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Have the Eclogues and Florilegium of Stobaeus been translated into English?
To confirm what Alberto Yagos said:
- The best Princeton’s database of Byzantine translations has is Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras, or, Pythagoric life, which includes some sentences by Stobaeus.
- Here’s some bits translated online: The Gentle Exit ” Stobaeus Extracts Sentences and Precepts. By bits, I mean one paragraph.
- Here’s Roger Pearse, Patristic blogger, asking the question in 2010: Stobaeus, Florilegium, and getting a negative answer in 2017.
- A translation of Hermes Trismegistus is based heavily on Stobaeus: Thrice-Greatest Hermes
- This is a review of a translation of one extract of the Eclogues: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.02.37.
The complete anthologies by Stobaeus, pretty clearly, have not been Englished.
Is it true that Klingon is a living language, and that people who don’t speak the same earth languages can communicate with it?
I have had conversations in Klingon, including with the guy who was trying to teach his kid to speak in Klingon. (The kid lost interest in it, and I have found a photo of the kid, 15 years later, jumping into a mosh pit. He’s turned out fine. 🙂
The vocabulary admittedly can be a little restricted in some domains. But it can be done, and I have done it.
You aren’t really going to be able to hold a conversation in Klingon, unless you’ve studied The Klingon Dictionary. The book is available in Italian and (I think) German, so in theory it is possible for two people with no common natural language to converse in Klingon. In practice, if any Klingon speaker does not understand English, I would be exceedingly surprised.
Answered 2017-06-14 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK. and
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.
Since the active and middle voices of the 2nd aorist forms of “to stand” are intransitive (ἵστημι – ἔστην vs ἐστάμην), are these forms synonymous?
James Garry’s answer to Since the active and middle voices of the 2nd aorist forms of “to stand” are intransitive (ἵστημι – ἔστην vs ἐστάμην), are these forms synonymous? This is the answer to this question. And my thanks, James.
What I’m writing here is an answer to a more general question: how much do active/middle voice distinctions matter? It’s an elaboration of Nick Nicholas’ answer to In Ancient Greek, does the middle voice of φιλέω (φιλέομαι) mean “I love in my own interest,” “I love myself,” (reflexive) or “I am loved” (passive)?
My thanks for your indulgence.
English distinguishes between Active and Passive verbs. The distinction is fairly clear cut. An intransitive verb is always active. If a transitive verb is active, the subject is doing stuff; if the transitive verb is passive, the subject is having stuff done to them.
Homeric Greek worked on a different, Active/Middle distinction; in many ways, that distinction has lasted to this day. In that distinction, if a verb is transitive, the active still means you’re doing stuff, and the middle means you’re having stuff done to you. Or that you’re doing it to yourself. Or that you’re doing it for yourself. Or that you’re doing it to each other.
And that’s the easy bit.
What happens when the verb is intransitive?
When the verb is intransitive, it could be active, or it could be middle.
There is a kind of semantics to it. Kind of. If the intransitive verb is active, it means that you’re doing stuff, you’re acting. If the intransitive verb is middle, it means that you’re just sitting there, that you’re passive—or at least, that your actions are inward. So run or go are active. Work or sleep are middle.
Does that distinction sound unconvincing? Good. Because it was.
I mean, the distinction was there. But it was not stable, and it was not consistent, and it was not rigorous.
The distinction was inconsistent enough that some intransitive verbs got to be either active or middle; lampō ‘shine’, for example. In fact, some perfectly transitive verbs also got to be either. So for lambanō, there is an active usage, meaning ‘take’, and a middle usage, meaning ‘take hold of, seize’.
Now, if you are approaching grammar synchronically, like a good structuralist, any contrast in grammatical form must correspond to some contrast in meaning. There has to be some nuance there; some notion of more active vs more passive, some connotation picked up from other actives or middles, some subtlety. It can’t just be random.
People speaking the language at a point in time have good reason to think so. Writers are certainly going to be alert to all the connotations and resonances latent in the language, and they will exploit them. Yes, synchronically there is no such thing as a true synonym.
If you’re working in the diachronic model, you are much more cynical about structuralist notions of paradigm and meaning distinctions, because your business involves watching those structures morph and evaporate.
It’s an overly fuzzy view of language. It’s why a century of Indo-European historical linguistics, which focussed primarily on phonology, did not come up with a concept of the phoneme: it was too busy seeing sounds change to work out the structure of sounds. But it’s a healthy cynicism to bring to bear, when there are overly subtle nuances in play. Even if they’re there, they’re evanescent.
The instance that has made me sceptical about fine active/middle nuances in Greek is phaîo. It’s a verb I spent hours trying to work out in Pindar: The tale of φαῖο.
I couldn’t work it out, because it wasn’t in the grammar books: the 19th century editions of Pindar, that the grammar books were based on, used the active optative of ‘you would say’, φαίης, and that’s what the grammars had documented. The 1971 edition of Pindar switched to the middle optative φαῖο. Both forms turn up in manuscripts.
‘Say’ is one of those intransitive verbs that could appear in the active or in the middle (in the optative mood in particular). Was there a subtle semantics involved? Was there a notion of actively saying something versus passively saying something? Like, asserting versus conceding, or something like that?
Nah. It’s much simpler than that. It’s a dialect difference. Attic used the active in the optative of phēmi ‘say’; Doric, the dialect of Pindar, used the middle. (The edition switched the voice, because they figured that the scribes that had copied Pindar over the generations were more familiar with Attic than Doric.) Attic used the active and Doric the middle, not because Athenians were more assertive than Spartans, or anything like that. It was simply a random choice, that the dialects made in one mood of one verb, when they split apart.
Just like Greek, a few centuries later, replaced the middle ergazomai ‘work’ with the active douleuō ‘originally: to slave away’. No nuance there. Not in the long run: in the long run, nuance gets squashed and overrun by the shifts of language.
Lucky are those who settle down to a single period of language, that delve into its treasures, and that look upon its nuance and subtleties and paradigmatic contrasts as something more substantial, more rich, more verdant—than the cobwebs that Time knows them to be.
Don’t weep for historical linguists, though. We have our own entertainments. And sometimes, we pause to read the literature too, and let go of our cynicism.
How did Plato address Socrates? Teacher? Master?
Originally Answered:
How does Plato call Socrates?
Of course, we don’t have transcripts by Plato of chats with Socrates, we have dialogues he made up. But Socrates is constantly addressed in Plato’s dialogues as “O Socrates” (ὦ Σώκρατες), with monotonous regularity—over 1200 times in the works of Plato. Socrates in turn addresses his trollees (er, interlocutors) as “O partner” or “o good man” (ὦ ἑταῖρε, ὠγαθέ).
How are the clusters “μψ” and “γξ” pronounced in Modern Greek?
Modern Greek has nasal Sandhi. That means that following a word ending in /n/, any voiceless stop is voiced. (And in the case of /ks/ and /ps/, so is the following /s/.) The /n/ in turn assimilates in place of articulation to what follows.
So:
- patera “father”, san patera [sam batera] “like a father”
- keo “I burn”, ðen keo [ðeŋ ɡeo] “I don’t burn”
- psixi “soul”, stin psixi [stim bziçi] “to the soul”
- kseno “stranger”, ton kseno [toŋ ɡzeno] “the stranger”
Does βαμπίρ have female and plural forms in modern Greek?
Being a foreign word ending in a non-Greek ending, there is no plural. In Modern Greek, if a noun ends in something other than a vowel or sigma, it can’t be declined. (Nu is archaic; rho xi psi even more so.) So το βαμπίρ, τα βαμπίρ.
I see that at least one person online has named themselves Vampirissa “vampiress”, forming a feminine of the form. But that would be considered informal usage: formal usage would just put a feminine article in front of βαμπίρ.
There is a reason unassimilated loanwords suck.
Are βαμπιρ and βρικόλακας the same word in modern Greek?
As other answers have pointed out, the vrikolakas is an indigenous Greek creature rising from the grave, with its own mythology, which is only somewhat similar with that of the vampire. Andreas Karkavitsas‘ harrowing novella The Beggar (1897) depicts the associated superstitions in detail.
When I was a kid, as far as I remember, the Vampires of Eastern Europe or Hollywood were rendered as vrikolakas. They now appear to be rendered as vampir. If you are referring to the vampires of western popular culture, as opposed to blood drinking beings that people used to actually be afraid of, vampir is a safe bet.
Why did the Byzantines call Western Europeans beef-eaters?
Because Byzantines did not eat beef as often as Western Europeans did.
They occasionally ate lamb and mutton, chicken, and pork; rarely beef.
Or the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. meat:
The most popular kind of meat was lamb … Goat meat is mentioned, among others, by Liutprand of Cremona, who did not enjoy the “fat goat” served at the imperial court in Constntinople. Pork was considered a coarse food, whereas the chine of beef appears in Niketas Choniates as a staple of imperial banquets and of the Crusaders.
Or An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds, which I have cotranslated: the Sheep, Pig, Goat and Rabbit each boast of how tasty their meats are; the Buffalo only mentions its cheese, and the Ox does not mention either meat or dairy products: he only mentions how his horn is used to polish books, and his penis is used to make whips.
Why beef would be avoided is a question I’m not fully across. If the Ancient Greeks could come up with the Hecatomb, they certainly had neither a shortage of beef, nor a reluctance to eat it. Greeks do eat beef now—though more veal than beef, and much more lamb than either.
The related question, why do I keep referring to Western Europeans from a Greek perspective on Quora as “beef-eaters”, is because Niketas Choniates memorably used the phrase in his account of the sack of Constantinople:
Οἱ δ’ ἀγκροῖκοι καὶ ἀγελαῖοι ἐπεκερτόμουν μᾶλλον τοῖς ἐκ Βυζαντίου ἡμῖν καὶ τὴν ἐν πτωχείᾳ καὶ γυμνότητι κακουχίαν ἰσοπολιτείαν ἀφρόνως ὠνόμαζον, οὐ τοῖς τῶν πέλας κακοῖς παιδευόμενοι. πολλοὶ δὲ καὶ ἀνομίαν ὑπολαμβάνοντες „εὐλογητὸς Κύριος, ὅτι πεπλουτήκαμεν“ ἔλεγον, ὀλίγου τὰς τῶν συμφυλετῶν οὐσίας ἀποδιδομένας ὠνούμενοι. οὐ γάρ πω βουθοίνας εἰσῳκίσαντο Λατίνους, καὶ εἴδοσαν, ὅπως μὲν τὸν οἶνον ἄκρατον ὁμοῦ καὶ ζωρότερον ὥσπερ καὶ τὸν χόλον ἀκέραστον χέουσιν, ὅπως δὲ Ῥωμαίοις ἐν ὑπερηφανίᾳ καὶ ἐξουδενώσει προσφέρονται.
The peasants and common riff-raff jeered at those of us from Byzantium and were thick-headed enough to call our miserable poverty and nakedness equality, without learning anything from the evils perpetrated at their doorstep. Many were only too happy to accept this outrage, saying “Blessed be the Lord that we have grown rich”, and buying up for next to nothing the property that their fellow-countrymen were forced to offer for sale, for they had not yet had much to do with the beef-eating Latins and they did not know that they served a wine as pure and unmixed as unadulterated bile, nor that they would treat the Romans with utter contempt.
What is the origin of rhyming poetry? Is it strictly European-based?
In fact, though Rhyme – Wikipedia is very coy and tentative about stating it, there is good evidence that European rhyme originates in Arabic rhyme, via the Andalus; Arabic has used rhyme extensively since the sixth century. There is occasional rhyme in Classical Greek and Latin, but that is an effect, not a structuring principle. The claim for Old Irish is apparently disputed. Rhyme arose independently in Chinese poetry (far earlier), but it did not have any impact on Europe.
How to say transgender in Greek
In A cis lament for the Greek language, I posted on the difficulties of rendering transgender and intersex in Greek. The solution I reported there seems not to have been the settled solution. I did some further reading since, and this is an expanded version on the challenges that were involved.
The first challenge to rendering transgender and intersex in Greek is that, like most languages Greek does not have a distinct word for sex and gender. An added complication is that all the words Greek does have for sex (or gender) are derived from words for ‘tribe’ (since that’s how Greeks first conceived of sex—as two different tribes of people); and any words based on ‘gender’ or ‘sex’ are going to sound like they’re referring to ethnicities or nations instead.
The word genos for example is used for grammatical gender; outside of grammar, it only means ‘ethnicity’. The word that has prevailed is phylon (our phylum), and that is uncomfortably close to phylē ‘race’. So phyletikē diakrisē is ‘racial discrimination’, although the default term for that is ratsismos. (And ratsismos has been extended to mean bigotry in general; it is used to include homophobia and sectarian prejudice, for example.)
Which means that there is no good adjectival form for phylon, to mean gender-related. Any attempt is going to sound too close to ‘racial’; and the default solution, phylikos, is pronounced identically to the well established philikos ‘friendly’. (I’m using Ancient Greek transliteration here to help readers recognise the terms; in Modern Greek, they’re both filikos.)
Here, Modern Greek has used a nice trick. While the default strategy for forming adjectives is to suffix an ending like –ik-, an alternate strategy is to prefix en– ‘in’. There is a subtle meaning distinction, which, like all subtle meaning distinctions, is not always there: the ‘in’ adjectives have a connotation of the noun being immersed, imbued with the adjective quality, whereas the -ik- adjectives can just mean the noun is about the adjective quality. So metrikos is ‘metrical’, ‘about metre’; emmetros is ‘in-metre, put in verse’. A treatise is metrikos if it is about verse; it is emmetros if it is in verse. Similarly, rhythmikos is ‘rhythmical’; errhythmos is specifically ‘in rhythm, with a beat’. Psychikos is ‘relating to the soul’ (psikhiko in the vernacular is almsgiving, which is done for the good of your soul); empsychos is ‘having a soul, animate’.
So gender studies are emphyles meletes, and gender identity is emphylē tautotēta. It’s not an identity about gender; it’s an identity in gender, realised through gender. (Of course the real reason for this being adopted is that the default formation phylikē tautotēta would be misunderstood as ‘friendly identity’.)
Because emphylos has been established as a rendering of English ‘gender’ as an adjective, the Greek renderings of transgender have used emphylos rather than phyl-ik-. That could be generalised into a notion of phyl– ‘sex’ vs emphyl– ‘gender’, given that homosexual and heterosexual already use phyl-: homophylophilos, heterophylophilos. In fact the coinage I reported last post, too clever by half, differentiated transgender and intersex as di-emphyl-ikos and dia-phyl-ikos. It really was too clever, and it hasn’t stuck.
That was the first puzzle to deal with. The second is that Greek is very proud of its prepositional prefixes, but none of them is a precise match for trans-.
Greek does have a precise adverb match for trans and cis, the Latin for ‘this side of’ and ‘the other side of’: enteuthen and ekeithen. The Latin expressions where trans and cis got the most exposure were Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul: Gaul on the other side of the Alps (= France), and Gaul on this side of the Alps (Northern Italy, which was still Celtic). The Greek renderings of those were Galatia ekeithen tōn Alpeōn and Galatia enteuthen tōn Alpeōn. But as you can see, that’s an adverb, not a prefix. So it won’t work for transgender.
Greek has no less than four prefixes that have been used to render trans– ‘other side of’.
- Meta– means ‘after’. It is the established classical means of rendering trans– (if you’ve gone the other side of a state, you are in the aftermath of the state), and indeed a lot of trans- words in Latin are renderings of meta– words in Greek. So transformation, transition, translation = metamorphōsis, metabasis, metaphrasis. So it’d be the obvious solution…
- … if this was Classical Greece. Meta– has kept picking up connotations since, and metaphylikos would now end up sounding like either ‘meta-sexual’ or ‘post-sexual’. Phylometabatikos ‘gender-transitioning’ has been suggested, but I think you can see the problems with that.
- Hyper– means ‘above’, and it can be used in the sense of overcoming something. Cf. hyperanthropos, Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Hyperphylikos was in fact an early proposal for transgender.
- No, hyperphylikos does not immediately make one think ‘hypersexual’; and no, hyperphylikos still didn’t get accepted.
- Para– ‘by the side’ has longstanding usage to mean ‘auxiliary’ or ‘unconventional’. The model in English is paramilitary; the prefix is much more productive in Greek. So parekklēsiastikos ‘para-church’ is a name for religious organisations that are not officially part of the church; parakratos ‘para-State’ is the term for the Deep State or for thugs acting as a regime’s enforcers.
- This is of course a value-laden term, so it was never contemplated for transgender. It has however been adopted for cross-dressing (old term: trans-vestite): parendytikos. The unconventionality in cross-dressing is, for many practitioners of it, the point.
- The prefix people have settled on is dia– ‘across’. The problem with dia– is that it means ‘inter-’ as much as it means ‘trans-’; in fact, the coinages I reported used it in both ways. Diemphylikos seems to have stuck as the official rendering of transgender—although as I reported, the term that is actually used most is transdzender.
And if diaphylikos was rejected for ‘intersex’, what has been used instead? The NGO pamphlet I found that was up on all the current terminology didn’t use any of the above. It used mesophylikos.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a coincidence that mesophylikos corresponds exactly to the title of a renowned novel with an intersex protagonist, written as it happens by a Greek-American: Middlesex.