3 ms·
Where are you getting this information? Everything I can see puts that development well after the poems' composition around 800-700 BCE, though perhaps before
by TheCoelacanth 2mo ago
Where are you getting this information?
Everything I can see puts that development well after the poems' composition around 800-700 BCE, though perhaps before they had been fully written down.
If I understand correctly, it's a minority but not completely fringe opinion among historians that a major motivation for inventing the Greek alphabet in the first place may have so that they would be able to write down Homer.
- suddenlybananas 2mo agoThe digamma was never used in Homer's written form, but the poetic metre in some place is done such that there would be a digamma there and in some places, they don't modify the metre to adapt to the digamma.
- TheCoelacanth 2mo agoThere's a two-hundred year gap been it bring composed to capturing it in written form. It was in oral form and didn't written down (outside of some short fragements) for the ~200 year. When the The Odyssey was composed, widespread use of digamma sound was still a big thing. I can easily believe that anachronistic language was added in the process of writing them down, but the original audience wasn't people reading in a book; it was people who were listening to a poem that had never been written down. There is a huge amount of anacronistic content, but when it was first performed, language was relatively contemporary at the start.
- suddenlybananas 2mo agoBut there is inconsistent use of the digamma, in some sections it's not used!