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Category: Ancient Greek
Was Homer being transcribed when written vowels were invented for the Greek alphabet?
Nestor’s Cup is one of the earliest inscriptions in Greek, and it’s got a metrical inscription that may allude to the Iliad: So it’s feasible that Homer started being transcribed as soon as vowels were introduced—which pretty much was as soon as the alphabet was adopted in Greek. (We have no evidence of Greek using […]
Why does the Greek “αγγε” transliterate to “ange” and not “agge” in English?
Ah, a Modern Greek perspective in the question details. I answered the corresponding Ancient Greek question at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why has the word συγγεής two γ? I know it comes from σύν + γεν, and that later the ν disappeared, but why putting two γ? And why has the ν disappeared at the […]
Did Caesar say “I could kill you faster than I could threaten to kill you?”
At a first stab (so to speak): Plutarch • Life of Caesar After this speech to Metellus, Caesar walked towards the door of the treasury, and when the keys were not to be found, he sent for smiths and ordered them to break in the door. Metellus once more opposed him, and was commended by […]
In ancient Greek, how is the root determined in τὸ τεῖχος?
Humphry Smith’s answer is right, but let me spell it out a bit more. We come up with stem suffixes in proto-Greek, to explain the diversity of case endings of classes of nouns—a diversity between dialects of Greek, as well as trying to make intuitive sense of where they came from. The nouns in your […]
Since Cyamites is probably an epithet for Hades, could the scythe/sickle be the meaning of the digamma missing from his name?
As OP clarified elsewhere, the prevalent account for the name Hades is that it originally had a digamma in it, and meant Unseen: Hades – Wikipedia. Ἀϝίδης A-wídēs > Ἀΐδης Ā-ï´dēs > ᾌδης Ā´idēs. The archaic wid– stem for ‘see’ is the same as the stem vid– in Latin, and wit in English. (The terms […]
How do I search in the dictionary for the Ancient Greek verb υφηιρειτω?
Well, you could go to a morphological analyser of Ancient Greek, type in the word, and see what comes out. Such as morpheus on Perseus, or the other offshots of morpheus publicly available, or the subscription only variant of morpheus that I worked on for thirteen glorious years at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, before my […]
Will we ever decode Linear A or Cretan Hieroglyphs?
We can actually read Eteocretan language, because it’s in Greek characters; and we even have enough bilingual text that we know the Eteocretan for ‘cheese’. And we still can’t make head or tail of it. A lot of Linear A and Linear B characters are shared, which means we can guess at the pronunciation of […]
What is the etymology of “Pyramus”, the name of the famous mythological character?
I looked up Dr. W. PAPE’s Woerterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen. Dritte Auflage neu bearbeitet von Dr. Gustav Eduard BENSELER. Vierter Abdruck. Braunschweig, 1911, the big old Greek dictionary of proper names. It brings up the Byzantine authorities’ guesses, and they lean towards ‘wheat’. The Etymologicum Magnum says that the river Pyramus was so called διὰ […]
What is the etymology of “Thisbe”, the name of the famous mythological character?
I looked up Dr. W. PAPE’s Woerterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen. Dritte Auflage neu bearbeitet von Dr. Gustav Eduard BENSELER. Vierter Abdruck. Braunschweig, 1911, the big old Greek dictionary of proper names. The best it had to offer is Suda’s gloss of the noun thisbē as ‘funerary urn’ (σορός): SOL Search. The Thisbe mentioned by Ovid […]
How is it determined that an ancient language had pitch or stress or tone accent?
In the case of Ancient Greek, it’s actually quite straightforward: We know that words had accents, because the ancients made up signs for accents. Words having accents is the norm in language anyway. We know that normally only one syllable per word had an accent, because that’s how the ancients wrote their accents. At the […]