Switch Reference in Ancient Greek?

I'm going to be presenting at the student research symposium again. I think, though some of the data is a problem, that Ancient Greek has a switch reference marker. The data, very much a work in progress, is here: http://bit.ly/XXWJm5.

What I find interesting is that so many things, such an elegant word, flank the particle de. I'm quite aware that Runge says that de is [+development], which is to say indicating new information, but I don't think that's the whole story. About 40% of the time, de has a nominative case something on one side or the other. 40%? This seems much higher than chance alone. Of course it could also be an artifact of being located near the front of a clause, which is where the subject tends to hang out.

Anyway, I've got to pour some work in on this, but my preliminary research will be presented in two (yow!) weeks. I'll put up the presentation slides here then.

Ørberg for Ancient Greek

I've thought a bit about this sort of thing. I've written a few passages, but nothing good enough to share. And I realize that the project needs to be approached quite a bit differently than Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. In part this is an intellectual challenge. Polis, Athenaze and Reading Greek are all creditable books—and probably hard to really make an improvement on.

Some challenges

• the alphabet
• the pronunciation to use—though probably ignorable
• not so many obvious derivatives
• the dialects
• contracts

I'm really not quite sure how to deal with the alphabet. It's not hard to learn, but teaching it through context is another story. Pronunciation is somewhat a moot point, as Ancient Greek isn't really a spoken language. On the other hand, sound recordings are valuable resources.

The derivatives are a major problem. Ørberg uses the preposition in on the first page. English, German, Italian, Dutch and Swedish use the same word to mean the same thing. Spanish is one letter off. There are no diacritics. Place names add yet another layer of familiarity to the first chapter. The fact that Latin's ablative case in the first declension looks like the nominative with a diacritic also helps too.

Greek on the other hand presents a challenge. ἐν looks more like ev—nonsense, unless you've thoroughly mastered the alphabet. While not difficult, beginning students will occasionally slip. Ἑλλάδα, on the other hand, doesn't look like any work a non-Greek student knows. Then there's the morphology involved with the dative case in Greek…

But that's no real matter. I don't think Ørberg's first chapter works with Greek. It would probably have to look more like Ørberg's chapter 2, but without the genetive case. I suspect that a different entry point would be necessary anyway.

The dialect situation is also a concern. Attic Greek is probably the best place to aim at. Epic has fierce morphology, since it is somewhat an amalgam of several dialects. It also has the disadvantage of being entirely in verse, which isn't the easiest way to present material to beginners. On the other hand, you can't completely ignore Epic either. Authors will quote it and figure you know what they're quoting. Koine is straightforward after Attic Greek, so no need to worry about it after Attic. Either Koine or Attic would work well, given that there are lots of examples of both written down. Lots of fodder for corpus mining. In any case, Attic is the best given the ease of entry into Koine and the availability of stuff to read. But the Attic dialect presents its own challenge.

Verb contracts. This is a major wrinkle. Verb contracts have to be taught and mastered. On the other hand, some dialects—Epic and Ionic in particular—don't contract. I think I know how to get around it: start with Ionic Greek. Herodotus, among others, is written in this dialect, and it solves the contract problem for a few chapters.

The angle

The story should probably start in Asia Minor and follow the characters across the Aegean to Athens. This story angle allows for a start in non-contracting Ionic Greek but also builds in the eventual shift to contracting Attic Greek. One problem solved.

Another story angle would be to work the Greek gods into the narrative in some way. From the beginning. If for no other reason than people are familiar, at least passingly, with Greek myth. It also solves, to some degree, the derivative problem mentioned earlier. People may not know Δημήτηρ right off hand, but at least sounding the word out will give them a chance. Ζεύς will be transparent to the newbiest newb. So that's got to be a consideration.

The other nice thing that the journey across the Aegean would solve is the sheer volume of nautical terminology that seems to pervade Ancient Greek.

The sequence

Here's one point that I've not gotten as far with. Or at least I've not gotten answers that satisfy me. The sequence of learning Greek is going to be much different than Latin's sequence. Naturally: it's another language. Indirect speech? No problem. Greek is virtually English on that point. The article is a problem. You've got to use it, but defining it isn't very transparent in an Ørberg-style environment. Since the article lines up so nicely with the first and second declensions, morphology on that point won't be too vicious. Same with the 3rd declension—the article to the rescue again.

I'm also not quite sure how to present verb tense. Clearly present at first. But which first? -μι verbs? Or add on the imperfect and aorist? Which of those two first? Imperfect seems obvious, but aorist is frequent and useful. The whole mess of the verb's principal parts is an ugly question too. 

μέν and δέ

I've recently learned about switch-reference markers. Since I'm a native English speaker, I don't really know about know about such things. We don't have them (I don't think).

They're not traditionally shown as such in Greek, but I'm beginning to think μέν and δέ are switch-reference markers of a sort. Or if they aren't, they're very similar. For those who are familiar, consider what this means:

οἱ δὲ [non-noun]…

It should signal that whoever οἱ are, they are not the subject of the last sentence. Hopefully I'll learn more about switch-referencing and will be able to say more about this topic. So far as I know, this would make Greek and odd man out—so far as I am aware—in Indo-European languages.

Greek compound nouns

Since I'm reading some Greek, I might as well inflict a little Greek on the world. That and I've got some serious dislike of traditional Greek grammar—parathetic and synthetic compounds being the sort thing that the classics have too much of. Let's remedy that.

I'm at the halfway point in True Story, and the sheer promiscuity that Lucian tosses out compounds wholly invented for his book astounds me. For whatever reason, it makes the work seem less alien. Anyway, back to my point. He makes compounds, and for sake of reducing assumptions let's assume he is following the standard patterns of forming compounds that Greek uses. Let's see what we can learn from these compounds. Specifically, N-N compounds in book 1. Anything that looked questionable or that I couldn't find, I ditched. First up: pre-existing words.

Right headed endocentric compounds

γαστρο.κνημίη – calf

Ἡρα.κλέης – Hercules
Λυχνό.πολις – Lamptown
οἰνο.φαγία – feast
πελτ.αστής – light shield bearer

Right-headed do-er compound
σκευο.φόρος – porter


Copulative
Νεφελο.κοκκγ.ία – Cloudcuckootown

Well, um, yeah
οἰκο.δόμημα – building

Seriously, this thing means something like househome. Anyway. From the looks of these pre-existing words, it would appear that Greek uses right-heading as its main strategy when compounding. Sound like another language? That's right. English tends to use right-headed compounds as well. Yet another reason, Ancient Greek is more like English than you may think.

And here are Lucian's made up words. He used a lot of these, and they're fun.

 Right-headed endocentric
Ἀερο.κόρδακες – sky dancers
Ἀερο.κώνωψ – sky-mosquito
ἀερο.μαχία – air battle
Ἀνεμο.δρόμοι – wind walkers
Ἱππο.γέρανοι – crane cavalry
Ἱππό.γυποι – vulture cavalry
Ἱππο.μύρμηξ – horse ant
Κεγχρο.βόλοι – Millet throwers

Λαχανό.πτερος – Grass plumer

Νεφελο.κένταυρος – cloud centaur
νησο.μαχία – island fight
Σκοποδο.μάχοι – Garlic fighters

Right-headed do-er compound

Θαλασσο.πότης – Sea-drinkers

Copulative
Ψυλλο.τοξότης – flea archer

Exocentric compounds
θυννο.κέφαλος – tuna headed

Καθλο.μύκητες – stalk mushrooms
Κυνο.βάλανοι – dog acorns
Στρουθο.βάλανοι – Sparrow acorns

Ψηττό.ποδες – Sole-feet

In a book like this, you can't tell if he means that the creatures are just heads (κέφαλος) that look like tuna (θύννος) or some sorts of Doctor Who style tuna-headed alien. I prefer the latter interpretation.

Sadly, not everything was a compound. Drat.

Τριτωνο.μένδητες – Mergoat

When I saw this, I was truly hoping I could find how this was a compound. The Middle Liddell failed me. Of course, given Greek culture, there was almost no way that there aren't all sorts of words having to do with every facet of boats and seafaring. Which brings me to the most glaringly odd omission. All of these other things are  compounded, but this one isn't despite the free way Greek compounds.

χείρ σιδήρεος – hand iron

But you might like to call it a grappling hook, and I think it's cool. Even if it isn't a compound.

UPDATE
And then in Book 2, section 4, Lucian spells out exactly how he makes his compounds.

ἅπαντα ἡμῖν προσεοικότας, καὶ τὰ σώματα καὶ τὰμεγέθη, πλὴν τῶν ποδῶν μόνων· ταῦτα γὰρ φέλλινα εἶχον, ἀφ᾽ οὗ δή, οἶμαι, καὶ ἐκαλοῦντο Φελλόποδες.

…entirely similar to us in both body and size, except for their feet: those are cork, from which I suppose, they are called Cork-feet.

Greek compounds and English phrasals

I'm working my way through Lucain's True Story and the realization is hitting me again. Ancient Greek and English have some odd ways that they are alike. The biggest to me is in how compound verbs are interpreted. (And I'm sure as soon as I hit publish, I'll realize otherwise.)

I should be clear. The morphology of the verbs are completely unalike. English is virtually inflection free, whereas Greek has inflections for person and number that are much more like Latin. But the interpretation of the compound is more likely to be transparent to English speakers than Latin compounds. For example:

καταγράφω – I write on

The morphology breaks down like this:

/kata.grap^h.o:/
κατα.γράφ.ω
against.write.I

Ok, so maybe I'm cherry-picking a definition for κατα. But there are more. I'll divide the morphemes up with dots like I did above—they are in the same order.

περι.πλέκ.ω – I fold around
ἐπι.σκοπέ.ω – I look at

In most cases, the Greek compound fits more or less with its English phrasal counterpart. This is completely at odds with Latin. Latin forms its compounds exactly like Greek. Preposition + verb root + person/number inflection.

pro.mitt.o – I send for?
in.veni.o – I come into?
con.st.o – I stand with?

No, promise, find and agree (though that last one kind of works). It is almost as if you have to learn each Latin compound as its own new work, but in Greek you can guess and wind up close to the mark. The other nice thing about Greek is that it is a bit more promiscuous about noun-noun compounds. Latin does this to an extent with words like crucifer (cross bearer), but it usually prefers to phrase things like that as a phrase—typically with genitive case.

Greek is far more promiscuous with compounds, particularly in the right- vs. left-headedness of the compound. You're familiar with some of them already. Here are a few left-headed compounds.

ῥινό.κερως – rhinoceros (nose.horn)
ἱππο.πόταμος – hippopotamus (horse.river)
φιλο.σοφία – philosophy (love.knowledge)

You may not know my new favorite from Lucian, which is right-headed.

ψυλλο.τοξότης – flea archers

Rico suave

Ok, so maybe I'm making a terrible reference to that song. If Prof. Rico sees this, I can only hope he forgives my flippant attitude and takes it for the compliment I mean it as.

Anyway, Prof. Rico has that kind of command of Greek. This video is really long, but it should give you an idea of what an Ancient Greek class can look like. The guy never breaks away from target language. It's amazing. I've done stuff like this with Latin, but I don't think I've ever gotten much above 75% in target language.

I really like TPR-style and active-use approaches to teaching dead languages, since they can often be quite removed from our day-to-day experience. Of course, some of them are: Avestan anyone? But Latin and Ancient Greek have a broad literature that is made that much richer with active command of the language. Or at least that's been my experience with Latin.

You can find out more about Rico's book, Polis here, but it's a major pain to import to America. Just take my word for it. 

-que and καί

Ok, I was reading a book about Latin's history the other day [well, not really, this is lightly-revised, reblogged material]. I know—just what you do for fun too. This entry may give some insight into how Latin and Ancient Greek relate to each other. And why I find this stuff so interesting.

In any history of Latin in its earliest days, the ancient languages of Italy come up. So far as linguists can tell, there are two main groups. The first group is the Etruscan language. It is a language that no one fully knows. It is limited to a handful of inscriptions, many of which are funerary. Etruscan played an important role in the development of Latin—particularly the Latin alphabet—though it lent many words to Latin as well.

The other group of languages is the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin is one of these. The others include Oscan, Faliscan and Venetic, although Venetic may not be Italic. It's always hard to be certain about things this far in the past, but to my inexpert eyes Venetic seems similar enough to Latin. We know about Venetic—hold your breath for it—through inscriptions.

The thing that struck me was from an inscription from Este. Because I have a font that can show you the Venetic alphabet, I'll take a stab at transliterating it back into Venetic. I promise zero actual accuracy on my transcription, though I've made efforts at it. The inscription starts on the right and goes to the left.



Now on to the serious part. It is transliterated, from left to right, as:

mego donasto sainatei reitiai egeotora aimoi ke louderobos

Which corresponds to the Latin:

me donavit sanatrici reitiae egetora aemo liberisque

And in English:

Egetora gave me to Reitia the healer for Aemus and his children.

There's all sorts of fascinating stuff here, but the one that struck me was the use of ke. Why? Because Latin has a very similar word it can use to mean "and." The word is "-que." I put a hypen in front of it to show you that in Latin it attaches itself to the end of a word instead of being its own independent word. As you can see, "ke" is its own word. Obviously these words are related. Here's my guess at how.

At one point, there was a word *ke either in Latin or Italic—the star is there to show you that it is not an actual word, but a hypothetical form that ought to have existed. You should not be surprised to find out that a language can go from a "qu" sound to a "k" sound. In English we have King and QUeen. More importantly in Latin we have "quomodo"—with the qu sound—which becomes the Spanish word "como"—with the k sound. So it is very possible to switch between those sounds. So *ke become ke in Venetic and -que in Latin.

I've also noticed a bit more going on too. Maybe I'll blog again about this.

I mention all of this because there is another Indo-European language that uses a very similar sounding word to mean "and." It is Greek, and the word is και, which you might write as "kai" with our alphabet. This word is the same in ancient and modern Greek—so far as my barbarian eyes can see. Again, it is easy enough to get from an "e" (like the "ay" in way) to an "ai" sound (like the word eye). Latin itself made that change, otherwise we would have "praedictions" and "praedispositions." But we don't, because Latin went from an "ai" sound to an "e" sound for the vowel combination of "ae."

So *ke made its way from whatever ancient language—probably Proto Indo-European—into Greek and Latin. This sort of analysis of words can help students made connections when learning a new language, but it is not always easy to spot. Suffice to say, I thought it was interesting enough to write this post.

Now, why did "-que" move to the end of words? Why did it stop being an independent word? Oh, the mysteries of Latin.

[Update: Lest you think I'm not sufficiently capable to talk about this in Latin...]

Last of the Ancient Greek Videos

Hopefully people who actually know Ancient Greek very well won't shudder too much at what I have to say here.

Ancient Greek Vocabulary

Well, I caved and got another Twitter feed. This time for Ancient Greek vocabulary. Nothing helps like having a huge mass of words taken out of context. Right? Right. So that's what I'm doing. I hope someone will find it useful.

ἀρχή, ἀρχῆς, f, beginning. "…ὃς κατ᾽ ἀρχὰς ἔφησε…" –Herodotus 3.153 #AncientGreek
— Ancient Greek words (@AncientGrkwords) December 26, 2011

That's my first tweet on the feed. I'm trying to get some context on it, but who knows how this will unfold.

Ancient Greek Pronunciation

I'm curious how you do it.

customer survey

Here's the Institute of Biblical Greek's pronunciation guide, if you don't know which you use. Why do I ask? I want to make a few videos for introductory Ancient Greek. But I'm lazy: I want to make only one pronunciation. I'd say I can do the Erasmian without too much trouble.

I'm working on using a more Modern Greek pronunciation, because I'm mega-lazy. See, when I go to Greece (hopefully sooner rather than later), I'd like to learn a bit of Greek to help myself find tourist items in Greek. If I use a Modern Greek pronunciation on Ancient Greek, I can save a few seconds of effort when learning the modern version of the language.

If you find this page, please tweet a link to the poll or this very page to help me get a bigger number of responses. Like I said, I'm lazy.

2 Greek 2 Quit

Thank you Prof. Major. I didn't know these documents existed, but now I do.

First things first: Major shows the 50% and 80% lists for Ancient Greek. 

The 50% list is really short. English needs just over 100 lemmata to hit the 50% of text mark. Greek needs 65 (according to Major, and I have no reason to doubt him). Greek hauls in at about 1,200 words for the 80% list. English doesn't get to 80% until about 2,000. No matter how you slice that, Ancient Greek is easier than English on the vocabulary front. I had suspected this, but wasn't sure. 

Not that 80% is all that hot: you need to be at about 95% coverage in a text to be able to guess successfully what the unknown word might mean. This video is an excellent demonstration. Jump to 19:00 or so for the sickening demonstration he performs. The 90% coverage paragraph has words in it that I can't guess, and I'm a native English speaker. It's really shocking.

Next: Major provides a paper on pedagogy. He seems to be saying that a lot of what we do in teaching Ancient Greek is colored by two things. First, we expect that we can go from zero to grad school in about two semesters. Second, Latin's idiosyncrasies color how we teach Greek. Ut triggers subjunctive and the vast mess that subjunctive involves in Latin, so ἵνα must merit the same attention. Right? Major says not so much. He seems to be on the verge of making some general rules for learning Ancient Greek, but stops short. Too bad. Even so, it provides some context for what I found over the summer.

Reading the Gospel of St. Mark in Greek

I don't want to make a habit of specific book reviews on this blog, but this book demanded an exception (and I did work for the publisher for nearly five years). I really like it. I like it enough that I'm posting a review.

It has one small problem: I like it but can't quite figure out what to do with it. Why don't I describe the author's aims? He is trying to present the Gospel of St. Mark in Greek to several audiences. First, obviously, it is meant for students of New Testament Greek who are starting to read the New Testament after initial study, likely two years. Duckwitz, the author, says this style of text has made reading the whole gospel of Mark in one semester of class a reality, which didn't always happen in the past. Duckwitz also says he has used it as a supplemental reader for first year Greek classes.

The next obvious audience, which should be the largest, is people who have no Greek at all but want to read Mark in Greek anyway. I don't know how much this audience would get out of something like Mounce's Greek for the Rest of Us on its own, but certainly with both books at hand this audience should find New Testament Greek quite accessible. For that matter, someone who really wants to read Mark in Greek bad enough should be able to wade through with just Duckwitz's book. In short, this book answers the question "How do I read the Bible in Greek if I don't know Greek?"

Here's how. Its format is going to be familiar to any student of classics. A few lines of text at the top of the page. Under that is a set of vocabulary, which drops high-frequency words after several repetitions. At the bottom of the page are notes. And the notes are really, really full. They explain everything and then some. They explain so much that at the beginning, there are only two or three lines of Greek on each page. To further aid matters, Duckwitz has provided a quick start to reading Greek in the front of the book and a bit of a grammar reference in the back. This is on top of a glossary of high-frequency words. (It even shows principal parts for the verbs—hooray!)

Duckwitz is a professor of classics, and it shows. Flipping randomly to a page, he talks about tricolon crescens in one of the notes. Duckwitz is also aware that he is dealing with a sacred text, and that shows too. On another random page, he states, "Bethlehem claims His birth, Nazareth, the place where He grew up with His family, is His hometown." (Could you imagine the capital H in a book dealing with this strictly as literature? I can't.)

Anyway, give this book a swing if you're curious about the New Testament in its original language. Even if you don't know Greek. It's affordable, informative and a page-turner.

Purchase information:
Duckwitz, Norbert H. O., Reading the Gospel of St. Mark in Greek. ISBN 978-0-86516-776-6. From the publisher. 

Ancient Greek resources

This doesn't exactly pertain to my formal education, but this really is the heart of self-education: teaching yourself a new language.

I taught myself Ancient Greek over the summer. It took me a few tries over the years to get this to a point where I could read unadapted Ancient Greek, but I finally did it. Here is a series of videos to explain what I did, but it all boils down to this: throw stuff against the wall until it sticks.

1. The introduction



2. A short bit of history



3. Beginners' materials



3 1/2. Not-so-beginners' materials



4. A sample of Herodotus

Beginnings

I just got accepted into the Masters program in linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University. And I love dead languages. Hence the blog name, get it? Get it?

I think Latin is cool. I think Ancient Greek is cool. I speak one, however hesitatingly. I read the other, however slowly. I think you should give 'em a try if you haven't. If you have, I hope that some of what I post is of value.

I think linguistics is pretty cool. What's the fuss? It's only the study of a tool we all use every day. A lot of what I post will be musings about what I'll be learning in the program. I hope some of that will be of value.

If I'm lucky I'll manage to make them both happen in the same post.

And other times, I'll write about other things. I'm not at all sure, since this is a work in progress. In the mean time, have a vicarious trip to grad school on me.