6 ms·

Lest anyone take this article at face value, please note that it was published in _Speculative Grammarian_, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in

by baruz 1y ago

Lest anyone take this article at face value, please note that it was published in _Speculative Grammarian_, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.” The range of meanings for the Greek entautha, gar, and de are all well-understood.

arnsholt 1y ago
Classical Greek is well outside my field, but one of the things I love about SpecGram when it deals with things I do know, the jokes also have a kernel of truth to them. And in other classical languages I'm more familiar with, there is (IMO) an argument to be made that the texts should be translated more "orally" than they frequently are. There are probably many reasons for this, but I think one of them is that because they are Classical and Important there's a sense of reverence that makes us want to translate them Seriously(tm). Of course you're entirely right that Greek particles are not some unfathomable mystery. The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).
- dash2 1y ago
  So what trend in modern linguistics is this guy satirizing? Do they like to pretend that well-known things like entautha and oun are mysteries?
  - baruz 1y ago
    Not modern. Outsiders coming into the language (even for modern Greeks—the diglossia TFA mentions between spoken and written language in English existed for 1500+ years in Greek) find particles difficult to grasp, and the dictionary definitions do not really convey all the senses that the particles mean, like mathematics teaches from natural definitions of numbers progressing to Dedekind cuts. You know _Portuguese irregular verbs_, by Alexander McCall Smith, the comic novel where Dr. Professor von Igelfeld rests his reputation on a magisterial volume on the (strangely enough) Portuguese irregular verbs? Denniston’s _The Greek particles_ ultimately spans almost 700 pages after posthumous revisions (1960?). Page after page on individual particles. I think TFA satirizes that drive to squeeze every bit of meaning from the particles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewar_Denniston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewar_Denniston
    - dash2 1y ago
      Thank you. For future readers, here is the great opus itself. https://archive.org/details/john-d.-denniston-the-greek-particles-2nd-edition-1954/page/n15/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/john-d.-denniston-the-greek-part...
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles). The systematic study of Sanskrit also goes back literal millennia. Why would the understanding of the particles differ? To the degree that we believe we understand the ancient Greek particles better, how do we know that's true? It's a dead language; the corpus is the corpus.
gwd 1y ago
I've been learning Biblical Greek, and that was my impression too: The particles he list don't sound at all like the random "uh" and "ah" that he's translating them into. That said, I do think there's a point that a lot of things end up getting translated in the wrong "register" and lose some of the meaning. One message John the Baptist sends to Jesus is rendered in my translation, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect another?" But in the Greek there's no "should", and the whole sentence is a lot shorter. To me it has much more of a "get off your but and do something" implication; more like, "Hey, are you the one, or are we looking for someone else?" Same in another place, where where Jesus says something my translation renders, "Listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you: [About his upcoming death]" The Greek is a bit more colorful: "Take these words of mine and put them into your ears:" Has much more a sense of exasperation.
- binary132 1y ago
  That’s actually pretty funny and interesting.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > The Greek is a bit more colorful: "Take these words of mine and put them into your ears:" Has much more a sense of exasperation. Maybe. Another possibility (in general) is that that's the idiomatic thing to say in the source language, and it only sounds colorful to non-native speakers.
  - gwd 1y ago
    It can be both, can't it? "Get this through your skulls" is an idiom in English, for instance; but it's also colorful and much more emphatic than "Listen carefully to what I'm about to say".
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      No, it can't be both. "Get this through your skulls" is not an idiomatic† way to say "listen to this" in English. It's an idiomatic way to say "listen to this, idiots". It isn't possible for an expression to be simultaneously unmarked and marked. For a different Biblical phrase, Jesus is often reported as greeting people with the expression "peace be upon you". This is not exotic; the reason he's doing that is that it's Aramaic for "hello". (And still "hello" today in the region, but we tend to write down the modern version as "salaam" rather than "peace be upon you".) † It occurs to me, given your question, that you might be confused over the difference between "idiom" [meaning: a more or less fixed expression whose meaning is opaque] and "idiomatic" [meaning: (of a manner of speaking) ordinary / natural / unlikely to raise eyebrows] It's sense (1) here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiomatic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiomatic ("Pertaining or conforming to [...] the natural mode of expression of a language"), not sense (2).
YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
Satirical intent aside it's true that the way some ancient writers use particles makes it much harder to read and understand their writings, to me at least. To be clear, I'm a native Greek speaker and I can comfortably read back to at least the Koine Greek of the Gospels. But I've tried Xenophon in particular, who's mentioned in the article and I remember it being hard going, to the point I gave up and continued with the modern Greek translation (I had an edition with the ancient and modern text on opposite pages). I distinctly remember being very confused about the spray of particles interjected between nouns and verbs, and trying to shut out the noise of the particles to be able to parse a sentence. I probably got a headache. The problem is that, the meaning of "ενταύθα", "ουν", "ον", "γε", "δε", "ην", etc may be well known if you take them as individual words, but when you string them together they're apparently trying to say ... something. And that something is opaque and incomprehensible, like an ancient joke for which you have no context.
- epilys 1y ago
  I agree it depends on the writer and their cultural and educational background. Another example is Thucydides (which as also a native Greek speaker, find funny that anglophones pronounce as Thoo-see-dee-dees, but I digress). Thucydides was considered even in eras closer to him than to as as too abstract/verbose. Meanwhile Plutarch enriches the laconic myth corpus by reporting that the Lacedaemonians were content with replying to a letter with only the words "About what you wrote: no." Writing style is part of the message. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0195%3Astephpage%3D235b https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... Growing up bilingual, I personally always found Greek more verbose than English even in brevity. It's good for avoiding ambiguity and getting your intent across but sometimes bad for colloquial communication.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
    About what you wrote: that's true (Greek can be too verbose than English; it's got inflections). And yeah, I always get funny looks when I say "Θουκυδίδης" :)

by baruz 1y ago

arnsholt 1y ago

Classical Greek is well outside my field, but one of the things I love about SpecGram when it deals with things I do know, the jokes also have a kernel of truth to them. And in other classical languages I'm more familiar with, there is (IMO) an argument to be made that the texts should be translated more "orally" than they frequently are. There are probably many reasons for this, but I think one of them is that because they are Classical and Important there's a sense of reverence that makes us want to translate them Seriously(tm). Of course you're entirely right that Greek particles are not some unfathomable mystery. The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).

dash2 1y ago
So what trend in modern linguistics is this guy satirizing? Do they like to pretend that well-known things like entautha and oun are mysteries?
- baruz 1y ago
  Not modern. Outsiders coming into the language (even for modern Greeks—the diglossia TFA mentions between spoken and written language in English existed for 1500+ years in Greek) find particles difficult to grasp, and the dictionary definitions do not really convey all the senses that the particles mean, like mathematics teaches from natural definitions of numbers progressing to Dedekind cuts. You know _Portuguese irregular verbs_, by Alexander McCall Smith, the comic novel where Dr. Professor von Igelfeld rests his reputation on a magisterial volume on the (strangely enough) Portuguese irregular verbs? Denniston’s _The Greek particles_ ultimately spans almost 700 pages after posthumous revisions (1960?). Page after page on individual particles. I think TFA satirizes that drive to squeeze every bit of meaning from the particles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewar_Denniston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewar_Denniston
  - dash2 1y ago
    Thank you. For future readers, here is the great opus itself. https://archive.org/details/john-d.-denniston-the-greek-particles-2nd-edition-1954/page/n15/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/john-d.-denniston-the-greek-part...
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles). The systematic study of Sanskrit also goes back literal millennia. Why would the understanding of the particles differ? To the degree that we believe we understand the ancient Greek particles better, how do we know that's true? It's a dead language; the corpus is the corpus.

gwd 1y ago

I've been learning Biblical Greek, and that was my impression too: The particles he list don't sound at all like the random "uh" and "ah" that he's translating them into. That said, I do think there's a point that a lot of things end up getting translated in the wrong "register" and lose some of the meaning. One message John the Baptist sends to Jesus is rendered in my translation, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect another?" But in the Greek there's no "should", and the whole sentence is a lot shorter. To me it has much more of a "get off your but and do something" implication; more like, "Hey, are you the one, or are we looking for someone else?" Same in another place, where where Jesus says something my translation renders, "Listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you: [About his upcoming death]" The Greek is a bit more colorful: "Take these words of mine and put them into your ears:" Has much more a sense of exasperation.

binary132 1y ago
That’s actually pretty funny and interesting.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> The Greek is a bit more colorful: "Take these words of mine and put them into your ears:" Has much more a sense of exasperation. Maybe. Another possibility (in general) is that that's the idiomatic thing to say in the source language, and it only sounds colorful to non-native speakers.
- gwd 1y ago
  It can be both, can't it? "Get this through your skulls" is an idiom in English, for instance; but it's also colorful and much more emphatic than "Listen carefully to what I'm about to say".
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    No, it can't be both. "Get this through your skulls" is not an idiomatic† way to say "listen to this" in English. It's an idiomatic way to say "listen to this, idiots". It isn't possible for an expression to be simultaneously unmarked and marked. For a different Biblical phrase, Jesus is often reported as greeting people with the expression "peace be upon you". This is not exotic; the reason he's doing that is that it's Aramaic for "hello". (And still "hello" today in the region, but we tend to write down the modern version as "salaam" rather than "peace be upon you".) † It occurs to me, given your question, that you might be confused over the difference between "idiom" [meaning: a more or less fixed expression whose meaning is opaque] and "idiomatic" [meaning: (of a manner of speaking) ordinary / natural / unlikely to raise eyebrows] It's sense (1) here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiomatic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiomatic ("Pertaining or conforming to [...] the natural mode of expression of a language"), not sense (2).

YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago

Satirical intent aside it's true that the way some ancient writers use particles makes it much harder to read and understand their writings, to me at least. To be clear, I'm a native Greek speaker and I can comfortably read back to at least the Koine Greek of the Gospels. But I've tried Xenophon in particular, who's mentioned in the article and I remember it being hard going, to the point I gave up and continued with the modern Greek translation (I had an edition with the ancient and modern text on opposite pages). I distinctly remember being very confused about the spray of particles interjected between nouns and verbs, and trying to shut out the noise of the particles to be able to parse a sentence. I probably got a headache. The problem is that, the meaning of "ενταύθα", "ουν", "ον", "γε", "δε", "ην", etc may be well known if you take them as individual words, but when you string them together they're apparently trying to say ... something. And that something is opaque and incomprehensible, like an ancient joke for which you have no context.

epilys 1y ago
I agree it depends on the writer and their cultural and educational background. Another example is Thucydides (which as also a native Greek speaker, find funny that anglophones pronounce as Thoo-see-dee-dees, but I digress). Thucydides was considered even in eras closer to him than to as as too abstract/verbose. Meanwhile Plutarch enriches the laconic myth corpus by reporting that the Lacedaemonians were content with replying to a letter with only the words "About what you wrote: no." Writing style is part of the message. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0195%3Astephpage%3D235b https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... Growing up bilingual, I personally always found Greek more verbose than English even in brevity. It's good for avoiding ambiguity and getting your intent across but sometimes bad for colloquial communication.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
  About what you wrote: that's true (Greek can be too verbose than English; it's got inflections). And yeah, I always get funny looks when I say "Θουκυδίδης" :)