I have great, personal news: I will be at Greece this summer to study Classical Greek! I will attend the Paideia Institute's "Living Greek in Greece" program this summer. This is only because of my generous patrons at my university. There I will be conjugating verbs and declining nouns, and adjectives, on the quick, whilst speaking and/or listening. This is exciting for me on many levels. On one, I will improve my Greek; on another, I will meet other students/potential scholars and scholars. On another level, I will represent my university, the lowly country-city Fresno's university: Fresno State, which has produced impressive scholars, myself excluded. On another level (I mentioned that this was many leveled), this will be my first time in Europe! I will be at the coast of the Peloponnese, at a seaside village, and will visit Delphi, tragically un-oracled, and Mt. Parnassus. I suppose that Eutychus would be a fitting name for me, as I once fell asleep (being that I left my studies for some time) but am now awake with good fortune!
Friday, April 14, 2017
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Honor to Hermes...via Res Gerendae
If a Roman poet were to write a Fasti on the notable dates of the modern Western calendar, April Fools’ Day on April 1st would surely deserve a mention. As with many ancient festivals, this day – although not a public holiday – witnesses the disruption of social and cultural norms, as friends and media outlets attempt to fool others through a range of hoaxes and pranks. It is a day where you can circulate “fake news” liberally and legitimately. If an ancient god patronised the day, it would almost certainly be Fama, the many-eyed, -eared and -mouthed personification of gossip, a monster which “clings to fictions and distortions as much as she brings news of the truth” (tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntia veri, Aeneid 4.188).
Over the years, there have been a number of entertaining Classics-themed April Fools’ jokes online. Our fragmentary encounter with the ancient world clearly makes it especially open to the fantasy of discovering lost and unknown secrets.
Below are a selection from this year’s showing – I hope you enjoy (and that my comments don’t succumb to the common vice of ruining jokes by explaining their humour!)
1. Forthcoming Commentary on Ovid’s Medea
Cambridge Classics Facebook Page “The Greeks, the Romans and Us” promised us a new Green & Yellow commentary edition of Ovid’s “Medea” by a certain Benjamin H. Kennedy, to be published on 31st June 2017. Supposedly, a special lecture had been given on the text in the Faculty last week, a recording of which was available to watch on youtube.
This certainly sounds like exciting news, and seems to have fooled a few people based on the comments to the post, but on closer inspection, everything is rather fishy: for a start, Ovid’s “Medea” has survived in meagre fragments (2 verses), hardly enough to fill up an entire commentary, especially a student-focused Green & Yellow!
The editor of the volume appears to be Benjamin Hall Kennedy – a prominent Classics scholar who died as long ago as 1889, although his work is still extremely useful for the many modern students who learn their Latin morphology and syntax from “Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer”.
And last of all – and the biggest giveaway – the youtube link to the alleged lecture ends up nowhere other than a music video of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” – an example of the internet phenomenon ‘Rickrolling’, the prank involving the unexpected appearance of this very video. Yet in this specific context, this ‘Rickrolling’ could also have a deeper significance: the lyrics of the song’s chorus are especially apt for the story of Jason & Medea, and particularly foreboding in light of Jason’s duplicitous treatment of the Colchian maiden in the mythical tradition – he will be all too ready to “give Medea up”, “desert her” and “make her cry”. The final promise never to “tell a lie” also feels knowingly ironic in the context of April Fools’ Day.
So it turns out that this advertised commentary is little more than wishful thinking. Ovid’s original tragedy was famous and highly regarded in antiquity – the rhetorician Quintilian goes so far as to say that it “shows his potential for excellence” (Ovidi Medea videtur mihi ostendere quantum ille vir praestare potuerit, 10.1.98) – and it would certainly be a great boon to have a complete, commentary-worthy version of the text available today, but that – alas – is little more than a fantasy for now.
2. Calabrian Society Book List
Following the tradition of the past three years, Queens’ College Classicist David Butterfield displayed his erudition and wit on the international Liverpool classics email list by circulating lists of fake Classics books for sale from the so-called “Calabrian society”. Over the years, these hoaxes have become ever more learned and complex, full of multilingual puns and self-aware references, alongside much parody of list conventions: the asterisking of certain entries in other book lists was mocked in 2015 with the illogical “Items marked with an asterisk are in the list, and those marked with a further asterisk are for sale,” while the habitual email refrain of “with apologies for cross posting” this year became “with apologies if cross at posting.” Some of the more immediately accessible titles in this and previous years include:
(2017) Bannon, S. Io Trumpe! Daily Life Under Donaldian Rome. Legacy Books, Atlantic City, NJ. 92pp. A hair-raising reconstruction of life amidst the Domus Maxime Aurea. Sig. to ffep (in minium/lipstick?) ‘Ivanka Imperatrix’. $65. **Lacks content**
(2016) Karl ‘n’ Dee Apriles. Straight Outta Chrysostom: A Critical Survey of Dionic and Johannic Influence on Gangsta Rap. NY-Cricklade: Roc-A-Fella Reception $tudie$, 2012. i, [2], 12 [? Mike: check]. The chapter ‘Magnum 44 ex parvo‘ (on the lyricism of Lil’ Durk, Lil’ Herb, Lil’ P-Nut and Lil’ Snot Dudley) has been ill-treated. $65
(2015) **Hardsell, Robyn (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Blackwell Companions (Blackwell Supplements to World Knowledge 9.2) (New Oxford/York: Wily-Blackwell, 2015; h/b, 1,302pp. + 116 ill. + Blu-ray [pres. M. Bragg.]). $249
3. New Linear B Discovery
Cambridge postdoctoral researcher and former Res Gerendae editor Anna Judson offered her own April Fools’ Day prank by pretending that a new series of Linear B tablets had been discovered in Athens, providing “sensational” new evidence for Mycenean ritual practices.
Again, an exciting prospect, but she leaves many clues for the wary reader. Not only is the excavation director responsible for the discovery called ‘Ilithios Apriliou’ (‘Fool of April’ in Greek), but the ritual in question is said to have taken place on the first day of a month called ‘Apate’ (‘trickery’ or ‘fraud’ in Greek), which Anna claims is “tentatively identified as the fourth month of the Mycenaean year” (i.e. our April 1st). What’s more, the ritual may have involved participants competing “to tell the most outrageous stories in honour of the trickster god Hermes.” All of this adds up to a nice imaginary aetion (‘origin-story’) for our own April Fools’ Day, joining a tradition of other invented origins for the day – compare Boston University Professor Joseph Boskin’s claim in 1983 that the day derives from the occasion on which Emperor Constantine left a jester Kugel (the name of a Jewish noodle pudding) in charge of his empire for a day!
4. Second Book of Aristotle’s Poetics
[Thanks to Lea Niccolai for pointing this one out to me!]
Nor is the phenomenon of April Fool’s Day restricted to the Anglophone world.
Prof. Paul Schubert, papyrologist at the University of Geneva, claimed that today would also bring us the first revelation of a newly-discovered manuscript of the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. According to the sneak previews available, not only did this book re-introduce the concept of katharsis (a key concept in Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy) for the humbler ‘cleaning’ of fish markets, but the philosopher also promised a third instalment of the Poetics on lyric poets, teasingly expanding our list of known ‘lost’ texts.
Yet again, Prof. Schubert offers a fair few signposts along the way: the peculiar obsession with fish nods to the idiom “poisson d’avril”, the French phrase designating an “April Fools’ joke”; the monastery where the manuscript is alleged to have been found is that of St. Paul Apatelios (‘Deceitful’) on Crete – an island whose inhabitants were notorious in antiquity for being ‘perpetual liars’; the names of the scholars responsible for the discovery place an emphasis on truth and falsehood: Kassandra Immerwahr and Rainer Lügner, “two very different personalities” (deux personnages à la personnalité très contrastée): the former nods to the mythical heroine Cassandra, daughter of Priam, destined to tell the truth but never be believed (‘Immerwahr’ means ‘always true’ in German); the latter has a surname which means ‘liar’ in German, while the forename ‘Reiner’ might point to Rob Reiner, known for criticising ‘lying’ American presidents – most recently Donald Trump as a “pathological liar“. Finally, in the quoted ‘translation’ from the new text, Aristotle is said to have claimed that “to make a lie acceptable, it’s enough to associate it with truthful elements” (“Or pour faire accepter un mensonge, il suffit de l’associer à des éléments véridiques”).
Clearly, Classicists can have lots of fun letting their imaginations run wild. Hopefully there’ll be a similarly interesting batch next year! And if you’ve spotted any that I’ve missed, do let me know and I’ll add them to the list :)
Over the years, there have been a number of entertaining Classics-themed April Fools’ jokes online. Our fragmentary encounter with the ancient world clearly makes it especially open to the fantasy of discovering lost and unknown secrets.
Below are a selection from this year’s showing – I hope you enjoy (and that my comments don’t succumb to the common vice of ruining jokes by explaining their humour!)
1. Forthcoming Commentary on Ovid’s Medea
Cambridge Classics Facebook Page “The Greeks, the Romans and Us” promised us a new Green & Yellow commentary edition of Ovid’s “Medea” by a certain Benjamin H. Kennedy, to be published on 31st June 2017. Supposedly, a special lecture had been given on the text in the Faculty last week, a recording of which was available to watch on youtube.
This certainly sounds like exciting news, and seems to have fooled a few people based on the comments to the post, but on closer inspection, everything is rather fishy: for a start, Ovid’s “Medea” has survived in meagre fragments (2 verses), hardly enough to fill up an entire commentary, especially a student-focused Green & Yellow!
The editor of the volume appears to be Benjamin Hall Kennedy – a prominent Classics scholar who died as long ago as 1889, although his work is still extremely useful for the many modern students who learn their Latin morphology and syntax from “Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer”.
And last of all – and the biggest giveaway – the youtube link to the alleged lecture ends up nowhere other than a music video of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” – an example of the internet phenomenon ‘Rickrolling’, the prank involving the unexpected appearance of this very video. Yet in this specific context, this ‘Rickrolling’ could also have a deeper significance: the lyrics of the song’s chorus are especially apt for the story of Jason & Medea, and particularly foreboding in light of Jason’s duplicitous treatment of the Colchian maiden in the mythical tradition – he will be all too ready to “give Medea up”, “desert her” and “make her cry”. The final promise never to “tell a lie” also feels knowingly ironic in the context of April Fools’ Day.
So it turns out that this advertised commentary is little more than wishful thinking. Ovid’s original tragedy was famous and highly regarded in antiquity – the rhetorician Quintilian goes so far as to say that it “shows his potential for excellence” (Ovidi Medea videtur mihi ostendere quantum ille vir praestare potuerit, 10.1.98) – and it would certainly be a great boon to have a complete, commentary-worthy version of the text available today, but that – alas – is little more than a fantasy for now.
2. Calabrian Society Book List
Following the tradition of the past three years, Queens’ College Classicist David Butterfield displayed his erudition and wit on the international Liverpool classics email list by circulating lists of fake Classics books for sale from the so-called “Calabrian society”. Over the years, these hoaxes have become ever more learned and complex, full of multilingual puns and self-aware references, alongside much parody of list conventions: the asterisking of certain entries in other book lists was mocked in 2015 with the illogical “Items marked with an asterisk are in the list, and those marked with a further asterisk are for sale,” while the habitual email refrain of “with apologies for cross posting” this year became “with apologies if cross at posting.” Some of the more immediately accessible titles in this and previous years include:
(2017) Bannon, S. Io Trumpe! Daily Life Under Donaldian Rome. Legacy Books, Atlantic City, NJ. 92pp. A hair-raising reconstruction of life amidst the Domus Maxime Aurea. Sig. to ffep (in minium/lipstick?) ‘Ivanka Imperatrix’. $65. **Lacks content**
(2016) Karl ‘n’ Dee Apriles. Straight Outta Chrysostom: A Critical Survey of Dionic and Johannic Influence on Gangsta Rap. NY-Cricklade: Roc-A-Fella Reception $tudie$, 2012. i, [2], 12 [? Mike: check]. The chapter ‘Magnum 44 ex parvo‘ (on the lyricism of Lil’ Durk, Lil’ Herb, Lil’ P-Nut and Lil’ Snot Dudley) has been ill-treated. $65
(2015) **Hardsell, Robyn (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Blackwell Companions (Blackwell Supplements to World Knowledge 9.2) (New Oxford/York: Wily-Blackwell, 2015; h/b, 1,302pp. + 116 ill. + Blu-ray [pres. M. Bragg.]). $249
3. New Linear B Discovery
Cambridge postdoctoral researcher and former Res Gerendae editor Anna Judson offered her own April Fools’ Day prank by pretending that a new series of Linear B tablets had been discovered in Athens, providing “sensational” new evidence for Mycenean ritual practices.
Again, an exciting prospect, but she leaves many clues for the wary reader. Not only is the excavation director responsible for the discovery called ‘Ilithios Apriliou’ (‘Fool of April’ in Greek), but the ritual in question is said to have taken place on the first day of a month called ‘Apate’ (‘trickery’ or ‘fraud’ in Greek), which Anna claims is “tentatively identified as the fourth month of the Mycenaean year” (i.e. our April 1st). What’s more, the ritual may have involved participants competing “to tell the most outrageous stories in honour of the trickster god Hermes.” All of this adds up to a nice imaginary aetion (‘origin-story’) for our own April Fools’ Day, joining a tradition of other invented origins for the day – compare Boston University Professor Joseph Boskin’s claim in 1983 that the day derives from the occasion on which Emperor Constantine left a jester Kugel (the name of a Jewish noodle pudding) in charge of his empire for a day!
4. Second Book of Aristotle’s Poetics
[Thanks to Lea Niccolai for pointing this one out to me!]
Nor is the phenomenon of April Fool’s Day restricted to the Anglophone world.
Prof. Paul Schubert, papyrologist at the University of Geneva, claimed that today would also bring us the first revelation of a newly-discovered manuscript of the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. According to the sneak previews available, not only did this book re-introduce the concept of katharsis (a key concept in Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy) for the humbler ‘cleaning’ of fish markets, but the philosopher also promised a third instalment of the Poetics on lyric poets, teasingly expanding our list of known ‘lost’ texts.
Yet again, Prof. Schubert offers a fair few signposts along the way: the peculiar obsession with fish nods to the idiom “poisson d’avril”, the French phrase designating an “April Fools’ joke”; the monastery where the manuscript is alleged to have been found is that of St. Paul Apatelios (‘Deceitful’) on Crete – an island whose inhabitants were notorious in antiquity for being ‘perpetual liars’; the names of the scholars responsible for the discovery place an emphasis on truth and falsehood: Kassandra Immerwahr and Rainer Lügner, “two very different personalities” (deux personnages à la personnalité très contrastée): the former nods to the mythical heroine Cassandra, daughter of Priam, destined to tell the truth but never be believed (‘Immerwahr’ means ‘always true’ in German); the latter has a surname which means ‘liar’ in German, while the forename ‘Reiner’ might point to Rob Reiner, known for criticising ‘lying’ American presidents – most recently Donald Trump as a “pathological liar“. Finally, in the quoted ‘translation’ from the new text, Aristotle is said to have claimed that “to make a lie acceptable, it’s enough to associate it with truthful elements” (“Or pour faire accepter un mensonge, il suffit de l’associer à des éléments véridiques”).
Clearly, Classicists can have lots of fun letting their imaginations run wild. Hopefully there’ll be a similarly interesting batch next year! And if you’ve spotted any that I’ve missed, do let me know and I’ll add them to the list :)
Thursday, October 20, 2016
From Lewis
“'The trouble with these boys',said a grim old classical scholar looking up from some milk-and-watery entrance papers which he had been marking: 'the trouble with these boys is that the masters have been talking to them about the Parthenon when they should have been talking to them about the Optative.'”
-C.S. Lewis
-C.S. Lewis
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Some Exciting News!
The Associated Press:
JERUSALEM (AP) — The charred lump of a 2,000-year-old scroll sat in an Israeli archaeologist's storeroom for decades, too brittle to open. Now, new imaging technology has revealed what was written inside: the earliest evidence of a biblical text in its standardized form.
The passages from the Book of Leviticus, scholars say, offer the first physical evidence of what has long been believed: that the version of the Hebrew Bible used today goes back 2,000 years.
The discovery, announced in a Science Advances journal article by researchers in Kentucky and Jerusalem on Wednesday, was made using "virtual unwrapping," a 3D digital analysis of an X-ray scan. Researchers say it is the first time they have been able to read the text of an ancient scroll without having to physically open it.
"You can't imagine the joy in the lab," said Pnina Shor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who participated in the study.
The digital technology, funded by Google and the U.S. National Science Foundation, is slated to be released to the public as open source software by the end of next year.
Researchers hope to use the technology to peek inside other ancient documents too fragile to unwrap, like some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and papyrus scrolls carbonized in the Mt. Vesuvius volcano eruption in 79 CE. Researchers believe the technology could also be applied to the fields of forensics, intelligence, and antiquities conservation.
The biblical scroll examined in the study was first discovered by archaeologists in 1970 at Ein Gedi, the site of an ancient Jewish community near the Dead Sea. Inside the ancient synagogue's ark, archaeologists found lumps of scroll fragments.
The synagogue was destroyed in an ancient fire, charring the scrolls. The dry climate of the area kept them preserved, but when archaeologists touched them, the scrolls would begin to disintegrate. So the charred logs were shelved for nearly half a century, with no one knowing what was written inside.
Last year, Yosef Porath, the archaeologist who excavated at Ein Gedi in 1970, walked into the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls preservation lab in Jerusalem with boxes of the charcoal chunks. The lab has been creating hi-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest copies of biblical texts ever discovered, and he asked researchers to scan the burned scrolls.
"I looked at him and said, 'you must be joking,'" said Shor, who heads the lab.
She agreed, and a number of burned scrolls were scanned using X-ray-based micro-computed tomography, a 3D version of the CT scans hospitals use to create images of internal body parts. The images were then sent to William Brent Seales, a researcher in the computer science department of the University of Kentucky. Only one of the scrolls could be deciphered.
Using the "virtual unwrapping" technology, he and his team painstakingly captured the three-dimensional shape of the scroll's layers, using a digital triangulated surface mesh to make a virtual rendering of the parts they suspected contained text. They then searched for pixels that could signify ink made with a dense material like iron or lead. The researchers then used computer modeling to virtually flatten the scroll, to be able to read a few columns of text inside.
"Not only were you seeing writing, but it was readable," said Seales. "At that point we were absolutely jubilant."
The researchers say it is the first time a biblical scroll has been discovered in an ancient synagogue's holy ark, where it would have been stored for prayers, and not in desert caves like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The discovery holds great significance for scholars' understanding of the development of the Hebrew Bible, researchers say.
In ancient times, many versions of the Hebrew Bible circulated. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to as early as the 3rd century B.C., featured versions of the text that are radically different than today's Hebrew Bible.
Scholars have believed the Hebrew Bible in its standard form first came about some 2,000 years ago, but never had physical proof, until now, according to the study. Previously the oldest known fragments of the modern biblical text dated back to the 8th century.
The text discovered in the charred Ein Gedi scroll is "100 percent identical" to the version of the Book of Leviticus that has been in use for centuries, said Dead Sea Scroll scholar Emmanuel Tov from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who participated in the study.
"This is quite amazing for us," he said. "In 2,000 years, this text has not changed."
Noam Mizrahi, a Dead Sea Scrolls expert at Tel Aviv University who did not participate in the study, called it a "very, very nice find." He said the imaging technology holds great potential for more readings of unopened Dead Sea Scrolls.
"It's not only what was found, but the promise of what else it can uncover, which is what will turn this into an exciting discovery," Mizrahi said.
__
JERUSALEM (AP) — The charred lump of a 2,000-year-old scroll sat in an Israeli archaeologist's storeroom for decades, too brittle to open. Now, new imaging technology has revealed what was written inside: the earliest evidence of a biblical text in its standardized form.
The passages from the Book of Leviticus, scholars say, offer the first physical evidence of what has long been believed: that the version of the Hebrew Bible used today goes back 2,000 years.
The discovery, announced in a Science Advances journal article by researchers in Kentucky and Jerusalem on Wednesday, was made using "virtual unwrapping," a 3D digital analysis of an X-ray scan. Researchers say it is the first time they have been able to read the text of an ancient scroll without having to physically open it.
"You can't imagine the joy in the lab," said Pnina Shor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who participated in the study.
The digital technology, funded by Google and the U.S. National Science Foundation, is slated to be released to the public as open source software by the end of next year.
Researchers hope to use the technology to peek inside other ancient documents too fragile to unwrap, like some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and papyrus scrolls carbonized in the Mt. Vesuvius volcano eruption in 79 CE. Researchers believe the technology could also be applied to the fields of forensics, intelligence, and antiquities conservation.
The biblical scroll examined in the study was first discovered by archaeologists in 1970 at Ein Gedi, the site of an ancient Jewish community near the Dead Sea. Inside the ancient synagogue's ark, archaeologists found lumps of scroll fragments.
The synagogue was destroyed in an ancient fire, charring the scrolls. The dry climate of the area kept them preserved, but when archaeologists touched them, the scrolls would begin to disintegrate. So the charred logs were shelved for nearly half a century, with no one knowing what was written inside.
Last year, Yosef Porath, the archaeologist who excavated at Ein Gedi in 1970, walked into the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls preservation lab in Jerusalem with boxes of the charcoal chunks. The lab has been creating hi-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest copies of biblical texts ever discovered, and he asked researchers to scan the burned scrolls.
"I looked at him and said, 'you must be joking,'" said Shor, who heads the lab.
She agreed, and a number of burned scrolls were scanned using X-ray-based micro-computed tomography, a 3D version of the CT scans hospitals use to create images of internal body parts. The images were then sent to William Brent Seales, a researcher in the computer science department of the University of Kentucky. Only one of the scrolls could be deciphered.
Using the "virtual unwrapping" technology, he and his team painstakingly captured the three-dimensional shape of the scroll's layers, using a digital triangulated surface mesh to make a virtual rendering of the parts they suspected contained text. They then searched for pixels that could signify ink made with a dense material like iron or lead. The researchers then used computer modeling to virtually flatten the scroll, to be able to read a few columns of text inside.
"Not only were you seeing writing, but it was readable," said Seales. "At that point we were absolutely jubilant."
The researchers say it is the first time a biblical scroll has been discovered in an ancient synagogue's holy ark, where it would have been stored for prayers, and not in desert caves like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The discovery holds great significance for scholars' understanding of the development of the Hebrew Bible, researchers say.
In ancient times, many versions of the Hebrew Bible circulated. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to as early as the 3rd century B.C., featured versions of the text that are radically different than today's Hebrew Bible.
Scholars have believed the Hebrew Bible in its standard form first came about some 2,000 years ago, but never had physical proof, until now, according to the study. Previously the oldest known fragments of the modern biblical text dated back to the 8th century.
The text discovered in the charred Ein Gedi scroll is "100 percent identical" to the version of the Book of Leviticus that has been in use for centuries, said Dead Sea Scroll scholar Emmanuel Tov from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who participated in the study.
"This is quite amazing for us," he said. "In 2,000 years, this text has not changed."
Noam Mizrahi, a Dead Sea Scrolls expert at Tel Aviv University who did not participate in the study, called it a "very, very nice find." He said the imaging technology holds great potential for more readings of unopened Dead Sea Scrolls.
"It's not only what was found, but the promise of what else it can uncover, which is what will turn this into an exciting discovery," Mizrahi said.
__
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
A Tip for Reading/Translating
Earlier, as I was reading a bit of Catullus 76, I over-complicated a line. I saw in line 17/18 both "umquam" and "extremam" next to each other and immediately associated them with each other. I thought "Of course 'umquam' being an adverb of time, 'extremam' must be an accusative of extent of time!" That, however, didn't make sense. I did a quick check in a grammar, and ran across, "DIRECT OBJECT", and it hit me: I still didn't read the verb, or if there was a direct object that extremam could have modified! (This was ten minutes later.) Thus, listen attentively, gentle reader: first look for the simplest reason a word would be in a sentence, even if it is Catullus. He might have "opem" as a direct object, and open to a modifier that's also accusative feminine...he just might.
-Steven C.
-Steven C.
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Hindsight
I first learned ancient Greek a long time ago. There was a break as I switched schools and majors, but I would work on translation, the New Testament in particular. Now, as far as my grammar, I wouldn't swear by it (I wouldn't so with anything), but one would think I would be fairly good. Sadly, I'm not. It took me a year of ancient Greek to understand English syntax and now it's taken me a year of German to understand Greek. Oddly enough, there are some interesting similarities between Greek and German. One in particular, for example, is the German 'verb final' and the Greek 'tmesis' (an anachronistic term for what some verbs have in Homer). These both have verbal particles separate from the main verb. My eyes were opened when I saw it in Homer, but only after I learned of the verb final in German. Hence, the more one studies about language in general, the better one recognizes how language works in specifics. Now, I believe I am ready to re-begin my Greek learning, and I have just re-begun. This led me to see things anew, and I am seeing the anew, and I am ashamed that I didn't see them before.
Today, as I was reviewing some verbs, I noticed some similarities in some Greek tenses. This, of course, was obvious, but it wasn't for me until today. I noticed that the aorist passive is based off of the aorist active. I know...I know...DUH! But, it never clicked until today. I was sipping some mediocre green tea in a well cooled Starbucks and was reviewing phero, and saw it! I later looked at other flash cards, and saw a similar phenomenon. I was pretty well convinced when I saw it in phero, because it's a strong verb, a very strong verb. It's present, future and aorist look nothing alike! (phero...oiso...egnekon..really?) If this consistency within aorists was found in that verb, I was sure to find it in others. I will continue tomorrow on other verbs and I might do some statistical calculations, but I don't know; it's been a long time since I've done stats. Let's hope I find something more interesting tomorrow whilst drinking some rich Frenchly pressed coffee.
Today, as I was reviewing some verbs, I noticed some similarities in some Greek tenses. This, of course, was obvious, but it wasn't for me until today. I noticed that the aorist passive is based off of the aorist active. I know...I know...DUH! But, it never clicked until today. I was sipping some mediocre green tea in a well cooled Starbucks and was reviewing phero, and saw it! I later looked at other flash cards, and saw a similar phenomenon. I was pretty well convinced when I saw it in phero, because it's a strong verb, a very strong verb. It's present, future and aorist look nothing alike! (phero...oiso...egnekon..really?) If this consistency within aorists was found in that verb, I was sure to find it in others. I will continue tomorrow on other verbs and I might do some statistical calculations, but I don't know; it's been a long time since I've done stats. Let's hope I find something more interesting tomorrow whilst drinking some rich Frenchly pressed coffee.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Der Erste Blog-Post
I am happy to say that I've been motivated enough to start a new blog. This will be an extension of my studies, so it might be boring. Nevertheless, it will be an exciting new project for me, as I dive deeper into my language studies. This blog will focus on my findings in Greek, Latin and German. As for my experience in these languages, I have had a few years of classical Greek (actually the main grammar was from the Koine period), a semester (a fairly intensive one, which is spilling into this summer) of Latin, and a year of German (this will continue, officially, next semester). Hence, this will be a mix-up of different tidbits from whichever language I find a tidbit.
Now, as to why I am studying these languages is simple: I want to go to grad school. I plan to study either ancient history, or the New Testament. These languages are pre-required to attend a proper university, so I am learning them as an undergrad. I hope to make this informative and entertaining to everyone that is willing to read it.
Now, as to why I am studying these languages is simple: I want to go to grad school. I plan to study either ancient history, or the New Testament. These languages are pre-required to attend a proper university, so I am learning them as an undergrad. I hope to make this informative and entertaining to everyone that is willing to read it.
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