern spelling prescription. We can still come up with some conventional solution for them. In fact, editors are OK with Standard Modern Greek-based spelling: it’s only monotonic they reject.
- We should not assume the scribes are idiots, and too incompetent to follow the ancient accentual rules: in fact, we know several instances of the same scribes following accentual rules flawlessly when they wrote Ancient Greek texts. They just chose not to bother applying those rules to the vernacular.
- We also have three authors’ manuscripts surviving, from the 17th century. Father Synadinos and Joachim of Cyprus are as messy with their Greek orthography as the scribes; and Foscolo wrote in Latin characters. So the authors weren’t respectful of ancient Greek orthography either—though we know them not to have been unlettered. If the authors did not agonise over circumflexes or iota subscripts, we shouldn’t have to either.
- Not that I’m saying we should be using Latin script: there are reasons why Greek orthography remains historical. But it’s a historical orthography that has been corrected towards being more sensible, through the monotonic and contemporary spelling norms.
Section 4
- So why would you use polytonic at all? Force of habit. That’s understandable, but it doesn’t make monotonic illegitimate or polytonic the scholarly correct choice. In the absence of any scholarly argument for polytonic, insisting on polytonic for some unstated scholarly rationale is dishonest. Like Kriaras says, “some people like being the last”.
- Why do editors outside Greece use the polytonic? They worked extra hard to learn it; publishers will probably look more kindly on the prestigious garb of polytonic—since they admire ancient Greece and dismiss modern Greece; Greeks and foreigners alike feel an inferiority complex against antiquity, and as Eideneier admits, that makes them annex Early Modern Koine to Hellenistic Koine, though they know they’re distinct. But that’s hardly a scholarly argument.
- Since many editors are also involved in teaching learnèd Greek, embracing monotonic may generate a separation anxiety in them about archaic Greek. But that isn’t a scholarly reason either. And by going monotonic and with modern spelling, you get rid of orthographic uncertainty. Plus, you’re making life easier for yourself in word processing. [Like Tasos himself had, citing the “Trial of Accents” with tildes for circumflexes.] Though I’m not making that a primary consideration.
- Are we using polytonic because we underlyingly assume they were all trying to write Ancient Greek, and falling short? Maybe that’s true: but what they wrote was not Ancient Greek, and the texts should be taken on their own merits.
- Each era edits texts for its own reasons. But we are promoting these texts because they are interesting to us, and we are using modern approaches to analysing them: we should stop treating treating them as museum pieces. At any rate, while we shouldn’t be intervening in the language of the texts, we are publishing them for not 14th century, but 21st century audiences. And why should we be allowed to normalise texts from the 4th century AD, but not the 17th?
- We still need a database of Early Modern texts, and it will need to be normalised.
- I wish a polytonicist would present some scholarly arguments in response.
Section 5
- petrovgr in comments: The compelling argument is that pitch accent was dead, so attempts to impose polytonic on the texts are ahistorical.
- The main problem is the difficulty of delimiting learnèd from vernacular texts, so different accentuation systems will make borderline cases look more dissimilar than they really are.
- This is primarily a matter of choice of convention, and in choosing a convention, scholarly correctness is not the major determinant, it’s a social issue.
- As long as the choice of convention, such as polytonic vs monotonic, does not disrupt functional aspects of the text, I don’t mind editors making a personal choice, so long as they’re explicit about saying so in the preface. It’s the same with the multiple ways of citing references. And the reader can make their own conclusions.