Symmetry between languages
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
In article ?351036...@indiana.edu?, mith...@indiana.edu wrote:
? No, the Indo-European roots are hardly Greek. Greek didn't and doesn't
? have an aspirated b (bh), for example.
...while Indo-european does, right? Have you heard it?
How is an spirated b (bh) actually supposed to sound?
Something like "v", maybe?
You know, "b" is pronounced as "v" in Standard Modern Greek.
? You really are a total complete idiot. I'll explain it one more time
? with a diagram (** indicates borrowing, --- transmission from parents to
? children):
?
? Indo-European *gwherm-
? / \
? / \
? / \
? Pre-Greek *kwherm- \
? (IE *gwh ? PG *kwh) / \
? / \
? Attic therm- \
? (PG *kwh ? At. th before | \
? front vowels, different | \
? changes in other dials.) | wearm Old English
? | | (Breaking of
? Byzantine therm- | vowels before
? (Ancient Greek aspirated | * | r + C)
? t became a continuant, | * |
? modern theta) | * |
? | * warm Middle Engl.
? | * |
? | therm- | Renaissance
? | | |
? Modern Greek therm- therm- warm Modern English
?
? That is, the original word was something like *gwhermos, which became
? thermos in Greek, formus 'warm' in Latin, gharma in Sanskrit, and warm
? in modern English. (A more careful analysis would have to take into
? account whether the same form or closely related forms of the same word
? were the source for the Greek and English descendants.) The Greek word
? was borrowed by other languages during the Renaissance. The
? Indo-European theory is that the forms warm and therm- connected by
? dashes from the ancestral form at the top are related by certain sound
? changes which I have indicated in part above. The Indo-European theory
? has nothing to say about borrowings like English therm- above. If you
? can't understand this, then there's no use arguing with you.
As far as I am concerned, I can assure you I do understand what you mean.
Linguistical affinity has nothing to do with word loans. It's clear.
English "warm", German "warm" and Greek "thermos" are no doupt
linguistically related words.
Our disagreement in this whole discussion is on how long people saying
(something like) "thermos" have lived in Greece. It is not on whether
"thermos" is related to "warm". Of course it is.
You claim "thermos"-speakers invaded Greece around 2.000 B.C. We support
they have lived in Greece for much longer. This is the subject here.
So, since I have understood your arguments and have agreed with your pure
(and not your made-up imaginary) linguistical evidence, in which I recognize
you as a specialist and which is also evident to me, I expect you to show some
willingness in understanding my argument:
Greek-speakers seem to have lived in a stable place long enough to create a
civilisation that would lead to the creation of words like "thermikos",
"energeia", "metron", "metrhsis", "statikos", "statikh", and other.
Then my question is:
Since, according to you, the evolution of Greek and the movements of its
speakers on Earth's surface was symmetrical and analogous to the ones of other
related languages and their repsective speakers, then, how come, the are *not*
such English words like:
"warmal inwork", "warmomeasurer", "warmostander"
, but, rather, instead of them, the borrowed, yet related, Greek ones:
"thermal energy", "thermometer", "thermostat".
(I hope you can immediately observe that I mean theat the Greek words:
"thermos", "en", "ergon", "metron", "isthmi"
are "indoeuropeanly" (?) related to the respective English words:
"warm", "in", "work", "measure", "stand".
However, Greeks had long time enough to construct a word like
"energeia" ("energy")
out of its roots "en" and "ergon".
while Englishpersons (politically correct) did not construct a word like
"inwork"
out of its respective related roots "in" and "work"
W H Y ?
Panagiotis Karras
PS
Btw, what's the "indoeuropean" common origin of "ergon" and "work"?
Let me guess:
I think it will look like "*ghk(a)gwhergkh(e)hwf-", won't it?
However it looks, can you please pronounce it, along with "*gwherm-", record
it in an audio file, and send it to me?
You see, I am interested to work on a computer enginnering a project on
"indoeuropean language speech recognition".
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pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
? No, the Indo-European roots are hardly Greek. Greek didn't and doesn't
? have an aspirated b (bh), for example.
...while Indo-european does, right? Have you heard it?
How is an aspirated b (bh) actually supposed to sound?
You claim Greek-speakers invaded Greece around 2.000 B.C. We support they
have lived in Greece for much longer. This is the subject here.
So, since I have understood your arguments and have agreed with your pure
(and not your made-up imaginary) linguistical evidence, in which I recognize
you as an expert and which is also evident to me, I expect you to show some
willingness in understanding my following argument:
Greek-speakers seem to have lived in a stable place long enough to create a
civilisation that would lead to the creation of words like "thermikos",
"energeia", "metron", "metrhsis", "statikos", "statikh", and others.
Then my question is:
Since, according to you, the evolution of Greek and the movements of its
speakers on earth's surface was symmetrical and analogous to the ones of other
related languages and their repsective speakers, then, how come, the are *not*
such English words like:
"warmal inwork", "warmomeasurer", "warmostander"
, but, rather, instead of them, the borrowed, yet related, Greek ones:
"thermal energy", "thermometer", "thermostat" ?
(I hope you can immediately observe that I mean theat the Greek words:
"thermos", "en", "ergon", "metron", "isthmi"
are ("indoeuropeanly" ?) related to the respective English words:
"warm", "in", "work", "measure" (?), "stand".
However, Greeks had long time enough to construct a word like
"energeia" ("energy")
out of its roots "en" and "ergon".
while Englishpersons (politically correct) did not construct a word like
"inwork"
out of its respective related roots "in" and "work"
W H Y ?
Panagiotis Karras
PS
Btw, what's the " "indoeuropean" common origin " of Greek "ergon", English
"work", German "Werk" and others, which you surely know?
Let me guess:
I think it will look like "*wfergwh-", won't it?
However it looks, can you please pronounce it, along with "*gwherm-", record
it in an audio file, and send it to me?
You see, I am interested to work on a computer enginnering project on
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
? No, the Indo-European roots are hardly Greek. Greek didn't and doesn't
? have an aspirated b (bh), for example.
...while Indo-european does, right? Have you heard it?
How is an aspirated b (bh) actually supposed to sound?
Something like ?v?, maybe?
You know, ?b? is pronounced as ?v? in Standard Modern Greek.
English ?warm?, German ?warm? and Greek ?thermos? are no doupt
linguistically related words.
Our disagreement in this whole discussion is on how long people saying
(something like) ?thermos? have lived in Greece. It is not on whether
?thermos? is related to ?warm?. Of course it is.
You claim Greek-speakers invaded Greece around 2.000 B.C. We support they
have lived in Greece for much longer. This is the subject here.
So, since I have understood your arguments and have agreed with your pure
(and not your made-up imaginary) linguistical evidence, in which I recognize
you as an expert and which is also evident to me, I expect you to show some
willingness in understanding my following argument:
Greek-speakers seem to have lived in a stable place long enough to create a
civilisation that would lead to the creation of words like ?thermikos?,
?energeia?, ?metron?, ?metrhsis?, ?stasis?, ?statikh?, and others.
Then my question is:
Since, according to you, the evolution of Greek and the movements of its
speakers on earth's surface was symmetrical and analogous to the ones of other
related languages and their respective speakers, then, how come, the are *not*
such English words like:
?warmal inwork?, ?warmomeasurer?, ?warmostander?
, but, rather, instead of them, the borrowed, yet related, Greek ones:
?thermal energy?, ?thermometer?, ?thermostat? ?
(I hope you can immediately observe that since the Greek words:
?thermos?, ?en?, ?ergon?, ?metron?, ?isthmi?
are (?indoeuropeanly? ?) related to the respective English words:
?warm?, ?in?, ?work?, ?measure? (?), ?stand?
, I performed a word-building based on these relations.)
Put in another way, Greeks had long time enough to construct a word like
?energeia? (?energy?)
out of its roots ?en? and ?ergon?
, while Englishpersons (politically correct) did not construct a word like
?inwork?
out of its respective related roots ?in? and ?work?.
W H Y ?
Panagiotis Karras
PS
Btw, what's the ?common origin? of Greek ?ergon?, English
?work?, German ?Werk? and others, which you surely know?
Let me guess:
I think it will look like ?*wfergwh-?, won't it?
However it looks, can you please pronounce it, along with ?*gwherm-?, record
it in an audio file, and send it to me?
You see, I am interested to work on a computer enginnering project on
?indoeuropean language speech recognition?.
m...@wxs.nl
On Fri, 20 Mar 1998 07:10:20 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>In article ?351036...@indiana.edu?, mith...@indiana.edu wrote:
>
> How is an spirated b (bh) actually supposed to sound?
> Something like "v", maybe?
No, as aspirated b. A better term, phonetically, is "breathy voice"
or "murmur". The /b/ is not quite fully voiced, but whispered, and
the onset of the following vowel is also breathy. The sound isn't
particularly hard to make, once you've heard it.
Murmured consonants are not found in very many languages of the world,
but they certainly exist. Within the context of Indo-European, it is
of course significant that Sankrit and most modern Indo-Aryan
languages have a full set of murmured consonants (/b"/, /d"/, /g"/,
/dZ"/, etc.).
That doesn't mean that the entity reconstructed as IE *bh was indeed
pronounced as murmured /b"/. We have no sound recordings of IE. All
we can do is compare the different outcomes in teh different
languages, and make an eduacted guess. In the final analysis, *bh,
*dh, etc. are merely "mathematical" symbols that subsume the following
equation:
IE :: Grk Lat Cel Bal Slv Alb Irn Gmc Arm Ind Toc Hit
*dh :: th f d d d d d d d dh t t
*d :: d d d d d d d t t d t t
*t :: t t t t t t t th th t,th t tt
*x, *y and *z would also have done, but are less informative about the
approximate pronunciation. FYI, I think the pronunciations in early
PIE were /d/, /t/ and /tt/ respectively, but that's just my opinion.
> Our disagreement in this whole discussion is on how long people saying
>(something like) "thermos" have lived in Greece. It is not on whether
>"thermos" is related to "warm". Of course it is.
>
> You claim "thermos"-speakers invaded Greece around 2.000 B.C. We support
>they have lived in Greece for much longer. This is the subject here.
And it's a subject that cannot be decided by linguistic arguments
alone.
> Btw, what's the "indoeuropean" common origin of "ergon" and "work"?
> Let me guess:
>
> I think it will look like "*ghk(a)gwhergkh(e)hwf-", won't it?
*wergom (just say: ouergkom).
==
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~
Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~
m...@wxs.nl |_____________|||
========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig
Mikael Thompson
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>
> In article ?351036...@indiana.edu?, mith...@indiana.edu wrote:
>
> ? No, the Indo-European roots are hardly Greek. Greek didn't and doesn't
> ? have an aspirated b (bh), for example.
>
> ...while Indo-european does, right? Have you heard it?
You mean "did." That is how it is reconstructed.
> How is an spirated b (bh) actually supposed to sound?
> Something like "v", maybe?
Try Hindi bh.
> You know, "b" is pronounced as "v" in Standard Modern Greek.
Yes, I know. The stop spirantized in the early Byzantine era IIRC.
> You claim "thermos"-speakers invaded Greece around 2.000 B.C. We support
> they have lived in Greece for much longer. This is the subject here.
>
> So, since I have understood your arguments and have agreed with your pure
> (and not your made-up imaginary) linguistical evidence, in which I recognize
> you as a specialist and which is also evident to me, I expect you to show some
> willingness in understanding my argument:
>
> Greek-speakers seem to have lived in a stable place long enough to create a
> civilisation that would lead to the creation of words like "thermikos",
> "energeia", "metron", "metrhsis", "statikos", "statikh", and other.
Length of residence is no measure of creativity. After all, the Greeks
outstripped both Egypt and Persia despite (or probably because of) being
the new kids in the neighborhood.
> Then my question is:
>
> Since, according to you, the evolution of Greek and the movements of its
> speakers on Earth's surface was symmetrical and analogous to the ones of other
> related languages and their repsective speakers, then, how come, the are *not*
> such English words like:
>
> "warmal inwork", "warmomeasurer", "warmostander"
>
> , but, rather, instead of them, the borrowed, yet related, Greek ones:
>
> "thermal energy", "thermometer", "thermostat".
>
> (I hope you can immediately observe that I mean theat the Greek words:
>
> "thermos", "en", "ergon", "metron", "isthmi"
>
> are "indoeuropeanly" (?) related to the respective English words:
>
> "warm", "in", "work", "measure", "stand".
>
> However, Greeks had long time enough to construct a word like
>
> "energeia" ("energy")
>
> out of its roots "en" and "ergon".
>
> while Englishpersons (politically correct) did not construct a word like
>
> "inwork"
>
> out of its respective related roots "in" and "work"
>
> W H Y ?
You need only compare English and German. English has words based on
Greek and Latin elements, German uses natve German elements. For
example, im-pression, ein-drück. If you compare modern English
vocabulary with Old English vocabulary, however, you'll see that Old
English was similar to German in using largely native words. It has
nothing to do with the language but very much to do with the prestige of
languages. You should not confuse the prestige rightly adhering to
Greek civilization with any facts about their respective origins. The
former is extra-linguistic, the second linguistic. The sounds of Greek
changed regularly thoughout its history. That is the issue involved in
historical reconstruction.
> PS
> Btw, what's the "indoeuropean" common origin of "ergon" and "work"?
Approximately *werg-.
> Let me guess:
>
> I think it will look like "*ghk(a)gwhergkh(e)hwf-", won't it?
You do yourself great discredit acting the fool like that.
Mikael Thompson
Mikael Thompson
Mikael Thompson wrote:
> You mean "did." That is how it is reconstructed.
First I was going to expand on this comment. Then I was going to
include a reference to Miguel's posting, which came up just as I was
rereading this for finishing touches. Instead, I ended up doing
neither. So, see Miguel's posting next to this one. MAT
Ralf Guminski
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote in article
<6etpoe$pu4$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>...
> In article ?351036...@indiana.edu?, mith...@indiana.edu wrote:
> Since, according to you, the evolution of Greek and the movements of
its
> speakers on Earth's surface was symmetrical and analogous to the ones of
other
> related languages and their repsective speakers, then, how come, the are
*not*
> such English words like:
>
> "warmal inwork", "warmomeasurer", "warmostander"
> , but, rather, instead of them, the borrowed, yet related, Greek ones:
>
> "thermal energy", "thermometer", "thermostat".
>
> (I hope you can immediately observe that I mean theat the Greek words:
>
> "thermos", "en", "ergon", "metron", "isthmi"
I would offer up the suggestion that since those concepts or artifacts were
"new", for the sake of precision it was desireable to identify them with
entirely "new" words. Borrowing roots from pre-existing Greek words, or
Latin for that matter, to construct the new "English" or "French" or
"German" words was a matter of expedience and has no bearing on the
relative antiquity of the Greek language. Borrowing roots from other
languages provided "new" words which had the advantage of having roots
that were already well known and could be understood by academics in their
original meaning. Words like "thermos" and "metron" may be Greek words but
"thermometers" neither existed in ancient Greece nor is it even a Greek
word or concept. It is an "English" word which happens to be constructed
using Greek roots.
Cheers,
Nikos Sarantakos
On Fri, 20 Mar 1998 10:07:55 -0500, Mikael Thompson
<mith...@indiana.edu> wrote:
>
>You need only compare English and German. English has words based on
>Greek and Latin elements, German uses natve German elements. For
>example, im-pression, ein-drück. If you compare modern English
>vocabulary with Old English vocabulary, however, you'll see that Old
>English was similar to German in using largely native words. It has
>nothing to do with the language but very much to do with the prestige of
>languages. You should not confuse the prestige rightly adhering to
>Greek civilization with any facts about their respective origins. The
>former is extra-linguistic, the second linguistic. The sounds of Greek
>changed regularly thoughout its history. That is the issue involved in
>historical reconstruction.
you get my drift, ok, say cultured] word formation.
However, there is also a much underrated contribution of Greek to
Eng. and German vocabulary via popular transmission. These words
are sometimes changed beyond recognition. For instance,
Eng. surgery, also Ger. Arzt, Eng. gherkin, also Ger. Gurke, Eng.
church, also Ger. Kirche, Eng. galley [Ger??], Eng maslin, also
Ger. Messing, and hundreds of other words can safely be traced
to Greek, although this is hardly obvious.
ns
Nikos Sarantakos
On 20 Mar 1998 14:36:18 GMT, "Ralf Guminski" <rgum...@sprint.ca>
wrote:
>pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote in article
><6etpoe$pu4$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>...
>> In article ?351036...@indiana.edu?, mith...@indiana.edu wrote:
>
>> Since, according to you, the evolution of Greek and the movements of
>its
>> speakers on Earth's surface was symmetrical and analogous to the ones of
>other
>> related languages and their repsective speakers, then, how come, the are
>*not*
>> such English words like:
>>
>> "warmal inwork", "warmomeasurer", "warmostander"
>> , but, rather, instead of them, the borrowed, yet related, Greek ones:
>>
>> "thermal energy", "thermometer", "thermostat".
>>
>> (I hope you can immediately observe that I mean theat the Greek words:
>>
>> "thermos", "en", "ergon", "metron", "isthmi"
>
>I would offer up the suggestion that since those concepts or artifacts were
>"new", for the sake of precision it was desireable to identify them with
>entirely "new" words. Borrowing roots from pre-existing Greek words, or
>Latin for that matter, to construct the new "English" or "French" or
>"German" words was a matter of expedience and has no bearing on the
>relative antiquity of the Greek language. Borrowing roots from other
>languages provided "new" words which had the advantage of having roots
>that were already well known and could be understood by academics in their
>original meaning. Words like "thermos" and "metron" may be Greek words but
>"thermometers" neither existed in ancient Greece nor is it even a Greek
>word or concept. It is an "English" word which happens to be constructed
>using Greek roots.
>
>Cheers,
Excuse me, but we risk confusing here two distinct phenomena.
Ralf is right in saying that the borrowing of Greek words,
or more precisely Greek roots, for the creation
of neologisms does not mean that the words produced are Greek.
Yes, telephone is not a Greek word in that sense. Neither is, say,
Eng. "thermometer" a borrowing from Gk. "thermometron", a word
that never existed in Greek before, rather Gk. thermometron is a
borrowing from English or more likely French.
The use of Greek is/was due to linguistic prestige, combined with
the classical education of 19th c. scientists. Latin is
also a major contributor, probably more than Greek (although
Latin has its own debt to Greek) even if during the 1930-1960's
there has been a marked shift to Greek (vs Latin, cf. the terminology
of polymers) probably because
some modern major european languages were "more Latin" than others,
while no major european language (read: nation, state) had any
affinity with Greek.
However, many of the words cited by Panayotis, "energeia" for
instance, did exist in AncGreek *as such*, so these were in fact
borrowed (Fr. energie is a loanword fr. the late Latin
energia, which is a loan fr. Greek). The same is valid for very
many other words.
Nikos Sarantakos
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant_2
.
>
Mikael Thompson
Nikos Sarantakos wrote:
> However, there is also a much underrated contribution of Greek to
> Eng. and German vocabulary via popular transmission. These words
> are sometimes changed beyond recognition. For instance,
> Eng. surgery, also Ger. Arzt, Eng. gherkin, also Ger. Gurke, Eng.
> church, also Ger. Kirche, Eng. galley [Ger??], Eng maslin, also
> Ger. Messing, and hundreds of other words can safely be traced
> to Greek, although this is hardly obvious.
True. One should not forget that Greek was the language of the early
Church and provided many words springing from a much humbler level of
society. Then there are numerous Greek words which became common in
Late Latin and from there entered English after the Norman Conquest; one
such word is English "calm," which entered English from French, where it
had come from Italian, deriving from Late Latin and there in turn from
Greek kauma.
Mikael Thompson
Nikos Sarantakos
and also re-entered ModGreek as kalma, a typical ruckwanderer.
French chomage (unemployment) is also a branch of the same tree.
Kauma meant 'burning heat of the sun', whence arose the meaning
'tranquillity of the sea during oppressive heat'.
But note that according to Corominas, the home of this semantic
shift, as well as of the change from -au- to -al- was the Iberian
Peninsula, from where it was irradiated to the rest of Europe.
ns
Loren Petrich
In article <35127b34...@news.xs4all.nl>, <m...@wxs.nl> wrote:
... In the final analysis, *bh,
>*dh, etc. are merely "mathematical" symbols that subsume the following
>equation:
>
>IE :: Grk Lat Cel Bal Slv Alb Irn Gmc Arm Ind Toc Hit
>*dh :: th f d d d d d d d dh t t
>*d :: d d d d d d d t t d t t
>*t :: t t t t t t t th th t,th t tt
>*x, *y and *z would also have done, but are less informative about the
>approximate pronunciation.
I think that modern linguistic practice would be to do something like:
*dh ~ *t1
*d ~ *t2
*t ~ *t3
-- to create reconstruction symbols *t1, *t2, *t3.
FYI, I think the pronunciations in early
>PIE were /d/, /t/ and /tt/ respectively, but that's just my opinion.
I agree with that assessment.
--
Loren Petrich Happiness is a fast Macintosh
pet...@netcom.com And a fast train
My home page: http://www.petrich.com/home.html
Dwight E. Howell
> > I think it will look like "*ghk(a)gwhergkh(e)hwf-", won't it?
>
>
That's easy for you to say!!
gack!!!!!!!!!!
Peter T. Daniels
Dwight E. Howell wrote:
>
> > > I think it will look like "*ghk(a)gwhergkh(e)hwf-", won't it?
> >
> >
>
> That's easy for you to say!!
>
> gack!!!!!!!!!!
Actually it is--Modern Greek orthography has to jump through all sorts
of hoops to notate the voiced stops in words borrowed from e.g. English.
A linguist friend told me about headlines he saw in New York's Greek
newspaper at the time when the neighborhood of Howard Beach was in the
news. Maybe someone can give us (a transliteration of) the Greek
spelling of that name. I don't dare try reconstructing it!
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@worldnet.att.net
Loren Petrich
In article <6f4m0v$i...@bgtnsc03.worldnet.att.net>,
Peter T. Daniels <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>Dwight E. Howell wrote:
>> > *wergom (just say: ouergkom).
>> That's easy for you to say!!
>> gack!!!!!!!!!!
>Actually it is--Modern Greek orthography has to jump through all sorts
>of hoops to notate the voiced stops in words borrowed from e.g. English.
IIRC, the trick is to use spellings that look like "nt" for d,
"mp" for b, and "gk" for g.
>A linguist friend told me about headlines he saw in New York's Greek
>newspaper at the time when the neighborhood of Howard Beach was in the
>news. Maybe someone can give us (a transliteration of) the Greek
>spelling of that name. I don't dare try reconstructing it!
And I wonder how they treat sounds like /S/ (sh) and /Z/ (zh) and
/tS/ (ch) and /dZ/ (j).
D. Edward Gund v. Brighoff
In article <351457F2...@usit.net>,
Dwight E. Howell <deo...@usit.net> wrote:
>> > I think it will look like "*ghk(a)gwhergkh(e)hwf-", won't it?
>>
>>
>
>That's easy for you to say!!
>
>gack!!!!!!!!!!
Easy for a Greek to say, more's the point. Miguel's respelling is a rough
transcription of the presumable Greek phonetic spelling (omicron-upsilon-
epsilon-rho-gamma-kappa-omicron-mu).
--
Daniel "Da" von Brighoff /\ Dilettanten
(de...@midway.uchicago.edu) /__\ erhebt Euch
/____\ gegen die Kunst!
D. Edward Gund v. Brighoff
In article <3512b2a0...@news.innet.lu>,
Nikos Sarantakos <sar...@innet.lu> wrote:
>On Fri, 20 Mar 1998 10:07:55 -0500, Mikael Thompson
><mith...@indiana.edu> wrote:
> >
>>You need only compare English and German. English has words based on
>>Greek and Latin elements, German uses natve German elements. For
>>example, im-pression, ein-drück. If you compare modern English
>>vocabulary with Old English vocabulary, however, you'll see that Old
>>English was similar to German in using largely native words. It has
>>nothing to do with the language but very much to do with the prestige of
>>languages. You should not confuse the prestige rightly adhering to
>>Greek civilization with any facts about their respective origins. The
>>former is extra-linguistic, the second linguistic. The sounds of Greek
>>changed regularly thoughout its history. That is the issue involved in
>>historical reconstruction.
>
>You are speaking here mainly of 'savant' [this is probably French, but
>you get my drift, ok, say cultured] word formation.
(The usual English expression would be "learned".)
>However, there is also a much underrated contribution of Greek to
>Eng. and German vocabulary via popular transmission. These words
>are sometimes changed beyond recognition. For instance,
>Eng. surgery, also Ger. Arzt, Eng. gherkin, also Ger. Gurke, Eng.
>church, also Ger. Kirche, Eng. galley [Ger??],
Ger. Galeasse [<-It. galeazza], Galeere [<- It. galera]
>Eng maslin, also
>Ger. Messing, and hundreds of other words can safely be traced
>to Greek, although this is hardly obvious.
Hundreds? I've only ever encountred a few dozen in either language, most
of which passed through Latin. So if it be an underrated contribution,
it's not much underrated.
Michele Ignelzi
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> Dwight E. Howell wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> >
> > That's easy for you to say!!
> >
> > gack!!!!!!!!!!
>
> of hoops to notate the voiced stops in words borrowed from e.g. English.
> newspaper at the time when the neighborhood of Howard Beach was in the
> news. Maybe someone can give us (a transliteration of) the Greek
> spelling of that name. I don't dare try reconstructing it!
Gaouarnt Mpits?
Michele Ignelzi
Peter T. Daniels
Michele Ignelzi wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >
> > A linguist friend told me about headlines he saw in New York's Greek
> > newspaper at the time when the neighborhood of Howard Beach was in the
> > news. Maybe someone can give us (a transliteration of) the Greek
> > spelling of that name. I don't dare try reconstructing it!
> > --
>
> Gaouarnt Mpits?
>
I think that's about right, but there might even have been something to
mark the initial [h] as not just a gamma. And maybe something to mark
the palatal of <ch>?
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>Michele Ignelzi wrote:
>>
>> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>> >
>> > A linguist friend told me about headlines he saw in New York's Greek
>> > newspaper at the time when the neighborhood of Howard Beach was in the
>> > news. Maybe someone can give us (a transliteration of) the Greek
>> > spelling of that name. I don't dare try reconstructing it!
>> > --
>>
>> Gaouarnt Mpits?
>>
>
>I think that's about right, but there might even have been something to
>mark the initial [h] as not just a gamma.
X (khi) would be the other option.
>And maybe something to mark the palatal of <ch>?
How? Browsing through the articles of Ta Nea online
<http://tanea.dolnet.gr>, I find:
Tzortz Mpous (tz="j", s="sh"), Xelmout Kol (x="h")
Motsart, Mpetoben, Tsai"kofski (ts="ch"), Mentelson, Mpax...
Mihalis Panagiotakis
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>
> On Mon, 23 Mar 1998 10:49:46 -0500, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> >Michele Ignelzi wrote:
> >>
> >> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >> >
> >> > A linguist friend told me about headlines he saw in New York's Greek
> >> > newspaper at the time when the neighborhood of Howard Beach was in the
> >> > news. Maybe someone can give us (a transliteration of) the Greek
> >> > spelling of that name. I don't dare try reconstructing it!
> >> > --
> >>
> >> Gaouarnt Mpits?
> >>
> >
> >I think that's about right, but there might even have been something to
> >mark the initial [h] as not just a gamma.
>
> X (khi) would be the other option.
Yep! it is : "Xaouarnt Mpits", or maybe "Xaouarnt MpHts" if the
writer is old-fashioned: In the Katharevousa the -ea- was usually
translitterated as an ita (eta).
>
> >And maybe something to mark the palatal of <ch>?
>
> How? Browsing through the articles of Ta Nea online
> <http://tanea.dolnet.gr>, I find:
>
> Tzortz Mpous (tz="j", s="sh"), Xelmout Kol (x="h")
>
> Motsart, Mpetoben, Tsai"kofski (ts="ch"), Mentelson, Mpax...
Mparmpantos (Barbados) :-) The official "katharevousa" purists
used to "Hellenize" foreign names i.e: Beethoven is "Beetxobenios),
Shakespear: Sakesphros (pronounced Sa-ke-SPI-ros) etc!
>
> ==
> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~
> Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~
> m...@wxs.nl |_____________|||
>
> ========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig
Regards
Mihalis Panagiotakis
Michele Ignelzi
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>
> On Mon, 23 Mar 1998 10:49:46 -0500, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> >Michele Ignelzi wrote:
> >
> >> Gaouarnt Mpits?
> >>
> >
> >I think that's about right, but there might even have been something to
> >mark the initial [h] as not just a gamma.
>
> X (khi) would be the other option.
Yes. With regard to Cyrillic, Russians prefer G over X as
transliteration of German initial H (Gegel, Gitler, Gamburg).
Transliteration from English is inconsistent: Gollivud, gandikap, xobbi,
xit-parad.
>And maybe something to mark the palatal of <ch>?
>
> How? Browsing through the articles of Ta Nea online
> <http://tanea.dolnet.gr>, I find:
>
> Tzortz Mpous (tz="j", s="sh"), Xelmout Kol (x="h")
>
> Motsart, Mpetoben, Tsai"kofski (ts="ch"), Mentelson, Mpax...
Mendelssohn is an interesting case. Shouldn't they write Menntelson (or
perhaps Men-ntelson)?
Michele Ignelzi
Nikos Sarantakos
>>Eng maslin, also
>>Ger. Messing, and hundreds of other words can safely be traced
>>to Greek, although this is hardly obvious.
>
>Hundreds? I've only ever encountred a few dozen in either language, most
>of which passed through Latin. So if it be an underrated contribution,
>it's not much underrated.
>--
I understand we speak about works of Greek origin in German or English
that were propagated by non-learned means and (usually) are not easily
recognizable. I have never counted them
but please have a look to H&R Kahane's _Scripta Selecta_ (in the 2nd
volume) where they
dress an inventory just of Byzantine Greek words that came to Western
European languages and they have some 150 entries, if I remember well.
And AncGk words would be more, I guess.
Unfortunately, I have no German or English dictionaries just now, so
I can only cite the example of Ampel :-)
ns
Nikos Sarantakos
On Mon, 23 Mar 1998 16:38:52 +0100, Michele Ignelzi <mign...@ats.it>
wrote:
>
>Mendelssohn is an interesting case. Shouldn't they write Menntelson (or
>perhaps Men-ntelson)?
Assuming you are referring to Greeks, both solutions are sensible but
unapplicable, I am afraid. Similar problem with the musical term
andante, transliterated antante. In any case, Greek language is
losing nasals (nd, mb, ng) fast -or already lost them, perhaps,
because
I remember clearly my grand father and assorted elders, all
pronouncing 'Adad' for Entente (when discussing the 1WW).
(Rhodes and other islands do conserve nasals, other regions
possibly).
ns
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>> Motsart, Mpetoben, Tsai"kofski (ts="ch"), Mentelson, Mpax...
>
>Mendelssohn is an interesting case. Shouldn't they write Menntelson (or
>perhaps Men-ntelson)?
There's also Mpil Klinton. <nt> is used for /nt/, /nd/ and /d/, which
I suppose might make for some interesting mispronunciations.
Nikos Sarantakos
On Mon, 23 Mar 1998 20:33:38 GMT, sar...@innet.lu (Nikos Sarantakos)
wrote:
I have found some old notes of mine, so now I have posted on my
homepage a list of some 50 words (beginning with the letters A or B)
whose (non-obvious) origin can be traced in Greek. Excluded are
scientific terms, obvious Greek loanwords etc. plus the majority of
disputed (or contested?) cases. Obviously, *some* words are
exceedingly rare, although I tried to exclude antiquated words or
words with a specific Greek context.
See the URL
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant_2/etymology.html and follow the only
link in English, or go to
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant_2/
and click on the "Newest" link (the one with the baby:-)
Nikos Sarantakos
.
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
> > ? No, the Indo-European roots are hardly Greek. Greek didn't and doesn't
> > ? have an aspirated b (bh), for example.
> >
> > ...while Indo-european does, right? Have you heard it?
>
> You mean "did." That is how it is reconstructed.
How? How do you know there was an aspirated b in that language?
> > How is an spirated b (bh) actually supposed to sound?
> > Something like "v", maybe?
>
> Try Hindi bh.
>
> > You know, "b" is pronounced as "v" in Standard Modern Greek.
>
> Yes, I know. The stop spirantized in the early Byzantine era IIRC.
>
> > You claim "thermos"-speakers invaded Greece around 2.000 B.C. We support
> > they have lived in Greece for much longer. This is the subject here.
> >
> > So, since I have understood your arguments and have agreed with your
pure
> > (and not your made-up imaginary) linguistical evidence, in which I
recognize
> > you as a specialist and which is also evident to me, I expect you to show
some
> > willingness in understanding my argument:
> >
> > Greek-speakers seem to have lived in a stable place long enough to
create a
> > civilisation that would lead to the creation of words like "thermikos",
> > "energeia", "metron", "metrhsis", "statikos", "statikh", and other.
>
> Length of residence is no measure of creativity. After all, the Greeks
> outstripped both Egypt and Persia despite (or probably because of) being
> the new kids in the neighborhood.
They were not "the new kids in the neighborhood". This is the subject here.
Do you realize what you've done? You have used the very same fact we are
putting in dispute as an evidence for its own credibility!...
> > Then my question is:
> >
> > Since, according to you, the evolution of Greek and the movements of its
> > speakers on Earth's surface was symmetrical and analogous to the ones of
other
> > related languages and their repsective speakers, then, how come, the are
*not*
> > such English words like:
> >
> > "warmal inwork", "warmomeasurer", "warmostander"
> >
> > , but, rather, instead of them, the borrowed, yet related, Greek ones:
> >
> > "thermal energy", "thermometer", "thermostat".
> >
> > (I hope you can immediately observe that I mean theat the Greek words:
> >
> > "thermos", "en", "ergon", "metron", "isthmi"
> >
> > are "indoeuropeanly" (?) related to the respective English words:
> >
> > "warm", "in", "work", "measure", "stand".
> >
> > However, Greeks had long time enough to construct a word like
> >
> > "energeia" ("energy")
> >
> > out of its roots "en" and "ergon".
> >
> > while Englishpersons (politically correct) did not construct a word like
> >
> > "inwork"
> >
> > out of its respective related roots "in" and "work"
> >
> > W H Y ?
>
> You need only compare English and German. English has words based on
> Greek and Latin elements, German uses natve German elements. For
> example, im-pression, ein-drück.
The words "im-pression" and "ein-drück" seem to me only as literal
translations of the Greek "en-typwsis".
But I am searching for much deeper words like "energeia" (which means "act"
and not "energy" in Ancient Greek) that would be like "einwerk" in German. Why
aren't they?
> If you compare modern English
> vocabulary with Old English vocabulary, however, you'll see that Old
> English was similar to German in using largely native words. It has
> nothing to do with the language but very much to do with the prestige of
> languages. You should not confuse the prestige rightly adhering to
> Greek civilization with any facts about their respective origins.
This is totally out of the subject.
The subject was this: Where are these native English or German or whatever
words based on native Indoeuropean roots?
Anyway, if there is such a "prestige rightly adhering to Greek
civilization", how can you so easily claim that Greek is merely one branch of
the large "Indoeuropean" family and not something more than that? Then why on
earth didn't the other branches develop such a prestige as well?
> The former is extra-linguistic, the second linguistic. The sounds of Greek
> changed regularly thoughout its history. That is the issue involved in
> historical reconstruction.
Of course the sounds of Greek have changed. We can speculate on this
subject, since we are sure that Greek existed. But how can we do the same for
the "Indoeuropean", which we do not know if it existed as such?
> > PS
> > Btw, what's the "indoeuropean" common origin of "ergon" and "work"?
>
> Approximately *werg-.
>
> > Let me guess:
> > I think it will look like "*ghk(a)gwhergkh(e)hwf-", won't it?
>
> You do yourself great discredit acting the fool like that.
It's a pity that we do not have the same sense of humour.
Anyway, I will to express my point in a humourless way to be sure I will not
be discredited:
"*werg-" looks scandalously similar to "ergon". How come you believe it is
something different than a proto-Greek word?
Who is actually trying to act the fool here?
Panagiotis Karras
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
> > How is an spirated b (bh) actually supposed to sound?
> > Something like "v", maybe?
>
> No, as aspirated b. A better term, phonetically, is "breathy voice"
> or "murmur". The /b/ is not quite fully voiced, but whispered, and
> the onset of the following vowel is also breathy. The sound isn't
> particularly hard to make, once you've heard it.
Then what's its difference from "ph"?
Thank you for the rest interesting information on murmured consonants.
> That doesn't mean that the entity reconstructed as IE *bh was indeed
> pronounced as murmured /b"/. We have no sound recordings of IE. All
> we can do is compare the different outcomes in teh different
> languages, and make an eduacted guess. In the final analysis, *bh,
> *dh, etc. are merely "mathematical" symbols that subsume the following
> equation:
>
> IE :: Grk Lat Cel Bal Slv Alb Irn Gmc Arm Ind Toc Hit
> *dh :: th f d d d d d d d dh t t
> *d :: d d d d d d d t t d t t
> *t :: t t t t t t t th th t,th t tt
>
> *x, *y and *z would also have done, but are less informative about the
> approximate pronunciation. FYI, I think the pronunciations in early
> PIE were /d/, /t/ and /tt/ respectively, but that's just my opinion.
>
> > Our disagreement in this whole discussion is on how long people saying
> >(something like) "thermos" have lived in Greece. It is not on whether
> >"thermos" is related to "warm". Of course it is.
> >
> > You claim "thermos"-speakers invaded Greece around 2.000 B.C. We support
> >they have lived in Greece for much longer. This is the subject here.
>
> And it's a subject that cannot be decided by linguistic arguments
> alone.
Oh! Exactly! You're the first one to admit this! Linguistics is not directly
relevant to where and when people speaking a specific language lived and it
shouldn't make brutal efforts to extend its scope onto such domains,
especially when there isn't something specific to propose or when it lacks
undisputable evidence.
> > Btw, what's the "indoeuropean" common origin of "ergon" and "work"?
>
> *wergom (just say: ouergkom).
Thank you. I see you have added the ending "*-om" to the thema "*werg-".
Well, then it seems even more similar to Greek "ergon", doesn't it?
Anyway, I appreciate your informed reply (as well as your knowledge of the
Modern Greek language and its phonetic orthography), and I would like to make
another question to you:
Oinos, Vin, Vine, Wine, Wein, ... All these words for that alcoholic drink
produced from grapes surely look like they have a common "IE" origin, don't
they?
Then this means that these notorious people talking the "IE" proto-language
should have lived in a place where wine was well known and produced. Correct?
Well, I am sorry, but, as far as I know, neither Hungary, neither the
Unkraine, neither the Caucasus, neither India, neither the Ural Mountains,
neither the Caspian Sea are famous for their wine produce and tradition.
Therefore, none of these places seems to me as a probable homeland of the
"IE"-speaking people, do they?
However, there is a well-known place in the world, where a very ancient
tradition of wine-making is developed, where a God of wine, Dionysus, used to
be worshipped since time immemorial and the most ancient known religious
celebrations were dedicated to him.
Guess which place I mean: Greece!
So, it is true that the subject of "how long Greek-speakers have lived in
Greece" is a subject that cannot be decided by linguistic arguments alone,
but, nevertheless, I think that some sound combined linguistical and
climatological evidence can provide some clues on the case.
Do you think that the art of wine-making, the worship of Dionysus, and the
word for it was brought to Greece by war-oriented Greek-speaking
"Indo-europeans", who invaded the country around 2.000 B.C., coming from a
place where wine could not have been produced?
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
In article <petrichE...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
wrote:
> IIRC, the trick is to use spellings that look like "nt" for d,
> "mp" for b, and "gk" for g.
>
> >A linguist friend told me about headlines he saw in New York's Greek
> >newspaper at the time when the neighborhood of Howard Beach was in the
> >news. Maybe someone can give us (a transliteration of) the Greek
> >spelling of that name. I don't dare try reconstructing it!
>
> And I wonder how they treat sounds like /S/ (sh) and /Z/ (zh) and
> /tS/ (ch) and /dZ/ (j).
The original subject of this discussion was entirely different than the
subject of this reply-message, but since you are so much interested in Modern
Greek Orthography, I'll give you some clues.
What written about "nt", "mp" and "gk" is true. They stand for "d", "b" and
"g" respectively, although they are most commonly pronounced as "nd", "mb" and
"ng" within native greek words. For example, Modern Greek "pente" (="five")
sounds more like "pende".
In my turn, I wonder how somebody would write the Modern Greek "g" (gamma),
as well as the similar-sounding Spanish and Dutch "g", or the sound of the
Modern Greek "x" (chi) in English.
I also wonder how so clearly sounding Greek words as "psychologia" or
"xenophobia" have come to be pronounced as "saikoloji" or "zinofobia" in
English.
I also wonder how can the same spelling "th" be used for both the sound of
Modern Greek "theta", in words as "thin" and the sound of Modern Greek
"delta", in words like "this", in English.
As far as the other sounds are concerned, it goes like this:
/S/ (sh) = no Modern Greek equivalent, only "s" (sigma).
/Z/ (zh) = no Modern Greek equivalent, only "z" (zeta).
/tS/ (ch) = ts (not so strong)
/dZ/ (j) = tz (not so strong)
But, anyway, I think that for representing sounds like these ones, the
Cyrillic alphabet is best fit, and that's why it was created by the Greek monk
Cyrill in the 8th century A.D. in order to cope with the special needs of the
Slavic languages.
Maybe if a special alphabet was created by some Greek monk around the 12th
century A.D. for the English language, we would have a much more sensible
English orthography today, too... :-)
As far as "Howard Beach" is concerned, here is how I think it must have
looked like: "XAOYARNT MPHTS"
Funny, isn't it?
However, have you ever thought how funny the spelling of "ophthalmologist"
or the pronounciation of "pause" look to me?
ke...@jps.net
In article <6fr0fg$nak$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> as well as the similar-sounding Spanish and Dutch "g", or the sound of the
> Modern Greek "x" (chi) in English.
>
> I also wonder how so clearly sounding Greek words as "psychologia" or
> "xenophobia" have come to be pronounced as "saikoloji" or "zinofobia" in
> English.
>
> I also wonder how can the same spelling "th" be used for both the sound of
> Modern Greek "theta", in words as "thin" and the sound of Modern Greek
> "delta", in words like "this", in English.
>
> As far as the other sounds are concerned, it goes like this:
>
> /S/ (sh) = no Modern Greek equivalent, only "s" (sigma).
> /Z/ (zh) = no Modern Greek equivalent, only "z" (zeta).
> /tS/ (ch) = ts (not so strong)
> /dZ/ (j) = tz (not so strong)
>
Very interesting. I may have missed it, but do you think Greek is related
to any other languages? If so, could you explain your theories of the
diffusion of these related languages?
Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala
mith...@indiana.edu
In article <6fqtq8$l9m$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> Oinos, Vin, Vine, Wine, Wein, ... All these words for that alcoholic drink
> produced from grapes surely look like they have a common "IE" origin, don't
> they?
No, the similarities are due to the word being a loan from one of the Semitic
languages, probably Phoenician. It entered Greek and Latin first along with
the product, then was borrowed from them into the more northern IE languages.
> Then this means that these notorious people talking the "IE" proto-language
> should have lived in a place where wine was well known and produced. Correct?
>
> Well, I am sorry, but, as far as I know, neither Hungary, neither the
> Unkraine, neither the Caucasus, neither India, neither the Ural Mountains,
> neither the Caspian Sea are famous for their wine produce and tradition.
As a matter of fact, Hungary has a major wine industry. However, that's
irrelevant.
> Therefore, none of these places seems to me as a probable homeland of the
> "IE"-speaking people, do they?
Since it's not an original IE word, it has no bearing on the question where IE
originated.
Mikael Thompson
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
In article <01bd540d$00286fc0$0b16...@sprint.ca.sprint.ca>,
"Ralf Guminski" <rgum...@sprint.ca> wrote:
> I would offer up the suggestion that since those concepts or artifacts were
> "new", for the sake of precision it was desireable to identify them with
> entirely "new" words. Borrowing roots from pre-existing Greek words, or
> Latin for that matter, to construct the new "English" or "French" or
> "German" words was a matter of expedience and has no bearing on the
> relative antiquity of the Greek language. Borrowing roots from other
> languages provided "new" words which had the advantage of having roots
> that were already well known and could be understood by academics in their
> original meaning. Words like "thermos" and "metron" may be Greek words but
> "thermometers" neither existed in ancient Greece nor is it even a Greek
> word or concept. It is an "English" word which happens to be constructed
> using Greek roots.
Well, I have to admit that I chose examples that were not the best ones to
make my point. Please consult other postings under the same subject to see
more of my arguments.
What I meant is that the English language e.g., although supposedly an "IE"
sister of the Greek, has not exhibited the same richness in word building and
derivation as the Greek has. The fact that this richness of Greek was also
used in word-borrowing to the English is only a minor side effect (btw, the
greek word for this is "parenergeia", I wonder why you don't say "parenergy")
of this phaenomenon.
Thus, your attention is attracted to the wrong issue here.
My point is that the English and other related languages did not have a
richness of vocabulary analogous to the Greek *at the first place*, before the
Rennaisance, and no matter what Greek philosophers studied, although they
should have, since they were all supposedly derived from a unique common
ancestor.
For example, look how words are derived in Greek:
titheemi -> themelion, themis, thesis, thesmos, thetos, theekee, thema
A single verb gives 6 subjects and 1 adjective! And this is a randomly
chosen example. There are hundreds like that.
How can Greek have such a great derivation potential if it is merely another
branch of the "IE" tree, whose other branches lack such a potential? How was
this potential a posteriori developed only within the Greek? Did Greek inherit
from the mother tongue more than its sisters? Why?
Moreover, please check out the question I raise in the posting under the
title "Let's think about Wine!", concerning the origin of the "IE" people.
Finally, I would like to make another comment. The word "energeia" already
existed in Greek meaning "act, execution", before the Rennaisance. Similarly,
the adjective "thermikos" existed long ago in Greek before it was used in the
altered form "thermal" in order to denote "thermal energy". Therefore, it is
not completely true that Greek words were used only as a convenient
alternative, as you claim, but rather because they were the only ones
available. But this is another subject.
Panagiotis Karras
mith...@indiana.edu
I'll try to get around to replying to the rest in timely fashion.
In article <6fqrer$jen$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>
> In article <351286...@indiana.edu>, mith...@indiana.edu wrote:
...
> > You need only compare English and German. English has words based on
> > Greek and Latin elements, German uses natve German elements. For
> > example, im-pression, ein-drück.
>
> The words "im-pression" and "ein-drück" seem to me only as literal
> translations of the Greek "en-typwsis".
The term is "calque." Yes, some of the words I referred to are, some aren't.
...
> > If you compare modern English
> > vocabulary with Old English vocabulary, however, you'll see that Old
> > English was similar to German in using largely native words. It has
> > nothing to do with the language but very much to do with the prestige of
> > languages. You should not confuse the prestige rightly adhering to
> > Greek civilization with any facts about their respective origins.
>
> This is totally out of the subject.
>
> The subject was this: Where are these native English or German or whatever
> words based on native Indoeuropean roots?
As I pointed out in the supposedly off-topic paragraph, such words existed in
Old English. They were then replaced by borrowings from Latin, Greek and
French.
> Anyway, if there is such a "prestige rightly adhering to Greek
> civilization", how can you so easily claim that Greek is merely one branch of
> the large "Indoeuropean" family and not something more than that? Then why on
> earth didn't the other branches develop such a prestige as well?
And French had enormous prestige from the 16th to the 19th century. How could
anyone so easily claim that it is merely a branch of the Romance languages and
not something more than that? Your root error is trying to bring in
extralinguistic matters (international prestige, technological, scientific,
philosophical and literary achievements) into a linguistic issue.
> > The former is extra-linguistic, the second linguistic. The sounds of Greek
> > changed regularly thoughout its history. That is the issue involved in
> > historical reconstruction.
>
> Of course the sounds of Greek have changed. We can speculate on this
> subject, since we are sure that Greek existed. But how can we do the same for
> the "Indoeuropean", which we do not know if it existed as such?
By inference from present and attested past regularities and similarities to
the unrecorded past. There is no reason to think that the principles of
language change suddenly changed fundamentally because records happened to
have survived. How do we know there was a single language from which French,
Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian developed? Well, Latin happens to
have survived (in very rich amounts). How do we know there was a common
language from which all the ancient Greek dialects developed? We don't have
any records of it. How do we know there was a common language from which
German and English developed? It's not attested, nothing was written in it
(so far as we know), yet it would be ridiculous to claim that the records of
Latin somehow make it fundamentally different from Common Germanic or proto-
Greek. Where would YOU draw the line? Proto-Greek? Common Germanic? Proto-
Indo-European?
...
> Anyway, I will to express my point in a humourless way to be sure I will not
> be discredited:
>
> "*werg-" looks scandalously similar to "ergon". How come you believe it is
> something different than a proto-Greek word?
The Old English word for "fish" was written fisc and pronounced very much like
the Modern English. Are they the same word or different words if they are
pronounced the same in different stages of the language? Similarly, Modern
German "Fisch" is pronounced very much like the English. Are they the same
word or different words? Not all words changed drastically in the passage
from IE to ancient Greek, but not all stayed nearly the same either. *gwem-
yo: (that's a late IE form) became "bain-ô" in Greek, "ven-io" in Latin, and
"come" in Modern English.
Mikael Thompson
jka...@otelo.ibmmail.com
In article <6fqtq8$l9m$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> Oinos, Vin, Vine, Wine, Wein, ... All these words for that alcoholic
drink
> produced from grapes surely look like they have a common "IE" origin, don't
> they?
No. I don't know where the Greeks got Oinos from, but I'm pretty sure
that Latin uinus is a borrowing from the Greek, and of course, all of
the others are provably derived from the Latin word; the Romance words
by direct evolution, and the Germanic ones by evolution of a fairly old
borrowing.
> Then this means that these notorious people talking the "IE"
proto-language
> should have lived in a place where wine was well known and produced.
Correct?
It might be an indication if the word were IE. As it is, *if* the Latin
isn't borrowed from Greek, then it is borrowed from the same language as
the Greeks borrowed it from. And of course, both Rome and Greece are
well known wine producing areas. (One guess--but it is just that:
The Etruscians are originally from the north Aegian, before moving
to central Italy. They could have easily been the source of the word
in both languages.)
> Well, I am sorry, but, as far as I know, neither Hungary, neither the
> Unkraine, neither the Caucasus, neither India, neither the Ural Mountains,
> neither the Caspian Sea are famous for their wine produce and tradition.
Apparently, you don't know very far. Hungary produces some excellent
wines. I've also drunk Ukrainian wine, and I would be very surprized
if the Caucasus didn't produce wine.
Not that this has anything to do with the subject. Wine originated in
the Middle East or the Eastern Mediteranian--I don't think any body
disputes that. So did beer, for that matter, but the modern French
word for the beverage is certainly a borrowing from Germanic.
--
James Kanze +33 (0)1 39 23 84 71 mailto: ka...@gabi-soft.fr
+49 (0)69 66 45 33 10 mailto: jka...@otelo.ibmmail.com
GABI Software, 22 rue Jacques-Lemercier, 78000 Versailles, France
Conseils en informatique orientée objet --
-- Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung
jka...@otelo.ibmmail.com
> Anyway, if there is such a "prestige rightly adhering to Greek
> civilization", how can you so easily claim that Greek is merely one branch
of
> the large "Indoeuropean" family and not something more than that? Then why
on
> earth didn't the other branches develop such a prestige as well?
Almost certainly because they weren't in such close contact
with the more advanced Semitic cultures of the eastern Mediteranian.
(Actually, both Persia and India did fairly well as well. Of course,
we know less about them, since they didn't transfer their culture
to the Romans, who then transfered it to us--us, in this case, meaning
western Europeans.)
--
James Kanze +33 (0)1 39 23 84 71 mailto: ka...@gabi-soft.fr
+49 (0)69 66 45 33 10 mailto: jka...@otelo.ibmmail.com
GABI Software, 22 rue Jacques-Lemercier, 78000 Versailles, France
Conseils en informatique orientée objet --
-- Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung
-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
On Tue, 31 Mar 1998 08:18:20 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>In article <35127b34...@news.xs4all.nl>, m...@wxs.nl wrote:
>
>> > How is an spirated b (bh) actually supposed to sound?
>> > Something like "v", maybe?
>>
>> No, as aspirated b. A better term, phonetically, is "breathy voice"
>> or "murmur". The /b/ is not quite fully voiced, but whispered, and
>> the onset of the following vowel is also breathy. The sound isn't
>> particularly hard to make, once you've heard it.
>
> Then what's its difference from "ph"?
/ph/ is voiceless, and causes the initial segment of following vowel
to be voiceless as well (/h/ is the voiceless vowel).
>> And it's a subject that cannot be decided by linguistic arguments
>> alone.
>
> Oh! Exactly! You're the first one to admit this! Linguistics is not directly
>relevant to where and when people speaking a specific language lived and it
>shouldn't make brutal efforts to extend its scope onto such domains,
>especially when there isn't something specific to propose or when it lacks
>undisputable evidence.
Linguistics can exactly determine which languages descend from a
common ancestor. It can give a rough indication of the time elapsed
since the "break-up". It can give some clues about the place of
origin.
> Oinos, Vin, Vine, Wine, Wein, ... All these words for that alcoholic drink
>produced from grapes surely look like they have a common "IE" origin, don't
>they?
>
> Then this means that these notorious people talking the "IE" proto-language
>should have lived in a place where wine was well known and produced. Correct?
>
> Well, I am sorry, but, as far as I know, neither Hungary, neither the
>Unkraine, neither the Caucasus, neither India, neither the Ural Mountains,
>neither the Caspian Sea are famous for their wine produce and tradition.
Actually, Hungary, the Ukraine and the Caucasus are wine-producing
areas and have been for a long time. In fact, grapes were probably
first cultivated in the Caucasus area.
The IE word for wine, *woin-os, looks suspiciously similar to the
Proto-Semitic root *wajn- and the Proto-Kartvelian root *Gwin-. The
Kartvelian word was probably borrowed from Proto-Armenian (*gwini).
Whether the word was borrowed into IE from Semitic or the other way
around is unknown, although the Hittite and Luwian words (wiyana,
wayana) suggest a native IE origin (from the root *wei- "to wind", cf.
Latin vitis (*wei-t-is) "vine"). In that case, the word would have
been borrowed from IE into Semitic. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov take this
as an indication that the Indo-European homeland was in the Caucasus
or Eastern Anatolia.
Nikos Sarantakos
On Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:22:17 -0600, mith...@indiana.edu wrote:
>In article <6fqtq8$l9m$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
> pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>
>> Oinos, Vin, Vine, Wine, Wein, ... All these words for that alcoholic drink
>> produced from grapes surely look like they have a common "IE" origin, don't
>> they?
>
>No, the similarities are due to the word being a loan from one of the Semitic
>languages, probably Phoenician. It entered Greek and Latin first along with
>the product, then was borrowed from them into the more northern IE languages.
Now, this is a worthy thread, combining two of my favourite subjects,
etymology and wine :-)
First of all, Greek oinos had a digamma in front (Foinos), I guess, so
the similarity with other IE types becomes more marked, since digamma
was pronounced like "v"
Then, about the non-IE character of the word, are you sure it is so?
Let me copy from "Le Robert Historique", an authoritative and
modern (~1992) work.
"The term is largely spread in Mediterranean languages, under
different forms: Greek "oinos", Armenian "gine^", Alb. "ve^ne" etc.
but it is not known whether it has an IE origin. Semitic forms
reposing on "*wayn-" [asterisk means the type is unattested]
like Hebrew "yayin" or Ethiopian "wayn" are also cognates(?)
(French text: apparente's) to Lat. vinum, without it being possible
to establish a priority between an IE or semitic origin"
Case is not closed, it seems, at least according to the Robert.
BTW, what about the origin of the name of vine tree? Latin
vinea is a late formation from vinum. Greek is ampelos,
but I have no idea about its origin -it does ring very Greek
to me but I am used to it :-)
Now, while the oenological knowledge of Mr Karras is far from
perfect (not only Hungary, but Caucasus as well is proud for
some excellent wines, I am told:-) I have to remark that I am
unconvinced about the Semitic angle.
I don't have data about the chronology of vine cultivation
and wine production but at first glance the word might
well be an Aegean one, Pre-hellenic if you so like or from
Asia Minor. Also, extensive wine
consumption seems to me more appropriate to Greek
climate than to Middle East although Bible references
to wine are certainly numerous.
Mind you, I think that wine was not easily transported back then (and
until recently). It went acid. That is why the main wines that
were exported until recently were only very sweet wines (sherry,
port, malmsey etc.)
>
>Since it's not an original IE word, it has no bearing on the question where IE
>originated.
See reserves above. While I am certainly unconvinced (to put it
mildly) by efforts to postulate a Greek protoglossa, I sometimes am
baffled by a too doctrinaire IE-izing by some scholars. Perhaps that
is the reason why I prefer to concentrate on loanwords, where
hard data are usually more easy to find.
Nikos Sarantakos
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant_2/
PS
And what about olives? These seem to be a more localised produce
and Latin oliva is a loan from Greek elaiFa (digamma strikes again)
while the Greek word is considered, I believe, a loan from some
Mediterranean language -but let's not get too agricultural!
Torsten Poulin Nielsen
> Oinos, Vin, Vine, Wine, Wein, ... All these words for that alcoholic drink
>produced from grapes surely look like they have a common "IE" origin, don't
>they?
>
> Then this means that these notorious people talking the "IE" proto-language
>should have lived in a place where wine was well known and produced. Correct?
>
> Well, I am sorry, but, as far as I know, neither Hungary, neither the
>Unkraine, neither the Caucasus, neither India, neither the Ural Mountains,
>neither the Caspian Sea are famous for their wine produce and tradition.
>
> Therefore, none of these places seems to me as a probable homeland of the
>"IE"-speaking people, do they?
Not a good example. Vin in Scandinavian is of course a loan from latin vinum.
It's an old loan: Old Icelandic has vin and Gothic has wein, but a loan
none the less. The term was obviously borrowed along with the beverage.
By your own logic that could count against your out-of-Greece theory. If
our language is derived from proto-Greek, then why did we have to borrow
the word 'vin' from Latin? And why on earth are you bringing Hungary into
the picture. Hungarian is not IE. In any case, single examples are useless.
The Danish lexicon includes words like 'anorak' and 'kajak'. Can they be
used as an argument for proto-Inuit being the ancestor of Danish? Of
course not, but they may shed some light on our cultural connection with
Greenland.
The entire idea of proto-Greek being the ancestor of all IE languages
is moot. Just a cursory glance at Lithuanian would show you that
your stance is indefensible. I have no suggestions as to where IE
originated but I see no indications whatsoever for proto-Greek being the
common ancestral language. How on earth are you going to derive Danish
'kom(me)' (to use a slight variation of a previous example in this thread)
from the Greek 'bain'? It is much easier to see the connection of
both to Sanskrit 'gam'. Or another example: Is it really reasonable to
claim that a w or v was added to greek 'ergon' to yield English 'work'
and Danish 'værk' and to Greek 'ear' (spring) to yield Latin 'ver',
Danish 'vår', Sanskrit 'vasar' (early), and Lithuanian 'vasaru' (summer)?
The ear, ver, vår, vasar, vasaru example is especially illustrative
because each of these words are from different sub-families of IE, yet
all of them, except Greek, have initial 'v'. Is the conclusion not
obvious? That somewhere along the path from proto-IE to Greek, 'v'
was lost in the initial position. It is highly unlikely that the
opposite should be true.
-Torsten
Torsten Poulin Nielsen
On Wed, 01 Apr 1998 00:26:38 +0000 (GMT), Mike <Kau...@post2.tele.dk> wrote:
>Wine?
>In short: Oinos, vin, wine etc..........Water in danish = vand (soft 'd')
>well..I don't know :-)
Vand comes from ON vatn (cf. Swedish vatten). The 'd' isn't soft, it's silent.
Those 'nd's with a silent 'd' occur without good reason in several words.
I don't think it's a metathetic change. It's more likely just an ornament
left by the orthographic excesses of earlier centuries (we also have mand
for man, etc.)
-Torsten
Mike
In article <slrn6i2ojd....@ask.diku.dk>, Torsten Poulin Nielsen
In short: Oinos, vin, wine etc..........Water in danish = vand (soft 'd')
well..I don't know :-)
Ross Clark
If you don't mind I'll supply some simple glosses for non-Hellenists like
me.
>
> titheemi
"to place, put"
-> themelion,
"foundation"
themis,
"law"
thesis,
"setting"
thesmos,
"rule"
thetos,
"placed"
theekee,
"box, chest"
thema
"proposition"
>
> A single verb gives 6 subjects
I think you mean "nouns"
and 1 adjective! And this is a randomly
> chosen example. There are hundreds like that.
>
> How can Greek have such a great derivation potential if it is merely another
> branch of the "IE" tree, whose other branches lack such a potential? How was
> this potential a posteriori developed only within the Greek? Did Greek inherit
> from the mother tongue more than its sisters? Why?
Well let's suppose that you are right and that Greek is unique among IE
languages in the richness of its derivational morphology. You yourself
have already suggested two ways in which this might have come about, both
quite consistent with the position of Greek as a branch of IE: (i) the
derivational possibilities are an original property of PIE which has been
uniquely well preserved in Greek; (ii) Greek has developed this potential
to a unique degree during its separate history. Do you think this is
impossible? Do you believe that languages are given their properties once
for all eternity, and cannot develop or change?
But in fact you are not right. Here is a selection of Sanskrit words
related to the same IE root:
dádha:ti "he places"
dhá:tuh "element"
dhá:tar- "founder"
dha:tár- "creator"
dha:nam "container"
dha:man- "law"
-dhitáh "placed"
Not only similar in the range of derivative forms, but even strikingly
parallel here and there! Almost enough to make you believe in...but no,
I'll spare your feelings.
Ross Clark
Garry Williams
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> What I meant is that the English language e.g., although supposedly an "IE"
>sister of the Greek, has not exhibited the same richness in word building and
>derivation as the Greek has. The fact that this richness of Greek was also
Would you mind explaining just what you mean by "richness in word
building" and how you've figured out that Greek has this quality to a
greater degree than other languages, for example English, and why this
is necessarily a more desirable, useful or whatever quality for a
language to have and finally how this demonstrates that Greek is the
parent language, rather than Proto-Indo-European.
>used in word-borrowing to the English is only a minor side effect (btw, the
>greek word for this is "parenergeia", I wonder why you don't say "parenergy")
>of this phaenomenon.
>
> Thus, your attention is attracted to the wrong issue here.
>
> My point is that the English and other related languages did not have a
>richness of vocabulary analogous to the Greek *at the first place*, before the
>Rennaisance, and no matter what Greek philosophers studied, although they
>should have, since they were all supposedly derived from a unique common
>ancestor.
If English wasn't rich before, it sure is now! It's absorbed *lots* of
words from lots of languages and has a pretty good-sized vocabulary,
don't you think? But that aside, what's your point?
> For example, look how words are derived in Greek:
>
>titheemi -> themelion, themis, thesis, thesmos, thetos, theekee, thema
>
> A single verb gives 6 subjects and 1 adjective! And this is a randomly
>chosen example. There are hundreds like that.
And I'll bet you think other languages just can't do that, right? I'm
not going to spend a lot time thinking about this since it doesn't
lead to the conclusions that you seem to think it does, but looking at
your example and without hunting down a Greek dictionary, I'm thinking
that your "titheemi" means more or less "to place, put, set" in
English, right? Ok, so, we have the English verb "to set", we have the
noun "setting" (like a place setting for a table, for instance), then
there's "setter" a type of dog that sets when game is spotted, and of
course when we set ourselves down, we do so on a "seat", and having
put ourselves there we have "settled" down, sort of like the
"settlings" at the bottom of a teacup. Should I bother to drag in
"sit" and its variations too, or have I made my point?
The funnest part of this is that you don't realize that I was able to
pull an example like this up exactly because English and Greek are
both Indo-European languages and thus have much in common not only in
the way of vocabulary, but also in ways new words are formed.
> How can Greek have such a great derivation potential if it is merely another
>branch of the "IE" tree, whose other branches lack such a potential? How was
>this potential a posteriori developed only within the Greek? Did Greek inherit
>from the mother tongue more than its sisters? Why?
See above example for showing that these ideas are simply silly.
> Moreover, please check out the question I raise in the posting under the
>title "Let's think about Wine!", concerning the origin of the "IE" people.
Haven't got there yet, but looking forward to it. I can use a drink!
:-)
--
Garry Williams
gdw...@earthlink.net or
gdw...@william.salzo.cary.nc.us
Unknown
I sort of shifted the discussion to pronounciation since asking why X
is pronounced z really is about that anyway.
You have to be careful. Greek usage radiated in all directions.
A lot of "scholars" make the mistake of only studying the westward one,
esp because "classics" study Greek with Latin.
Spanish seems to have the closest pronounciation to the most customary
Greek-Latin transliterations. I once had a Cuban boss and when she
adressed me as "Mr Panayotoulos" (when most folks misponounce it
"Pan-tza-toh-pew-lous") I replied "Malista!" in surprise.. I don't
know why, but Spanish is supposed to have retained more Latin than
Italian.. and Greek, Latin, Romanian and Albanian are supposed to have
derived from the same proto-Messogian language that came to the region
with the second IndoEuropean wave..
Russians and other Slavs also do above-average in pronouncing Greek,
because the cross-cultural links have been more recent and have thusly
atrophied less. In the "west", lack of contact, allowed for
significant deformations to take place in the understanding and
speaking of Greek..
But you have to also study Hebrew and Hindu and Persian
transliterations. In the Septuagint of the Old Testament, there is a
section which starts "Aleph, Beth, Gimmel.." which is a good starting
point.. W Syndey Allen's Vox Graeca falls apart when he tries to
explain why Hindu coins don't follow his theory on ypsilon, for
example.. then there's a whole bunch of very stupid mistakes made by
some otherwise intelligent people on things that happened in 800 BC
being applied to Greek as it was spoken in 200 BC or 200 AD, because
they apply the word "ancient" unrigorously.. and Greeks can become
lazy and make the differences seem greater than they are.. a
cantankerous Greek can complain a lot more about reading Sophocles
than a stuck-up Brit about Shakespeare, even though the differences in
the language are actually about the same (because formation of a body
of literature tends to freeze up change)..
Here's a US-English attempt at modern Greek pronounciation
Alpha - a
Beta (vita) - v
Gamma (w'amma)- (a cross between y, w and gh)
Delta (dthelta) - th (hard)
Epsilon - e (eh-psilon, means eh-high)
Zita - z
Eta (ita) - ee ( half-way between i and e if you listen closely enough )
Theta (thita) - th (soft)
Iota - i
Kappa - k
Lamda (lamtha) - l
Mu (as in the word "me") - m
Nu (nih) - n
Ksi (ksih - as if prefixing "see" with a "k") - x (ks)
Omicron - o (o-micron, means o-small)
Pi (as in [sorry!] the word "pee") - p
Rho - r
Sigma (si'w'ma) - s
Tau (taf) - t
Ypsilon - y (y-grec in some laguages - ih-psilon meand ih-high)
Phi (as in the word "fee") - f
Chi (as in the word "he") - h (guttoral, as in kh)
Psi (psie) - ps
Omega - o (oh-mega, means oh-big)
Maybe this provides another clue: In my aunt's neighborhood in Athens
there was a widowed Swiss woman who had married a Greek and lived most
of her life in Greece. After forty-odd years you could only notice a
hissing sound in her pronounciation that gave her a way as possibly
being non-Greek, but most people thought she just had something wrong
with her throat.
- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bioengineer-Financier, NYC
BachMozart ReaganQuayle EvrytanoKastorian http://WWW.Dorsai.Org/~vjp2
vjp2@{MCIMail.Com|CompuServe.Com|Dorsai.Org}
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
jka...@otelo.ibmmail.com
In article <35723fa9....@news.wxs.nl>,
m...@wxs.nl wrote:
> The IE word for wine, *woin-os, looks suspiciously similar to the
> Proto-Semitic root *wajn- and the Proto-Kartvelian root *Gwin-. The
> Kartvelian word was probably borrowed from Proto-Armenian (*gwini).
> Whether the word was borrowed into IE from Semitic or the other way
> around is unknown, although the Hittite and Luwian words (wiyana,
> wayana) suggest a native IE origin (from the root *wei- "to wind", cf.
> Latin vitis (*wei-t-is) "vine"). In that case, the word would have
> been borrowed from IE into Semitic. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov take this
> as an indication that the Indo-European homeland was in the Caucasus
> or Eastern Anatolia.
Two questions: first, I have often read that to be considered IE, it
is important that the root be found in several widely distributed
languages. Thus, for example, the fact that the word for wine is
the same in Greek and Latin would not be considered indicating
IE. (Similarly, the "IE" origins for Beech--earlier used as a
"proof" of a western origin--is discounted because the word is
only found in the western languages: Celtic, Italic, and Germanic.)
Wouldn't this argument also hold for the word for wine, or is there
something in the Hittite evidence that is more revealing.
Second: the last major book I have seen concerning IE was "Des Steppes
a l'Ocean", by Meillet. From discussion here, I rather gather that
there has been some evolution since then. Could you recommend a
good modern book, accessible by someone who is not formally trained
in the field.
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
In article ?35214a1c...@news.innet.lu?, sar...@innet.lu wrote:
? Now, this is a worthy thread, combining two of my favourite subjects,
? etymology and wine :-)
Ki emena h idea moy hr0e enw epina krasi.
? First of all, Greek oinos had a digamma in front (Foinos), I guess, so
? the similarity with other IE types becomes more marked, since digamma
? was pronounced like ?v?
...while there has been a person in this thread claiming that Greek did not
posses a /v/ sound in the front of words, therefore it be a late outcome of
the IE family. I am glad to see you know.
? Then, about the non-IE character of the word, are you sure it is so?
? Let me copy from ?Le Robert Historique?, an authoritative and
? modern (~1992) work.
?
? ?The term is largely spread in Mediterranean languages, under
? different forms: Greek ?oinos?, Armenian ?gine^?, Alb. ?ve^ne? etc.
? but it is not known whether it has an IE origin. Semitic forms
? reposing on ?*wayn-? [asterisk means the type is unattested]
? like Hebrew ?yayin? or Ethiopian ?wayn? are also cognates(?)
? (French text: apparente's) to Lat. vinum, without it being possible
? to establish a priority between an IE or semitic origin?
?
? Case is not closed, it seems, at least according to the Robert.
...while there have been various persons in this thread claiming with
absolute confidence one of the two viewpoints and telling me that I should not
doupt the year-long investigations of linguists and their determined outcomes.
BTW, the proclaimed IE root of ?Foinos? was ?*woinos?, once again identical
to the Greek type.
Anyway, I am glad to see you are more open-minded than them.
? BTW, what about the origin of the name of vine tree? Latin
? vinea is a late formation from vinum. Greek is ampelos,
? but I have no idea about its origin -it does ring very Greek
? to me but I am used to it :-)
ampelos ? amphi + helix = ?double helix?
n. helix ? vb. helissoo ? thema Felis-
BTW, ?double helix? is also the nickname biologists use for the DNA.
? Now, while the oenological knowledge of Mr Karras is far from
? perfect (not only Hungary, but Caucasus as well is proud for
? some excellent wines, I am told:-) I have to remark that I am
? unconvinced about the Semitic angle.
I am very careful in my statements. I have said:
Well, I am sorry, but, as far as I know, neither Hungary, neither the
Unkraine, neither the Caucasus, neither India, neither the Ural Mountains,
neither the Caspian Sea are famous for their wine produce and tradition.
I meant that the places above do not seem to have had a millennia-long
tradition of wine cultivation, just as they did not have Dionysus, not that
they do not produce wine. It was a sound climatological argument.
BTW, I also did not mean Hungarian is an IE language, as some people
thought, only that Hungary is a proclaimed IE homeland.
? I don't have data about the chronology of vine cultivation
? and wine production but at first glance the word might
? well be an Aegean one, Pre-hellenic if you so like or from
? Asia Minor.
One of my basic questions on this IE subject has been:
?How do we determine which words are pre-hellenic??
Now I have a clue: We attribute as ?pre-hellenic? any word that does not fit
the rest arbitrary assumptions of our theory, although we could also suppose
it is IE as well. That's a lovely practice!
? Also, extensive wine
? consumption seems to me more appropriate to Greek
? climate than to Middle East although Bible references
? to wine are certainly numerous.
I am glad you finally do agree with my original climatological argument.
? Mind you, I think that wine was not easily transported back then (and
? until recently). It went acid. That is why the main wines that
? were exported until recently were only very sweet wines (sherry,
? port, malmsey etc.)
?
? ? Since it's not an original IE word, it has no bearing on the question
? ? where IE originated.
?
? See reserves above. While I am certainly unconvinced (to put it
? mildly) by efforts to postulate a Greek protoglossa, I sometimes am
? baffled by a too doctrinaire IE-izing by some scholars. Perhaps that
? is the reason why I prefer to concentrate on loanwords, where
? hard data are usually more easy to find.
BTW, I have noticed that it is easy for many linguists in this discussion to
alternate between a loanword- and a common-origin- interpretation, while they
all had determinately demonstrated against non-linguists who had proclaimed
borrowing instead of common origins at an earlier stage of this discussion.
That's also another wonderful scientific practice!
Panagiotis Karras
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
In article ?35723fa9....@news.wxs.nl?, m...@wxs.nl wrote:
? ?? No, as aspirated b. A better term, phonetically, is ?breathy voice?
? ?? or ?murmur?. The /b/ is not quite fully voiced, but whispered, and
? ?? the onset of the following vowel is also breathy. The sound isn't
? ?? particularly hard to make, once you've heard it.
? ?
? ? Then what's its difference from ?ph??
?
? /ph/ is voiceless, and causes the initial segment of following vowel
? to be voiceless as well (/h/ is the voiceless vowel).
So, /bh/ is not quite fully voiced, but whispered, while /ph/ is voiceless.
Well, I would be more certain if I heard them both.
? Linguistics can exactly determine which languages descend from a
? common ancestor. It can give a rough indication of the time elapsed
? since the ?break-up?. It can give some clues about the place of
? origin.
?
? Actually, Hungary, the Ukraine and the Caucasus are wine-producing
? areas and have been for a long time.
I did not say they are not. I said they do not have the perfect climate for
wine cultivation, like Greece does, and that Dionysus was not worshipped
there.
? In fact, grapes were probably first cultivated in the Caucasus area.
Based on which evidence?
? The IE word for wine, *woin-os, looks suspiciously similar to the
? Proto-Semitic root *wajn- and the Proto-Kartvelian root *Gwin-.
...and it is the same as the Greek ?Foinos?.
? The
? Kartvelian word was probably borrowed from Proto-Armenian (*gwini).
? Whether the word was borrowed into IE from Semitic or the other way
? around is unknown, although the Hittite and Luwian words (wiyana,
? wayana) suggest a native IE origin (from the root *wei- ?to wind?, cf.
? Latin vitis (*wei-t-is) ?vine?). In that case, the word would have
? been borrowed from IE into Semitic. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov take this
? as an indication that the Indo-European homeland was in the Caucasus
? or Eastern Anatolia.
...while the standard theory holds that ?Indoeuropeans? invaded Greece from
the north.
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
In article ?slrn6i2ojd....@ask.diku.dk?, tor...@diku.dk (Torsten
Poulin Nielsen) wrote:
? Not a good example. Vin in Scandinavian is of course a loan from latin
? vinum.
? It's an old loan: Old Icelandic has vin and Gothic has wein, but a loan
? none the less. The term was obviously borrowed along with the beverage.
? By your own logic that could count against your out-of-Greece theory. If
? our language is derived from proto-Greek, then why did we have to borrow
? the word 'vin' from Latin?
The proto-Greek word for wine would certainly be forgotten in Scandinavia,
where wine is not cultivated.
? And why on earth are you bringing Hungary into
? the picture. Hungarian is not IE.
I didn't say so. Hungary is a proclaimed IE geographical homeland.
? In any case, single examples are useless.
? The Danish lexicon includes words like 'anorak' and 'kajak'. Can they be
? used as an argument for proto-Inuit being the ancestor of Danish?
Danish belongs to the Germanic group of the ?IE? family. Your example would
be less unreasonable and more relevant if there were other IE languages
including words like 'anorak' and 'kajak'. There are not.
? Of course not, but they may shed some light on our cultural connection with
? Greenland.
?
? The entire idea of proto-Greek being the ancestor of all IE languages
? is moot. Just a cursory glance at Lithuanian would show you that
? your stance is indefensible.
What about Lithuanian? It's very close to Homeric Greek, isn't it?
Besides, my main problem is not whether proto-Greek is the ancestor of all
or not, although it seems very plausible to me to be, for reasons of the
language's assymetry to other IE languages (cf. thread ?Symmetry between
languages?).
My main problem is the unfounded extension of the IE theory to the arbitrary
claim that Greece was invaded by war-oriented ?Indoeuropeans? around 2.000
B.C. The term ?arbitrary? is used on the basis that this date is being shifted
according to state-of-the-art archaelogical findings (e.g. Linear B
decipherment).
? I have no suggestions as to where IE
? originated but I see no indications whatsoever for proto-Greek being the
? common ancestral language. How on earth are you going to derive Danish
? 'kom(me)' (to use a slight variation of a previous example in this thread)
? from the Greek 'bain'? It is much easier to see the connection of
? both to Sanskrit 'gam'.
You mean the verb 'bainoo'?
If this is what you mean, then can you give me the Sanskrit equivalents to
the Greek derivations of 'bainoo':
bainoo -? badeen, badizoo, bathmos, bathron, bados, basimos, basis, bateer,
batos, bebaios, bebeelos, beema, beelos, boomos, beessa, bibazoo,
bibaoo, baktron, bakteeria, bastazoo, bastagma, bastaktos, ...
, where I do not mention words build out of ?bainoo? combined with others,
like ?basileus?.
Greek derives so much within itself, thus it is quite different from other
IE languages and somehow unique among them, isn't it? How do you explain this
uniqueness?
? Or another example: Is it really reasonable to
? claim that a w or v was added to greek 'ergon'
Wrong. The original Greek was ?Fergon?.
? to yield English 'work'
? and Danish 'værk' and to Greek 'ear' (spring) to yield Latin 'ver',
? Danish 'vår', Sanskrit 'vasar' (early), and Lithuanian 'vasaru' (summer)?
? The ear, ver, vår, vasar, vasaru example is especially illustrative
? because each of these words are from different sub-families of IE, yet
? all of them, except Greek, have initial 'v'. Is the conclusion not
? obvious? That somewhere along the path from proto-IE to Greek, 'v'
? was lost in the initial position. It is highly unlikely that the
? opposite should be true.
No. Greek originally used a 'digamma': ?F?, sounding like /v/.
Nikos Sarantakos
On 1 Apr 1998 10:36:47 GMT, vj...@dorsai.org @smtp.dorsai.org (Vasos
Panagiotopoulos +1-917-287-8087 Bioengineer-Financier) wrote:
>
>Spanish seems to have the closest pronounciation to the most customary
>Greek-Latin transliterations. I once had a Cuban boss and when she
>adressed me as "Mr Panayotoulos" (when most folks misponounce it
>"Pan-tza-toh-pew-lous") I replied "Malista!" in surprise.. I don't
>know why, but Spanish is supposed to have retained more Latin than
>Italian.. and Greek, Latin, Romanian and Albanian are supposed to have
>derived from the same proto-Messogian language that came to the region
>with the second IndoEuropean wave..
My own experience with Spaniards tends to agree. They are excellent
pronouncers of Greek, and the way they speak sounds identical
especially if you cannot actually catch the words. Reason is probably
that they only have 5 vowel sounds, just like Greeks, no long and
short vowels.
Mind you, this is reciprocal. Greeks are able to speak excellent
Spanish and we have fooled many a Spaniard into believing
we are also Spaniards from another region.
ns
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
In article ?6frj90$8m8$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com?, jka...@otelo.ibmmail.com wrote:
? ? Anyway, if there is such a ?prestige rightly adhering to Greek
? ? civilization?, how can you so easily claim that Greek is merely one branch
? ? of the large ?Indoeuropean? family and not something more than that? Then
? ? why on earth didn't the other branches develop such a prestige as well?
First of all let me correct something: When I quoted 'Greek civilization'
above, I should actually have corrected it to 'Greek language', since this is
what I am talking about, but also what the original writer of the quotation
probably meant. There should be no confusion between the inherent qualities of
the Greek language and the scientific and cultural achievements of the Greeks.
So, the answer, the correction notwithstanding, was:
? Almost certainly because they weren't in such close contact
? with the more advanced Semitic cultures of the eastern Mediteranian.
This is obviously wrong, if the subject is the 'prestige rightly adhering to
Greek language'. The richness of expression, word-building and derivation of
Greek owes nothing to a semitic or other influence, does it?
As far as civilization is concerned, then what it written above, of course
irrelevant to our linguistical subject, is also a quite mislead, since there
had been no Semitic philosophers or theoretical mathematicians before the
Greeks.
But our subject here is the richness of the Greek language compared to its
'sisters', i.e. its 'assymetry'.
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
On Wed, 01 Apr 1998 09:52:36 -0600, jka...@otelo.ibmmail.com wrote:
>Two questions: first, I have often read that to be considered IE, it
>is important that the root be found in several widely distributed
>languages. Thus, for example, the fact that the word for wine is
>the same in Greek and Latin would not be considered indicating
>IE. (Similarly, the "IE" origins for Beech--earlier used as a
>"proof" of a western origin--is discounted because the word is
>only found in the western languages: Celtic, Italic, and Germanic.)
>Wouldn't this argument also hold for the word for wine, or is there
>something in the Hittite evidence that is more revealing.
*wei- "to wind, to bend, to twist" is as solid as they come, attested
in practically all branches (and with the meaning "branch", as in
Sanskrit vaya: "branch, twig", Slavic ve^ja "branch, horn", Welsh
gwialen "twig"). There are numerous root extensions *wi-l-, *wi-m-,
*wi-r- ("wire"), *wi-t- (Lat. "vitis", Rus. "vetka"), *wi-d-, *wi-k-,
*wi-g- ("wicker"), *wi-p-, *wi-b-, *wi-s- etc. As to *wei-n-/*wi-n-,
we have Skrt. vya:na- "winding", OIr. ar-fen- (*win-) "to fence
[off]", Greek is, inos (*win-s) "sinew", Slavic ve^nIc "wreath", Czech
vi'nek "braid", OE wine-wincla "Uferschnecke" ("shore snail?"), OE
wining "ribbon, braid". In view of all that, *wei-on-os, *woi-on-os
(as in Hittite wiyana- and Luwian wayana-) would have been an
unsurprising IE formation for a climbing, winding plant such as the
vine.
>Second: the last major book I have seen concerning IE was "Des Steppes
>a l'Ocean", by Meillet. From discussion here, I rather gather that
>there has been some evolution since then. Could you recommend a
>good modern book, accessible by someone who is not formally trained
>in the field.
Mallory's "In Search of the Indo-Europeans". I don't agree with it
(my position is somewhat intermediate between that of Mallory and
Renfrew), but it contains a good summary of what is known, what is
not, and what is speculated.
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
On Wed, 01 Apr 1998 12:03:49 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>In article ?35723fa9....@news.wxs.nl?, m...@wxs.nl wrote:
>? In fact, grapes were probably first cultivated in the Caucasus area.
>
> Based on which evidence?
Palaeobotanic evidence. I have oly second-hand information about
this, but during a discussion we had on the Basque-list about grapes,
Larry Trask, the well-known linguist and vasconist, whom I know to be
a higly reliable source on just about anything, dug out a book on the
history of viticulture, by one Hugh Johnson, and concluded:
"There are many species of grapes growing all over the world, and you
can make wine from any of them -- but then you can make wine from
dandelion leaves, if you want to (my mother always did). The key
point is that only one species of grape, Vitis vinifera, makes *good*
wine. This is the Caucasian species which spread out across the
Mediterranean and eventually the world -- and it is not indigenous
anywhere in the world except in and near the Caucasus."
From what I've seen elsewhere, this seems to be the general consensus.
Peter T. Daniels
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>
> >Second: the last major book I have seen concerning IE was "Des Steppes
> >a l'Ocean", by Meillet. From discussion here, I rather gather that
> >there has been some evolution since then. Could you recommend a
> >good modern book, accessible by someone who is not formally trained
> >in the field.
>
> Mallory's "In Search of the Indo-Europeans". I don't agree with it
> (my position is somewhat intermediate between that of Mallory and
> Renfrew), but it contains a good summary of what is known, what is
> not, and what is speculated.
>
Isn't there a fairly recent volume by Martinet with a title something
like the "Steppes ... Ocean" one? Though I don't think of him as an
Indo-Europeanist.
Also, there's a chapter on IE culture in Lehmann's *Theoretical
Foundations of IE Linguistics* (which is a history of IE studies, which
are shown to lead directly to what I am told is Lehmann's completely
idiosyncratic interpretation of IE).
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@worldnet.att.net
D. Edward Gund v. Brighoff
>subject of this reply-message, but since you are so much interested in Modern
>Greek Orthography, I'll give you some clues.
>
> What written about "nt", "mp" and "gk" is true. They stand for "d", "b" and
>"g" respectively, although they are most commonly pronounced as "nd", "mb" and
>"ng" within native greek words. For example, Modern Greek "pente" (="five")
>sounds more like "pende".
>
> In my turn, I wonder how somebody would write the Modern Greek "g" (gamma),
>Modern Greek "x" (chi) in English.
These sounds are often transcribed into English as <gh> and <kh>, respec-
tively, e.g. 'ghoul' (for Arabic [Gu:l]), 'khan' (Ar. [xa:n]). <ch> is
used for Ancient Greek 'chi', but <kh> is preferred in modern names
(probably to avoid confusion with English <ch> = [tS]). E.g., <Khios> for
Ancient Greek <Chios>.
> I also wonder how so clearly sounding Greek words as "psychologia" or
>"xenophobia" have come to be pronounced as "saikoloji" or "zinofobia" in
>English.
Simple: These are spelling pronunciations. Very few words have come into
English directly from Greek.
> I also wonder how can the same spelling "th" be used for both the sound of
>Modern Greek "theta", in words as "thin" and the sound of Modern Greek
>"delta", in words like "this", in English.
In Old English, [T] (Greek theta) was the basic sound; the so-called "soft
th" developed out of it. Very few words have this sound so it probably
wasn't felt necessary to create a unique spelling for it. In cases where
the distinction is important (e.g. Modern Greek names), the spelling <dh>
is often used, e.g. 'Rodhos' (Greek ['rODOs]).
[snip]
> Maybe if a special alphabet was created by some Greek monk around the 12th
>century A.D. for the English language, we would have a much more sensible
>English orthography today, too... :-)
The alphabet English had in the 12th century suited its needs fine. Now,
if someone had just bothered to revise the orthography between then and
now...
--
Daniel "Da" von Brighoff /\ Dilettanten
(de...@midway.uchicago.edu) /__\ erhebt Euch
/____\ gegen die Kunst!
D. Edward Gund v. Brighoff
In article <6ft5bv$1...@enews4.newsguy.com>,
Vasos Panagiotopoulos +1-917-287-8087 Bioengineer-Financier <vj...@dorsai.org @smtp.dorsai.org> wrote:
>I sort of shifted the discussion to pronounciation since asking why X
>is pronounced z really is about that anyway.
>
>You have to be careful. Greek usage radiated in all directions.
>A lot of "scholars" make the mistake of only studying the westward one,
>esp because "classics" study Greek with Latin.
>
>Greek-Latin transliterations. I once had a Cuban boss and when she
>adressed me as "Mr Panayotoulos" (when most folks misponounce it
>"Pan-tza-toh-pew-lous") I replied "Malista!" in surprise.. I don't
>know why, but Spanish is supposed to have retained more Latin than
>Italian..
I don't know what you mean by this statement. That Spanish has retained
more Latin vocabulary than Italian? That Spanish pronunciation is more
similar to Classical Latin pronunciation than Italian?
>and Greek, Latin, Romanian and Albanian are supposed to have
>derived from the same proto-Messogian language that came to the region
>with the second IndoEuropean wave..
This isn't a theory I've heard before. What is "proto-Messogian"
supposed to be?
>Russians and other Slavs also do above-average in pronouncing Greek,
>because the cross-cultural links have been more recent and have thusly
>atrophied less. In the "west", lack of contact, allowed for
>significant deformations to take place in the understanding and
>speaking of Greek..
Isn't it more likely that the transcription systems are at fault? Western
European spelling of Greek words tends to be skewed toward Classical Latin
transcriptions of Ancient Greek pronunciations, not taking into account
all the changes that have taken place over the centuries. So a name like
<Panagiotes> tends to get transcribed in exactly that way, regardless of
the fact that <g> has long since become a 'j' sound before <i> in most
English words and that Greek gamma has become a 'y' sound before <i>, or
that eta has fallen together with iota. <Panayotis> makes much more sense
as a transcription in English.
>But you have to also study Hebrew and Hindu and Persian transliterations.
Why? All that one needs is a transcription system more in line with the
modern pronunciation and a little coaching in how to read it.
>In the Septuagint of the Old Testament, there is a
>section which starts "Aleph, Beth, Gimmel.." which is a good starting
>point.. W Syndey Allen's Vox Graeca falls apart when he tries to
>explain why Hindu coins don't follow his theory on ypsilon, for
>example.. then there's a whole bunch of very stupid mistakes made by
>some otherwise intelligent people on things that happened in 800 BC
>being applied to Greek as it was spoken in 200 BC or 200 AD, because
>they apply the word "ancient" unrigorously.. and Greeks can become
>lazy and make the differences seem greater than they are.. a
>cantankerous Greek can complain a lot more about reading Sophocles
>than a stuck-up Brit about Shakespeare, even though the differences in
>the language are actually about the same (because formation of a body
>of literature tends to freeze up change)..
Someone made the same claim about literacy impeding language change in
sci.lang some weeks ago, and it was pointed out to him that there is ab-
solutely no proof for this statement.
Ruud Harmsen
Nikos Sarantakos wrote:
> Mind you, this is reciprocal. Greeks are able to speak excellent
> Spanish and we have fooled many a Spaniard into believing
> we are also Spaniards from another region.
etc. Greek has the sound z, sometimes an allophone for s, Spanish
hasn't.
--
Ruud Harmsen <rhar...@knoware.nl>
http://www.knoware.nl/users/rharmsen
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
On Wed, 01 Apr 1998 18:01:24 GMT, sar...@innet.lu (Nikos Sarantakos)
wrote:
>My own experience with Spaniards tends to agree. They are excellent
>pronouncers of Greek, and the way they speak sounds identical
>especially if you cannot actually catch the words. Reason is probably
>that they only have 5 vowel sounds, just like Greeks, no long and
>short vowels.
Another important similarity is that in Spanish /b/, /d/ and /g/ are
usually pronounced as weak fricatives /B/, /D/, /G/ (everywhere except
in absolute initial position or after /m/ and /n/). Greek <Ellada>
"Greece" sounds exactly like Spanish <helada> "frozen (f.)". The only
difference is Spanish /B/ which is bilabial, not labiodental like
Greek /v/.
There are also differences of course: Spanish doesn't palatalize /x/,
/G/, /k/, /n/ and /l/ before /e/ and /i/, but Spanish does have
palatalized <n~> /N/ and <ll> /L/ as separate phonemes.
Nikos Sarantakos
On Thu, 02 Apr 1998 12:04:47 GMT, m...@wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
wrote:
Exactly! In the case of some Spaniards I know who are excellent
in spoken Greek, the pronounciation of words like 'xeri' (hand)
gives them away.
ns
Loren Petrich
In article <352399dd...@news.innet.lu>,
Nikos Sarantakos <sar...@innet.lu> wrote:
>Exactly! In the case of some Spaniards I know who are excellent
>in spoken Greek, the pronounciation of words like 'xeri' (hand)
>gives them away.
That would be from Classical Greek "cheir". And one grammatical
change from Classical to Modern Greek is turning all the consonant-stem
declensions into vowel-stem ones, or at least that's the impression I get.
--
Loren Petrich Happiness is a fast Macintosh
pet...@netcom.com And a fast train
My home page: http://www.petrich.com/home.html
mith...@indiana.edu
In article <6ftufn$a36$1...@nnrp2.dejanews.com>,...
> ? ?The term is largely spread in Mediterranean languages, under
> ? different forms: Greek ?oinos?, Armenian ?gine^?, Alb. ?ve^ne? etc.
> ? but it is not known whether it has an IE origin. Semitic forms
> ? reposing on ?*wayn-? [asterisk means the type is unattested]
> ? like Hebrew ?yayin? or Ethiopian ?wayn? are also cognates(?)
> ? (French text: apparente's) to Lat. vinum, without it being possible
> ? to establish a priority between an IE or semitic origin?
> ?
> ? Case is not closed, it seems, at least according to the Robert.
>
> ...while there have been various persons in this thread claiming with
> absolute confidence one of the two viewpoints and telling me that I should not
> doupt the year-long investigations of linguists and their determined outcomes.
"Absolute confidence"? Nope. I stated what I had learned. Miguel's
knowledge is frequently more up-to-date than mine. (The second part is a
reference to Mr. Stirling, not me.) However, take careful note of what Miguel
argued. I stated that Foinos is a borrowing from Semitic. This was accepted
among at least some Indo-Europeanists in the past, based on the fact that it
occurs in the more northern IE languages as a borrowing from Greek and Latin
and occurs independently in Semitic. However, Miguel pointed out that a
similar form also occurs in a Caucasian language. What is at issue is the
direction of borrowing. It is claimed that "Foinos" and "vinum" are the Greek
and Latin descendants of a word in Indo-European meaning "wine" that is the
nominal form of a verb meaning "to wind" (English form there another cognate),
used to name the vine. Since this is a form based on another form known to be
IE while (I gather) a similar etymological analysis isn't possible in the
other langauges in question, it's quite a good argument (barring coincidence,
and I might point out that Andrew Sihler makes special note of the large
number of independent roots in PIE beginning with *wi-). This form was
devised, in this view, to name grapes and then the alcoholic beverage made
from them. In other words, they named something new to the IE speakers (or
the group of early IE languages in the area they were discovered). Moreover,
the paleobiological evidence suggests that this naming might well have taken
place around the Caucasus, also shown by the occurrence of similar words in
the Anatolian IE languages.
Your argument, such as it is, runs into a number of difficulties, some
pointed out already. First, there is the fact that you are trying to
determine the IE homeland from the geographical distribution of things whose
names have survived in the daughter languages. This has been done already
with numerous words--several dozen. These words are attested in IE languages
over a wide geographical range, and from that we can pin down a fairly
restricted region of Eurasia, which is far north of Greece. You are asking us
to throw all that information out on the testimony of one root (no pun
intended) known only in the Mediterranean IE languages and borrowed into the
northern IE languages.
Moreover, you argue that this root is known in all the IE languages. In
your original posting you wrote "Oinos, Vin, Vine, Wine, Wein, ... All these
words for that alcoholic drink produced from grapes surely look like they have
a common "IE" origin, don't they?" The last four, as pointed out, are
borrowings from Latin; this is a much later borrowing (the centuries AD) than
the period involved in the question of Semitic / IE / Caucasian origin. In
particular, when someone pointed out that it was not known in Scandinavian,
you replied that that is because in Norway you would expect it to be
forgotten. That is, the word was either forgotten in all those languages
(since wine wouldn't be known there so the word would disappear) or never
occurred in them in the first place (since wine wasn't known there when IE
invaders arrived). Your argument, in other words, doesn't work since it ends
up restricting itself to the evidence of Greek and Latin. That is, you can
make no claims about the IE homeland.
> BTW, the proclaimed IE root of ?Foinos? was ?*woinos?, once again identical
> to the Greek type.
>
> Anyway, I am glad to see you are more open-minded than them.
I am open to arguments based on good evidence. The evidence Miguel presented
was quite good; your "evidence" is of a much different quality.
...
> ? I don't have data about the chronology of vine cultivation
> ? and wine production but at first glance the word might
> ? well be an Aegean one, Pre-hellenic if you so like or from
> ? Asia Minor.
>
> One of my basic questions on this IE subject has been:
>
> ?How do we determine which words are pre-hellenic??
>
> Now I have a clue: We attribute as ?pre-hellenic? any word that does not fit
> the rest arbitrary assumptions of our theory, although we could also suppose
> it is IE as well. That's a lovely practice!
No. Pre-Hellenic words are ones in Greek which do not have cognates in the
other branches of IE and which are not produced by language-internal rules of
word formation (or, to be exhaustive, those words with related forms in other
branches where there is reason to suspect either borrowing from a common
substrate or from Greek). Similarly, there are numerous pre-German words,
pre-Slavic words, etc. However, it is always possible that more evidence will
come to light in which a word thought to be restricted to one branch in fact
has cognates in other branches. In that case, one can no longer claim that
such a word is pre-Hellenic. It's not an arbitrary assumption but a statement
of our context of knowledge. Notice, however, that you have to have hard
evidence; "just suppose" is unacceptable.
...
> ? ? Since it's not an original IE word, it has no bearing on the question
> ? ? where IE originated.
> ?
> ? See reserves above. While I am certainly unconvinced (to put it
> ? mildly) by efforts to postulate a Greek protoglossa, I sometimes am
> ? baffled by a too doctrinaire IE-izing by some scholars. Perhaps that
> ? is the reason why I prefer to concentrate on loanwords, where
> ? hard data are usually more easy to find.
What remains true is that it is not an IE word common to all the branches of
IE (though, if Miguel's argument is accepted, based on a common IE root). It
might have developed in some of the IE languages after the breakup of Proto-
Indo-European, or it might have been borrowed into those IE languages whose
speakers moved into the area of wine consumption around the Mediterranean.
The gist of my argument is unchanged.
> BTW, I have noticed that it is easy for many linguists in this discussion to
> alternate between a loanword- and a common-origin- interpretation, while they
> all had determinately demonstrated against non-linguists who had proclaimed
> borrowing instead of common origins at an earlier stage of this discussion.
> That's also another wonderful scientific practice!
I won't respond to this charge until you make it more concrete. What
instances are you referring to of waffling between borrowing and common
descent? I mean just that--waffling. I'm not referring to instances where
linguists point out that some words are borrowed and some are of common
descent, since those are issues that have to be decided for each word and can
be expected to vary from word to word.
Mikael Thompson
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
> >? In fact, grapes were probably first cultivated in the Caucasus area.
> >
> > Based on which evidence?
>
> Palaeobotanic evidence. I have oly second-hand information about
> this, but during a discussion we had on the Basque-list about grapes,
> Larry Trask, the well-known linguist and vasconist, whom I know to be
> a higly reliable source on just about anything, dug out a book on the
> history of viticulture, by one Hugh Johnson, and concluded:
>
> "There are many species of grapes growing all over the world, and you
> can make wine from any of them -- but then you can make wine from
> dandelion leaves, if you want to (my mother always did). The key
> point is that only one species of grape, Vitis vinifera, makes *good*
> wine. This is the Caucasian species which spread out across the
> Mediterranean and eventually the world -- and it is not indigenous
> anywhere in the world except in and near the Caucasus."
>
> From what I've seen elsewhere, this seems to be the general consensus.
Well, since the Greeks were leading expeditions towards the Caucasus since
quite an early time, that's not a great surprise. However, it comes in direct
contradiction to the hypothesis that 'Indoeuropeans' invaded Greece *from the
north* circa 2.000 B.C. !
Taking this opportunity, I would like to ask:
a) How does Historical Linguistics specify the time the 'Indoeuropean' group
was broken up or whatever else happened, based on linguistical evidence? Is
there a C-14 age-estimating method for words?
b) How can it be possible that the native inhabitants of Greece adopted the
language of the 'Indoeuropean invaders', along with *their* costums, *their*
traditions, *their* myths, etc.? What happened to the pre-hellenic culture?
Were the invaders culturally more advanced than the 'Pre-hellenes'? Anyway,
the Romans also conquered Greece, while some Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgars,
Slavs, Arabs, Normans, Crusaders and Franks passed through it, and the Turks
also held it for some centuries, but the Greeks did not adopt *their* less
advanced cultures and we still speak Greek today. Why should the supposed
Pre-hellenes do adopt the culture of the supposed savage Greek invaders?
Panagiotis Karras
Nikos Sarantakos
On Thu, 2 Apr 1998 14:29:25 GMT, pet...@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
wrote:
>In article <352399dd...@news.innet.lu>,
>Nikos Sarantakos <sar...@innet.lu> wrote:
>
>>Exactly! In the case of some Spaniards I know who are excellent
>>in spoken Greek, the pronounciation of words like 'xeri' (hand)
>>gives them away.
>
> That would be from Classical Greek "cheir". And one grammatical
>change from Classical to Modern Greek is turning all the consonant-stem
>declensions into vowel-stem ones, or at least that's the impression I get.
(sorry, but I'll use x for chi because I need the h for eta)
I don't grasp clearly what all these learned terms mean :-) but
AncGreek had an alternative accusative type of "xeir", namely "thn
xeira/ thn xera". It occurs in Classical texts (Euripides, for
instance) and it is very frequent in Anthologia Graeca (Palatina).
Apparently, this "thn xe'ra" gave the diminutive "xe'rion" (here is
where the change of gender occurs) and this evolved to "xerin",
"xeri".
Mind you, the dialect spoken in Crete conserves many archaisms,
including "h xera", "o podas" i.e. forms more closely related to
Classic Gk "h xeir", "o pous -podos".
More generally, it is amazing how many archaisms survive in
various dialects in Greece. The leading Greek etymologist,
Andriotis, has compiled a dictionary of them, appropriately
written in German and published in Wien, hence virtually
unknown in Greece except to scholars.
Nikos Sarantakos
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant_2
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
On Thu, 02 Apr 1998 11:15:33 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>a) How does Historical Linguistics specify the time the 'Indoeuropean' group
>was broken up or whatever else happened, based on linguistical evidence? Is
>there a C-14 age-estimating method for words?
Sort of. Unfortunately, it is much more unreliable and more subject
to local fluctuations than C-14, and it can only be "calibrated" by
written sources, the earliest of which don't reach further back than
the 3rd millennium.
Indo-European must be older than 1500 BC, the date of our earliest
written records (Hittite, Mycenaean). It must be considerably older
than that, because Hittite and Mycenaean are already very different.
A reasonable linguistic estimate for the break-up of Indo-European
would be 4500 BC +/- 1500.
>b) How can it be possible that the native inhabitants of Greece adopted the
>language of the 'Indoeuropean invaders', along with *their* costums, *their*
>traditions, *their* myths, etc.? What happened to the pre-hellenic culture?
It's still there. It was a two-way process. As Herodotus says, the
Hellenes adopted `Pelasgian' customs and gods, while the `Pelasgoi' in
the end adopted the Greek language.
>Were the invaders culturally more advanced than the 'Pre-hellenes'?
Certainly not in the case of Crete.
>Anyway,
>the Romans also conquered Greece, while some Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgars,
>Slavs, Arabs, Normans, Crusaders and Franks passed through it, and the Turks
>also held it for some centuries, but the Greeks did not adopt *their* less
>advanced cultures and we still speak Greek today. Why should the supposed
>Pre-hellenes do adopt the culture of the supposed savage Greek invaders?
But who said they were "savage"? Anyway, I need hardly remind you
that it is perfectly possible for Greek-speaking areas to become
non-Greek (in the case of Egypt and Syria Arabic, in Anatolia
Turkish). Were the Arab and Turkish invadors more "civilized" than
the inhabitants of the Persian and East Roman areas they conquered?
For that matter, were Alexander's Macedonians more "civilized" than
the Babylonians, Persians and Egyptians? The secret of a successful
conquest is the right mixture of savegery (beat them in the
battlefield), flexibility (adopt the best elements of the "old"
civilization) and ingenuity (put those elements to previously
unimagined use). And luck, of course.
==
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~
Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~
m...@wxs.nl |_____________|||
========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig
Gregory Dandulakis
In article Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <m...@wxs.nl> wrote:
...
>But who said they were "savage"? Anyway, I need hardly remind you
>that it is perfectly possible for Greek-speaking areas to become
>non-Greek (in the case of Egypt and Syria Arabic, in Anatolia
>Turkish). Were the Arab and Turkish invadors more "civilized" than
>the inhabitants of the Persian and East Roman areas they conquered?
>For that matter, were Alexander's Macedonians more "civilized" than
>the Babylonians, Persians and Egyptians?
Right on the head of the nail!
>The secret of a successful
>conquest is the right mixture of savegery (beat them in the
>battlefield), flexibility (adopt the best elements of the "old"
>civilization) and ingenuity (put those elements to previously
>unimagined use). And luck, of course.
I nit-pick here, but I suspect that you have in mind a rather
narrow set of historical examples, in order to reach to such
a "universal conquest recipe". I would say that _luck_ is the
only true time-invariant. Then follows, in the most frequent
occurence, the _battlefield_ (eventhough _internal_ disin-
tegrations are very frequent too), and then the _flexibility_
factor (recent counter-examples are N. America, Australia and
Black Africa; but I suspect such shock-treatments are very rear
in history, if not unique). I would say that _ingenuity_ is
rather _rare_. A conquest makes the spoils too easy, and
the ensuing slavery (or its equivalent forms) makes ingenuity
useless (there are old and recent examples of vast resources
consumption (human and material), with virtually nothing great
coming out of such historical configurations (besides trivia-
lities)).
Gregory
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
On Thu, 02 Apr 1998 12:27:34 -0600, mith...@indiana.edu wrote:
>However, take careful note of what Miguel
>argued. I stated that Foinos is a borrowing from Semitic. This was accepted
>among at least some Indo-Europeanists in the past, based on the fact that it
>occurs in the more northern IE languages as a borrowing from Greek and Latin
>and occurs independently in Semitic. However, Miguel pointed out that a
>similar form also occurs in a Caucasian language. What is at issue is the
>direction of borrowing. It is claimed that "Foinos" and "vinum" are the Greek
>and Latin descendants of a word in Indo-European meaning "wine" that is the
>nominal form of a verb meaning "to wind" (English form there another cognate),
>used to name the vine. Since this is a form based on another form known to be
>IE while (I gather) a similar etymological analysis isn't possible in the
>other langauges in question,
Indeed, as far as I know, there is no root *wyn in Semitic, just the
word for "wine". This would be consistent with a borrowing into
Semitic. On the other hand, it cannot be excluded that Semitic
borrowed the Anatolian Indo-European word *wayana > *wayna, and that
it was this Semitic word that was borrowed back by Greek and Latin
(*woyno-). The difficulty with that scenario would be the -o- in
Greek, and the initial w-, which changed fairly early into y- in NW
Semitic, including Phoenician.
>What remains true is that it is not an IE word common to all the branches of
>IE (though, if Miguel's argument is accepted, based on a common IE root). It
>might have developed in some of the IE languages after the breakup of Proto-
>Indo-European, or it might have been borrowed into those IE languages whose
>speakers moved into the area of wine consumption around the Mediterranean.
>The gist of my argument is unchanged.
Lexical data will never completely determine the original homeland of
PIE. If PIE had a word for "wine", it is logical that the word would
have been lost or adapted to other uses by Indo-Europeans moving to
the north to places where no grapes grow. If PIE had no word for
"wine", it is logical that those Indo-Europeans that moved to the
south were wine is made would have borrowed a word from the local
language or adapted a native word for "climbing bush" to denote the
vine. Either way, the argument is inconclusive as things stand: we
have no independent "northern" reflex of *woyn- used for "beer" or
something like that [no proof *woyn- was in PIE], and good indications
that *woyn- was not borrowed into "southern" IE from another language
[no proof that *woyn- wasn't in PIE].
Earlier, someone mentioned the word "beech", which has been used,
unsuccesfully, to determine the location of the IE homeland. An
interesting fact to consider is the so-called "Greek tree shift",
where we find that in Greek, the words for certain trees have shifted
position:
"ash" "beech" "oak"
osk- bha:g- perku-
\ \
\ \
\ \
melie: oksue: phe:gos
"ash" "beech" "oak"
What was the original meaning of *bha:g-: "oak" (as in Greek) or
"beech" (as in Latin, Celtic and Germanic)? If it was "beech", it
stands to reason that the proto-Greeks took the word with them into
Greece, but adapted it to a tree more common in the new surroundings
(just like American English "robin" denotes a completely different
bird than English English "robin"). But the argument can be turned
around, although that forces the additional requirement that Italic,
Celtic and Germanic be taken as a single group of connected languages
within IE. It is of course highly unlikely that such a shift would
have happened three times independently.
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
On 2 Apr 1998 19:19:18 GMT, gd...@watt.seas.Virginia.EDU (Gregory
Dandulakis) wrote:
>I nit-pick here, but I suspect that you have in mind a rather
>narrow set of historical examples, in order to reach to such
>a "universal conquest recipe".
Yes, I didn't intend to give a universal historical truth.
Furthermore, the only measure for "success" I had in mind was
linguistic: why do some conquests lead to language replacement and
others not?
>I would say that _luck_ is the only true time-invariant.
Indeed I think it is. Still it's interesting to wonder if there are
additional factors. If we take just the Medieval period and again are
concerned only with the fate of the language of the conquerors, we
have:
Huns no
Goths no
Vandals no
Burgundians no
Franks yes (but only in the Low Countries)
Anglo-Saxons yes
Bretons yes (but now threatened by French)
Avars no
Scots yes (but now threatened by English)
Lombards no
Slavs yes (but reversed in Greece)
Arabs yes (but reversed in Spain)
Bulgars no
Magyars yes
Normans/Vikings no (but strong influence on English)
Turks yes (but reversed in the Balkans)
Mongols no
Nikos Sarantakos
On Thu, 02 Apr 1998 18:30:15 GMT, m...@wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
wrote:
>On Thu, 02 Apr 1998 11:15:33 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>
>>b) How can it be possible that the native inhabitants of Greece adopted the
>>language of the 'Indoeuropean invaders', along with *their* costums, *their*
>>traditions, *their* myths, etc.? What happened to the pre-hellenic culture?
>
>It's still there. It was a two-way process. As Herodotus says, the
>Hellenes adopted `Pelasgian' customs and gods, while the `Pelasgoi' in
>the end adopted the Greek language.
Very true. And, I would say, the "Pelasgian" (non-IE) element of Greek
represents an amazing proportion. I mean, all major IE European
languages have their own non-IE share (described by various arcane
terms like nostratic, sorotaptic etc.) but the non-IE proportion of
Greek is not only much higher, as far as I know, but it also concerns
more frequent words, words of central importance.
So, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Greek language came
into being as the result of the fusion between the two elements, "old"
and "new".
>
>But who said they were "savage"? Anyway, I need hardly remind you
>that it is perfectly possible for Greek-speaking areas to become
>non-Greek (in the case of Egypt and Syria Arabic, in Anatolia
>Turkish). Were the Arab and Turkish invadors more "civilized" than
>the inhabitants of the Persian and East Roman areas they conquered?
You could add Sicily to the list, Southern Italy as well, where the
Greek dialect is all but lost, but please note that I am not sure
about the depth of Greek roots in Anatolia and in Egypt/Syria.
Certainly, city dwellers or state machinery were Greeks or
used Greek, but what about the bulk of the population? Didn't they
speak a different mother tongue? I am just guessing, but I believe
they were only using Greek as a second language. That is why they
adopted with great speed the language (and the religion, at least
in Anatolia) of the new masters little after their coming.
Nikos Sarantakos
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant_2
>For that matter, were Alexander's Macedonians more "civilized" than
>the Babylonians, Persians and Egyptians? The secret of a successful
>conquest is the right mixture of savegery (beat them in the
>battlefield), flexibility (adopt the best elements of the "old"
>civilization) and ingenuity (put those elements to previously
>unimagined use). And luck, of course.
>
>
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
On Thu, 02 Apr 1998 22:07:14 GMT, sar...@innet.lu (Nikos Sarantakos)
wrote:
>Very true. And, I would say, the "Pelasgian" (non-IE) element of Greek
>represents an amazing proportion. I mean, all major IE European
>languages have their own non-IE share (described by various arcane
>terms like nostratic, sorotaptic etc.) but the non-IE proportion of
>Greek is not only much higher, as far as I know, but it also concerns
>more frequent words, words of central importance.
>
>So, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Greek language came
>into being as the result of the fusion between the two elements, "old"
>and "new".
Yes. Hera and Zeus, Gaia and Ouranos.
>>But who said they were "savage"? Anyway, I need hardly remind you
>>that it is perfectly possible for Greek-speaking areas to become
>>non-Greek (in the case of Egypt and Syria Arabic, in Anatolia
>>Turkish). Were the Arab and Turkish invadors more "civilized" than
>>the inhabitants of the Persian and East Roman areas they conquered?
>
>You could add Sicily to the list, Southern Italy as well, where the
>Greek dialect is all but lost, but please note that I am not sure
>about the depth of Greek roots in Anatolia and in Egypt/Syria.
>
>Certainly, city dwellers or state machinery were Greeks or
>used Greek, but what about the bulk of the population? Didn't they
>speak a different mother tongue? I am just guessing, but I believe
>they were only using Greek as a second language. That is why they
>adopted with great speed the language (and the religion, at least
>in Anatolia) of the new masters little after their coming.
You're essentially right about Syria and Egypt (certainly far from
places like Antioch or Alexandria: "Pou ta Ellhnika / pisw ap' ton
Zagro edw, apo ta Fraata pera", as Kavafis says to his "Filellhn"
despot). But Anatolia is a different matter, depending on which part
of Anatolia you mean. The east was largely Persianized (Pontus,
Cappadocia, Commagene, even Armenia), but the western parts and most
of the interior (Phrygia, Galatia) were thoroughly Hellenized if not
already in the Hellenistic period, then certainly by Byzantine times.
Keith C. Ivey
Ruud Harmsen <rhar...@knoware.nl> wrote:
>Greek has the sound z, sometimes an allophone for s, Spanish
>hasn't.
Don't many Spanish speakers use [z] as an allophone of /s/ before
voiced consonants, as in "desde", "asgo", "mismo", and "asno"?
It sounds that way to me.
[followups to sci.lang only]
Keith C. Ivey <kci...@cpcug.org>
http://cpcug.org/user/kcivey/
Washington, DC
Perique des Palottes
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> Isn't there a fairly recent volume by Martinet with a title something
> like the "Steppes ... Ocean" one? Though I don't think of him as an
> Indo-Europeanist.
Martinet, André
Des Steppes aux océans: l'indo-européen et les indo-européens
Paris: Payot, 1987
ISBN 2-228-88804-4
I remember it to be a somewhat "informal" but an interesting reading.
--
"La esperanza es lo ultimo que se pierde. Y es un pena,
porque si se perdiera lo primero, quiza se hiciera algo
para solucionar las cosas." - J. Perich
Unknown
In <3523cd05...@news.innet.lu> by Nikos Sarantakos
(sar...@innet.lu) on Thu, 02 Apr 1998 17:51:55 GMT we perused:
*+-More generally, it is amazing how many archaisms survive in
*+-various dialects in Greece. The leading Greek etymologist,
*+-Andriotis, has compiled a dictionary of them, appropriately
*+-written in German and published in Wien, hence virtually
*+-unknown in Greece except to scholars.
You could reconstruct Classical Greek by merging the various archaisms
of various dialects.. then again, this is true of any
language.. haven't you heard of those that supposedly still speak
Elizabethan English off the coast of Maryland?
I'd bet these would confound many so-called "scholars" of W Sydney Allen's ilk.
Please do post a source for Andriotis (an ISBN number would be great).
- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bioengineer-Financier, NYC
BachMozart ReaganQuayle EvrytanoKastorian http://WWW.Dorsai.Org/~vjp2
vjp2@{MCIMail.Com|CompuServe.Com|Dorsai.Org}
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
gdw...@earthlink.net (Garry Williams) wrote:
> Would you mind explaining just what you mean by "richness in word
> building"
I had the impression that this quality of the Greek language was common
knowledge among people occupied with linguistics and/or classical studies. I
have already given some examples illustrating my point and I have got only
some naive replies putting forward elementary derivations within English or
Sanskrit which are supposed to discredit my point. Anyway, since you are not
convinced by my examples, which can never be perfect, I will bring forward a
quotation:
'The Greek language is incomparably superior to all the other languages of
the world considered with respect to its wisdom, beauty, depth, wealth of
words, and priceless richness of expression.'
Paissy Velichkovsky, in a letter to
Elder Theodosius in Zitie i pisanija
Moldavskago, Moscow, 1847.
This may offer you some indication on what I mean. Keep reading to see more
of what I mean.
> and how you've figured out that Greek has this quality to a
> greater degree than other languages, for example English,
I have figured this out through my own experience and knowledge of English
and other languages, as well as through the testimonies of English-speaking
professors of Greek, like the one that follows:
'Our earliest monuments of Greek are the Iliad and the Odyssey, and already
in these poems the vocabulary is so large and the expression so varied that it
is impossible to translate them with anything like the richness of the
original. I sometimes discourage my students by telling them that for each new
Greek author, they must practically learn a new language. But then in my own
turn I am discouraged that in them too, the wealth of words and idiom is so
great that the problems for a foreigner seem almost endless.'
Cedric Whitman in 'Greek Language and Culture.
Their vitality and imporatnace today.
Published by the Institute for Byzantine and
Modern Greek Studies, Inc. 2nd Edition, 1995.
In order to verify the message of the quotation above, you just need to
compare some of the English translations provided in the Perseus Project:
http://hydra.perseus.tufts.edu with the Greek original. I have done this
myself numerous times, just to find out how many techniques the English
translators have conceived in order to express slightly the variety of
meanings within the Greek language.
> and why this is necessarily a more desirable, useful or whatever quality
> for a language to have
I think that this quality is quite desirable indeed, since several literary
masterpieces as well as scientific advancements, as a matter of fact the whole
intellectual, political, moral, legal and social framework of our civilisation
has been based on and established thanks to this very quality whose
usefullness you have questioned.
> and finally how this demonstrates that Greek is the
> parent language, rather than Proto-Indo-European.
It demonstrates that Greek is not symmetrical to other 'IE' languages, as
well as that it can not have been the language of a group of savage 2.000 B.C.
invaders of the Greek peninsula. The rest follows according to reason.
> If English wasn't rich before, it sure is now! It's absorbed *lots* of
> words from lots of languages and has a pretty good-sized vocabulary,
> don't you think?
Yes. English has absorbed a plethora of Greek vocabulary.
> But that aside, what's your point?
You have seen it above.
> And I'll bet you think other languages just can't do that, right?
I am not so naive as you seem to be. They can do it, but not to the extent
Greek does it. See above.
> I'm not going to spend a lot time thinking about this since it doesn't
> lead to the conclusions that you seem to think it does,
No, it does.
> but looking at your example and without hunting down a Greek dictionary,
> I'm thinking that your "titheemi" means more or less "to place, put, set"
> in English, right? Ok, so, we have the English verb "to set", we have the
> noun "setting" (like a place setting for a table, for instance), then
> there's "setter" a type of dog that sets when game is spotted, and of
> course when we set ourselves down, we do so on a "seat", and having
> put ourselves there we have "settled" down, sort of like the
> "settlings" at the bottom of a teacup. Should I bother to drag in
> "sit" and its variations too, or have I made my point?
...which verifies how naive you think. Just check out the quotation of
Cedric Whuitman above.
> The funnest part of this is that you don't realize that I was able to
> pull an example like this up exactly because English and Greek are
> both Indo-European languages and thus have much in common not only in
> the way of vocabulary, but also in ways new words are formed.
...with the minor detail that it is impossible to translate a Greek text to
English without losing the original accuracy, wealth and beauty, although
English has borrowed massively from Greek.
> See above example for showing that these ideas are simply silly.
Your ideas?
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
Ross Clark <d...@antnov1.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> If you don't mind I'll supply some simple glosses for non-Hellenists like
> me.
>
> > titheemi
>
> "to place, put"
>
> -> themelion,
>
> "foundation"
>
> themis,
>
> "law"
>
> thesis,
>
> "setting"
>
> thesmos,
>
> "rule"
>
> thetos,
>
> "placed"
>
> theekee,
>
> "box, chest"
>
> thema
>
> "proposition"
>
> > A single verb gives 6 subjects
>
> I think you mean "nouns"
Yes, that's what I meant.
> > and 1 adjective! And this is a randomly
> > chosen example. There are hundreds like that.
> >
> > How can Greek have such a great derivation potential if it is merely
> > another branch of the "IE" tree, whose other branches lack such a
> > potential? How was this potential a posteriori developed only within the
> > Greek? Did Greek inherit from the mother tongue more than its sisters?
> > Why?
>
> Well let's suppose that you are right and that Greek is unique among IE
> languages in the richness of its derivational morphology.
Please, check out some quotations in my reply to Garry Williams to find out
if I am right. You can also try to provide a good translation of the Iliad
using no more words than the Greek text does.
> You yourself have already suggested two ways in which this might have come
> about, both quite consistent with the position of Greek as a branch of IE:
No, I have used them to demonstrate how unlikely this position is.
> (i) the derivational possibilities are an original property of PIE which has
> been uniquely well preserved in Greek;
Does this seem plausible to you? Why hasn't it been preserved in the others
as well? Anyway, even in such a case, you do admit that there is a
'uniqueness' of Greek among 'IE' languages, thus you agree with my argument.
But why not suppose a much more natural and reasonable explanation in the
first place?
> (ii) Greek has developed this potential to a unique degree during its
> separate history.
This does not seem totally unreasonable, only when we disregard the fact
that this 'separate history' happens to be considered to be only some hundred
years by the standard IE theory, from the 'IE' invasion of Greece until the
Homeric epics were written, notwithstanding the fact that there had certainly
been Greek written literature long before Homer, since it is quite impossible
for the written literature of a language to begin with poems of such length.
Thus such a possibility is ruled out, or in any case, the hypothesis for a
'savage Indo-european invasion of Greece' seems more and more unfounded.
> Do you think this is impossible?
No, I think it is impossible to happen within the time you hold it to have
happened.
> Do you believe that languages are given their properties once for all
> eternity, and cannot develop or change?
Of course not. But I have not seen any other language developing such a
potential within its 'separate history'.
> But in fact you are not right. Here is a selection of Sanskrit words
> related to the same IE root:
I wonder how a translation of Aeschylus in Sanskrit would be like.
> dádha:ti "he places"
>
> dhá:tuh "element"
>
> dhá:tar- "founder"
>
> dha:tár- "creator"
>
> dha:nam "container"
>
> dha:man- "law"
>
> -dhitáh "placed"
>
> Not only similar in the range of derivative forms, but even strikingly
> parallel here and there! Almost enough to make you believe in...but no,
> I'll spare your feelings.
Yes, I have already seen them in another reply to me and I have observed
their similarities to Greek. I have also noticed that the Greek are still much
more wealthy and I have not seen any abstract notion such as 'thema' depicted
in Sanskrit, although the supposedly savage invaders of Greece depicted it.
Anyway, please check out my reply to Garry Williams as well.
Panagiotis Karras.
Nikos Sarantakos
On 3 Apr 1998 09:37:58 GMT, vj...@dorsai.org @smtp.dorsai.org (Vasos
Panagiotopoulos +1-917-287-8087 Bioengineer-Financier) wrote:
>In <3523cd05...@news.innet.lu> by Nikos Sarantakos
> (sar...@innet.lu) on Thu, 02 Apr 1998 17:51:55 GMT we perused:
>Please do post a source for Andriotis (an ISBN number would be great).
>
Unfortunately, no ISBN is available but here is the reference:
Andriotis N., Lexikon der Archaismen in neu-griechischen Dialekten,
Wien, 1974
Perhaps the book is available thru inter-library loan, but I am not
sure this system still functions for trans-atlantic exchanges.
Nikos
Loren Petrich
In article <6g2rn0$qcv$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, <pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr> wrote:
> gdw...@earthlink.net (Garry Williams) wrote:
>> Would you mind explaining just what you mean by "richness in word
>> building"
> I had the impression that this quality of the Greek language was common
>knowledge among people occupied with linguistics and/or classical studies.
And is hardly a specifically Greek quality.
> 'Our earliest monuments of Greek are the Iliad and the Odyssey, and already
>in these poems the vocabulary is so large and the expression so varied that it
>is impossible to translate them with anything like the richness of the
>original. ...
So what is new with literary compositions?
To see what I mean, go to http://altavista.digital.com, and try
out its natural-language-translation software. It will do fairly well for
rather literal-minded language, but not very well for literary or poetic
language.
And last, but not least, puns don't translate very well at all. I
mention puns because I find them very punny :-):-):-)
> It demonstrates that Greek is not symmetrical to other 'IE' languages, as
>well as that it can not have been the language of a group of savage 2.000 B.C.
>invaders of the Greek peninsula. The rest follows according to reason.
The difficulty is that this could be used to "prove" that a bunch
of uncouth Vikings could not have composed the Icelandic Eddas, and that
a bunch of warlike wandering cattle herders could not have composed the
Vedas.
> Yes. English has absorbed a plethora of Greek vocabulary.
And Latin and Old French and Spanish and Italian and Dutch and
German and Scandinavian and ...
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
Dear Mr. Thompson,
This discussion is shifted to the thread after my reply to Garry Williams.
P.K.
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
m...@wxs.nl wrote:
> > a) How does Historical Linguistics specify the time the 'Indoeuropean'
> > group was broken up or whatever else happened, based on linguistical
> > evidence? Is there a C-14 age-estimating method for words?
>
> Sort of. Unfortunately, it is much more unreliable and more subject
> to local fluctuations than C-14, and it can only be "calibrated" by
> written sources, the earliest of which don't reach further back than
> the 3rd millennium.
Absolutely interesting, concerning the chronological details of the IE
theory.
> Indo-European must be older than 1500 BC, the date of our earliest
> written records (Hittite, Mycenaean).
Hold your horses! The Discus of Phaistos and Linear A are also Greek,
according to one of the two schools for its decipherment. BTW, there used to
be also a 'non-Greek school' before the definite decipherment of Linear B.
> It must be considerably older than that, because Hittite and Mycenaean are
> already very different. A reasonable linguistic estimate for the break-up of
> Indo-European would be 4500 BC +/- 1500.
4500 - 1500 = 3000 BC is already too late for the Cycladic civilization,
obviously related to the Minoan of Crete, therefore very possibly Greek as
well.
> >b) How can it be possible that the native inhabitants of Greece adopted the
> >language of the 'Indoeuropean invaders', along with *their* costums,
> >*their* traditions, *their* myths, etc.? What happened to the pre-hellenic
> >culture?
>
> It's still there. It was a two-way process. As Herodotus says, the
> Hellenes adopted `Pelasgian' customs and gods, while the `Pelasgoi' in
> the end adopted the Greek language.
I think the 'Pelasgoi' were the inhabitants of the islands, while the
'Hellenes' were the inhabitants of the mainland, which had not been in close
contact with each other after one of the physical destructions the Egyptian
priest of Sais talks about in Timaios. They were however already related to
each other as several texts confirm.
> >Were the invaders culturally more advanced than the 'Pre-hellenes'?
>
> Certainly not in the case of Crete.
Look above about the Discus of Phaistos.
> >Anyway,
> >the Romans also conquered Greece, while some Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgars,
> >Slavs, Arabs, Normans, Crusaders and Franks passed through it, and the
> >Turks also held it for some centuries, but the Greeks did not adopt *their*
> >less advanced cultures and we still speak Greek today. Why should the
> >supposed Pre-hellenes do adopt the culture of the supposed savage Greek
> >invaders?
>
> But who said they were "savage"?
Are you joking? Somebody in this discussion has written about three messages
on this savagery.
> Anyway, I need hardly remind you that it is perfectly possible for
> Greek-speaking areas to become non-Greek
Yes, but not for Greece itself.
> (in the case of Egypt and Syria Arabic, in Anatolia Turkish). Were the Arab
> and Turkish invadors more "civilized" than the inhabitants of the Persian
> and East Roman areas they conquered?
No, they were not. However, notice that:
a) The Arabs did not conquer homogenous Greek populations, only populations
with some Greek-speaking element as a second language. However, there are
Greek-speaking communities in Syria today, and there was a robust such
community in Alexandria, Egypt until very recently.
b) As far as Asia Minor and the Pontus are concerned, there was a lively
Greek population there until the first quarter of this century, when they were
formerly slaughtered and latterly exchanged with turkish population of Greece.
Moreover, there are still Greek-speaking people there, who do not speak
turkish at all!
> For that matter, were Alexander's Macedonians more "civilized" than the
> Babylonians, Persians and Egyptians?
This time you must really be joking. Just check out Herodotus to get a
detailed account of the differences between the eastern despotic culture of
the Babylonians, Persians and Egyptians compared to the Greek culture of
freedom, which the Macedonians and all the Greeks were representing.
As a matter of fact, yes, Alexander himself was far more civilized in his
behaviour than the Persians who attempted to conquer Greece before him.
Anyway, this is not the subject here.
> The secret of a successful conquest is the right mixture of savegery (beat
> them in the battlefield),
I do not think Miltiades or Themistokles were being savage against the
savagery of the - less civilized indeed - Persian invaders in order to avoid
their conquest. They were rather being intelligent. So this rule is too naive.
> flexibility (adopt the best elements of the "old" civilization)
This is true for Alexander the Great, (thereofre the name 'Great'), yet it
is not true for the turkish conquest of Asia Minor. Therefore, it can not be
considered a general rule.
> and ingenuity (put those elements to previously unimagined use).
> And luck, of course.
You have seen how many differences there are from conquest to conquest, or
from conquest attempt to conquest attempt. Thus your approach was too
simplistic.
Consequently, I do not think such a thing as 'the secret of a successful
conquest' can be defined.
Finally, coming back to the subject, I do not see how a 'IE' conquest of
Greece could be reasonably hypothesized. Check out the posting under the title
'Symmetry between languages' in order to see how unlikely it seems to me that
the Greek language and culture was a product of a mixture of undeveloped
elements.
Panagiotis Karras
Brian M. Scott
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> gdw...@earthlink.net (Garry Williams) wrote:
> > Would you mind explaining just what you mean by "richness in word
> > building"
> I had the impression that this quality of the Greek language was common
> knowledge among people occupied with linguistics and/or classical studies. I
> have already given some examples illustrating my point and I have got only
> some naive replies putting forward elementary derivations within English or
> Sanskrit which are supposed to discredit my point.
Miguel's Sanskrit examples were fully on a par with your Greek ones.
> Anyway, since you are not
> convinced by my examples, which can never be perfect, I will bring forward a
> quotation:
> 'The Greek language is incomparably superior to all the other languages of
> the world considered with respect to its wisdom, beauty, depth, wealth of
> words, and priceless richness of expression.'
> Paissy Velichkovsky, in a letter to
> Elder Theodosius in Zitie i pisanija
> Moldavskago, Moscow, 1847.
So? I've seen similar statements made about French, Russian, and
English, and probably others as well.
> > and how you've figured out that Greek has this quality to a
> > greater degree than other languages, for example English,
> I have figured this out through my own experience and knowledge of English
> and other languages, as well as through the testimonies of English-speaking
> professors of Greek, like the one that follows:
> 'Our earliest monuments of Greek are the Iliad and the Odyssey, and already
> in these poems the vocabulary is so large and the expression so varied that it
> is impossible to translate them with anything like the richness of the
> original. I sometimes discourage my students by telling them that for each new
> Greek author, they must practically learn a new language. But then in my own
> turn I am discouraged that in them too, the wealth of words and idiom is so
> great that the problems for a foreigner seem almost endless.'
> Cedric Whitman in 'Greek Language and Culture.
> Their vitality and imporatnace today.
> Published by the Institute for Byzantine and
> Modern Greek Studies, Inc. 2nd Edition, 1995.
This has nothing to do with Greek and everything to do with the
difficulty of translating literature.
Brian M. Scott
mith...@indiana.edu
>
> > Would you mind explaining just what you mean by "richness in word
> > building"
>
> I had the impression that this quality of the Greek language was common
> knowledge among people occupied with linguistics and/or classical studies. I
> have already given some examples illustrating my point and I have got only
> some naive replies putting forward elementary derivations within English or
> Sanskrit which are supposed to discredit my point.
As a matter of fact, what is common knowledge among classical scholars is that
Greek comes close to, but does not match, the derivational capacities of
Sanskrit. Sanskrit comes closest to the Proto-Indo-European verbal system,
which is why it is used, for example, in paradigmatic comparisons with PIE in
Beekes' Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. In fact, the first Indo-
Europeanists believed that Sanskrit was almost identical to Proto-Indo-
European. (The mergers of PIE *e, *o, and *a in Sanskrit put an end to that
view.) You are obviously remarkably ignorant of Sanskrit if you do not know
this.
I was not one of those who argued this point before. What the English
examples show is that there are many different ways of expressing names,
either by systematic derivations from simpler terms or by compounding. PIE
relied heavily on the former, Sanskrit most continued it, and the other IE
languages to greater and lesser extents--probably due in greatest part to the
loss of inflectional endings due to stress accent. PIE was pitch accented, as
were Sanskrit and Greek (the latter is attested by such writers as Aristotle).
Latin got first-stress accent for a while, ending about the time of Plautus,
while Germanic switched to a heavy first-syllable stress accent after Verner's
Law (in other words, there is direct evidence in the Germanic languages
themselves of the change of accent).
Anyway, since you are not
> convinced by my examples, which can never be perfect, I will bring forward a
> quotation:
>
> 'The Greek language is incomparably superior to all the other languages of
> the world considered with respect to its wisdom, beauty, depth, wealth of
> words, and priceless richness of expression.'
> Paissy Velichkovsky, in a letter to
> Elder Theodosius in Zitie i pisanija
> Moldavskago, Moscow, 1847.
>
> This may offer you some indication on what I mean. Keep reading to see more
> of what I mean.
Yawn. You can find quotes of that sort for every literate langauge on earth.
There are similar quotes for German, French, even (most interesting) one for
Tamil (a Dravidian language) that was mentioned by William Dwight Whitney in
his Life and Growth of Languages, in which a Protestant missionary fluent in
classical Greek declared Tamil fully the equal of the classical Indo-European
languages in expressiveness.
>
> > and how you've figured out that Greek has this quality to a
> > greater degree than other languages, for example English,
>
> I have figured this out through my own experience and knowledge of English
> and other languages, as well as through the testimonies of English-speaking
> professors of Greek, like the one that follows:
>
No, this quote has to do with translating literature, not the langauge per se.
ANY masterpiece in ANY langauge is going to use the particular resources of
the language to the fullest--its technique will be skewed to the language. No
language duplicates any other language, so you can't duplicate the literary
techniques of a language in any other. You can only approximate.
> > and why this is necessarily a more desirable, useful or whatever quality
> > for a language to have
>
> I think that this quality is quite desirable indeed, since several literary
> masterpieces as well as scientific advancements, as a matter of fact the whole
> intellectual, political, moral, legal and social framework of our civilisation
> has been based on and established thanks to this very quality whose
> usefullness you have questioned.
No, you are confusing the particular medium with the content.
> > and finally how this demonstrates that Greek is the
> > parent language, rather than Proto-Indo-European.
>
> It demonstrates that Greek is not symmetrical to other 'IE' languages, as
> well as that it can not have been the language of a group of savage 2.000 B.C.
> invaders of the Greek peninsula. The rest follows according to reason.
You are making several fallacies here: (1) That it is claimed the early IE
were "savages," whatever that means. (2) That the IE savages were nomads
before entering Greece. (3) That nomadic culture is poor in words. (4) That
flexibility of thought and rationality is crucially dependent on word-building
capabilities of a certain sort.
> > If English wasn't rich before, it sure is now! It's absorbed *lots* of
> > words from lots of languages and has a pretty good-sized vocabulary,
> > don't you think?
>
> Yes. English has absorbed a plethora of Greek vocabulary.
>
> > But that aside, what's your point?
>
> You have seen it above.
>
> > And I'll bet you think other languages just can't do that, right?
>
> I am not so naive as you seem to be. They can do it, but not to the extent
> Greek does it. See above.
Except for Sanskrit, Eskimo, Turkish, Arabic, and many others. You're
woefully ignorant of other languages.
> > I'm not going to spend a lot time thinking about this since it doesn't
> > lead to the conclusions that you seem to think it does,
>
> No, it does.
As a matter of fact, no it doesn't, since you're smuggling in a number of
preconceptions about language and thought which don't wash with linguists,
some of which I've pointed out above.
Mikael Thompson
Gregory Dandulakis
>Furthermore, the only measure for "success" I had in mind was
>linguistic: why do some conquests lead to language replacement and
>others not?
>
>>I would say that _luck_ is the only true time-invariant.
>
>Indeed I think it is. Still it's interesting to wonder if there are
>additional factors. If we take just the Medieval period and again are
>concerned only with the fate of the language of the conquerors, we
>
>Huns no
>Goths no
>Vandals no
>Burgundians no
>Franks yes (but only in the Low Countries)
>Anglo-Saxons yes
>Bretons yes (but now threatened by French)
>Avars no
>Scots yes (but now threatened by English)
>Lombards no
>Slavs yes (but reversed in Greece)
>Arabs yes (but reversed in Spain)
>Bulgars no
>Magyars yes
>Normans/Vikings no (but strong influence on English)
>Turks yes (but reversed in the Balkans)
>Mongols no
There is a need to split conceptually the set "conquerors" to
the subsets:
1. Conquered-conquerors
2. On-going-conquerors
And the subset "conquered-conquerors" to further subsets:
i. Extinct
ii. Reduced
And both the subsets "extinct" and "reduced" to further subsets
(seperately):
a. Revived
b. Stagnant
In the end, someone can't avoid the importance of the parameter
"time scale" when making general statements. Leave long enough
time, and all linguistic _lineages_ will become extinct in the
end, but one. It's the simple "law of random drifting", in po-
pulation dynamics. Of course, new diversities will have popped-
up as a result of divergent evolution out of that unique "alive
fossil" linguistic ancestry. And even that will go down the drain
when the human race dies out.
Gregory
Ross Clark
Vasos Panagiotopoulos +1-917-287-8087 Bioengineer-Financier wrote:
>
> In <3523cd05...@news.innet.lu> by Nikos Sarantakos
> (sar...@innet.lu) on Thu, 02 Apr 1998 17:51:55 GMT we perused:
>
> *+-various dialects in Greece. The leading Greek etymologist,
> *+-Andriotis, has compiled a dictionary of them, appropriately
> *+-written in German and published in Wien, hence virtually
> *+-unknown in Greece except to scholars.
>
> You could reconstruct Classical Greek by merging the various archaisms
> of various dialects.. then again, this is true of any
> language.. haven't you heard of those that supposedly still speak
> Elizabethan English off the coast of Maryland?
>
> I'd bet these would confound many so-called "scholars" of W Sydney Allen's ilk.
Perhaps they would if it were true; but it isn't.
Ross Clark
Ross Clark
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>
> gdw...@earthlink.net (Garry Williams) wrote:
>
> > Would you mind explaining just what you mean by "richness in word
> > building"
>
> I had the impression that this quality of the Greek language was common
> knowledge among people occupied with linguistics and/or classical studies. I
> have already given some examples illustrating my point and I have got only
> some naive replies putting forward elementary derivations within English or
> Sanskrit which are supposed to discredit my point.
It seems odd for you to be using the word "naive" here, since your
reaction to the list of Sanskrit forms was essentially "My goodness, I
have never seen such a thing before". In this and other ways you have
indicated your own innocence of the evidence on which Indo-European
linguistics is based.
Anyway, since you are not
> convinced by my examples, which can never be perfect, I will bring forward a
> quotation:
>
> 'The Greek language is incomparably superior to all the other languages of
> the world considered with respect to its wisdom, beauty, depth, wealth of
> words, and priceless richness of expression.'
> Paissy Velichkovsky, in a letter to
> Elder Theodosius in Zitie i pisanija
> Moldavskago, Moscow, 1847.
>
> This may offer you some indication on what I mean.
Perhaps someone will one day publish an anthology of similar ecstatic
quotations about languages of many different families around the world.
We have a useful word in English which is only half-Greek:
"ethnocentric". It refers to people who see everything from the point of
view of their own culture, and have not taken the fundamental step of
learning that things look different to those brought up elsewhere, and
that those people are not necessarily wrong.
Keep reading to see more
> of what I mean.
>
> > and how you've figured out that Greek has this quality to a
> > greater degree than other languages, for example English,
>
> I have figured this out through my own experience and knowledge of English
> and other languages, as well as through the testimonies of English-speaking
> professors of Greek, like the one that follows:
>
> 'Our earliest monuments of Greek are the Iliad and the Odyssey, and already
> in these poems the vocabulary is so large and the expression so varied that it
> is impossible to translate them with anything like the richness of the
> original. I sometimes discourage my students by telling them that for each new
> Greek author, they must practically learn a new language. But then in my own
> turn I am discouraged that in them too, the wealth of words and idiom is so
> great that the problems for a foreigner seem almost endless.'
> Cedric Whitman in 'Greek Language and Culture.
> Their vitality and imporatnace today.
> Published by the Institute for Byzantine and
> Modern Greek Studies, Inc. 2nd Edition, 1995.
We have some other terms in English, like "hellenophilia" and
"hellenolatry". This adulation of everything Greek, and disparagement of
other cultures and languages by comparison, has exercised a powerful and
not always beneficial influence on English-speaking cultural life.
Nowadays it can be used to feed the vanity of Greek linguistic
supremacists.
Here's another quote for you:
The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and
more exquisitely refined than either;...
Sir William Jones, Third Anniversary Discourse
on the Hindus, 1786
> In order to verify the message of the quotation above, you just need to
> compare some of the English translations provided in the Perseus Project:
> http://hydra.perseus.tufts.edu with the Greek original. I have done this
> myself numerous times, just to find out how many techniques the English
> translators have conceived in order to express slightly the variety of
> meanings within the Greek language.
>
> > and why this is necessarily a more desirable, useful or whatever quality
> > for a language to have
>
> I think that this quality is quite desirable indeed, since several literary
> masterpieces as well as scientific advancements, as a matter of fact the whole
> intellectual, political, moral, legal and social framework of our civilisation
> has been based on and established thanks to this very quality whose
> usefullness you have questioned.
> > and finally how this demonstrates that Greek is the
> > parent language, rather than Proto-Indo-European.
>
> It demonstrates that Greek is not symmetrical to other 'IE' languages,
You have used this term "symmetrical" again and again without explaining
what you mean by it. Do you mean anything more than "similar"?
as
> well as that it can not have been the language of a group of savage 2.000 B.C.
> invaders of the Greek peninsula.
Of course it does not demonstrate any such thing, any more than that the
manifest literary and linguistic richness of English "demonstrate" that
it could not have been the language of a bunch of savage invaders of
the British Isles about 500 AD.
>The rest follows according to reason.
If whatever you're translating as "reason" is the dominant intellectual
process in Greece these days, it may account for the sudden efflorescence
of crackpot linguistic chauvinism from that country....
>
> > If English wasn't rich before, it sure is now! It's absorbed *lots* of
> > words from lots of languages and has a pretty good-sized vocabulary,
> > don't you think?
>
> Yes. English has absorbed a plethora of Greek vocabulary.
No, he said "from lots of languages", a fact which you could confirm by
consulting an English dictionary. Such a dictionary would also explain
what "symmetrical" means in English.
>
> > But that aside, what's your point?
>
> You have seen it above.
>
> > And I'll bet you think other languages just can't do that, right?
>
> I am not so naive as you seem to be. They can do it, but not to the extent
> Greek does it. See above.
>
> > I'm not going to spend a lot time thinking about this since it doesn't
> > lead to the conclusions that you seem to think it does,
>
> No, it does.
>
> > but looking at your example and without hunting down a Greek dictionary,
> > I'm thinking that your "titheemi" means more or less "to place, put, set"
> > in English, right? Ok, so, we have the English verb "to set", we have the
> > noun "setting" (like a place setting for a table, for instance), then
> > there's "setter" a type of dog that sets when game is spotted, and of
> > course when we set ourselves down, we do so on a "seat", and having
> > put ourselves there we have "settled" down, sort of like the
> > "settlings" at the bottom of a teacup. Should I bother to drag in
> > "sit" and its variations too, or have I made my point?
>
> ...which verifies how naive you think. Just check out the quotation of
> Cedric Whuitman above.
Sorry, Whitman doesn't seem to be saying anything about English words
like "setting" and "seat".
>
> > The funnest part of this is that you don't realize that I was able to
> > pull an example like this up exactly because English and Greek are
> > both Indo-European languages and thus have much in common not only in
> > the way of vocabulary, but also in ways new words are formed.
>
> ...with the minor detail that it is impossible to translate a Greek text to
> English without losing the original accuracy, wealth and beauty, although
> English has borrowed massively from Greek.
And of course your studies of translations of English texts into Greek
have established beyond reasonable doubt that the original accuracy,
wealth and beauty of the English are fully preserved (perhaps even
enhanced?) in translation.....
Ross Clark
Robin R. Langton
On Wed, 01 Apr 1998 12:03:49 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> So, /bh/ is not quite fully voiced, but whispered, while /ph/ is voiceless.
> Well, I would be more certain if I heard them both.
It is a difficult sound to imagine if you have never heard it, but it
does occur in Indian languages, so if you fancy a curry, you could ask
for a demonstration as a side dish. :-)
In /bha/ the lips are closed and pressure is built up behind them with
air coming through vibrating vocal chords (i.e. voiced air) and then
the lips open causing a little explosion of air. After this the vocal
chords continue vibrating, emiting more air than is usual to make a
vowel sound, causing the first part of the vowel (/a/ in this case) to
sound different (more breathy) then the rest of it.
Compare this /ba/: it starts the same, with voiced air building up
behind the closed lips, but the extra breathines is not present, so
when the lips part the start of the vowel is the same as the rest of
it.
In the case of /pa/ the air causing the build up is not voiced (vocal
chords open but not vibrating). The vocal chords start vibrating at
the point when the lips open, so the the vowel has the same quality
throughout as in /ba/.
In the case of /pha/ the vocal chords start vibrating later than in
/pa/ so that the first part of the vowel is heard without voice. When
you whisper you use no voice, so to say that the sound of the first
part of the vowel is as in whispering is reasonable. In some languages
the /h/ part is more forceful - more air is put out, giving more some
white noise in the sound: this is more like what happens in
whispering, as the noise is used to carry the sound to the listener.
~ = voice; ^ extra air; _ = normal air
- = no voice
/ba/
lips closed: open lips.....vowel.....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
_____________________________________
/bha/
lips closed: open lips.....vowel.....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^_______________
/pa/
lips closed: open lips.....vowel.....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~------------------------
_____________________________________
/pha/(breathy version)
lips closed: open lips.....vowel.....
-------------------------------------
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^_______________
You will need to switch to a fixed pitch font to make sense of the
above diagrams.
It is very difficult to get an impression of a sound you have not
heard for yourself, but perhaps the above account will make it clearer
what people are talking about.
Robbie Langton For Sci-Fi Cult TV Satire see:
http://www.roblang.demon.co.uk/fangrok/index.html
sp...@erols.com
Ross Clark wrote: patronizing things
Panayiotis Karras wrote: something interesting:
'The Greek language is incomparably superior to all the other languages of
> the world considered with respect to its wisdom, beauty, depth, wealth of
> words, and priceless richness of expression.'
> Paissy Velichkovsky, in a letter to
> Elder Theodosius in Zitie i pisanija
> Moldavskago, Moscow, 1847.
>
Biography and writings. If the BLessed (was he canonized yet by the Orthodox
church, and if so, in which jurisdiction?) Paissy was writing to Staretz Teodosi in
Moscow from Names the monastery he founded in Moldavia, one presumes he would have
used a Slavic language to convey these great feelings about the Greek tongue. He
was a consummate diplomat in many respects, able to begin monasteries with the help
of the Phanar and panslavic contributions, at a time when money was tight,
establishing these in virgin territory (i.e. new monasteries).. His translations of
church texts still stand. He is an incredible saint. Eh, let me hunt up a fun
quote of his.....hmmmmmm.......:
"The Divine Prophet David says: 'By the Word of the Lord were the heavens
established, and all the might of them by the Spirit of His mouth' (Psalm 32.6) Do
you see ? He calls the Father Lord, but he calls the Son the Word, as pre eternally
begotten of Him, and He calls the Holy Spirit the SPirit of His lips, as proceeding
form the Father alone. One could search out many other testimonies also form the
Old and New Testaments, which show more clearly than the sun that the Holy SPirit
proceeds form the Father alone and reposes in the Son, as was disclosed also in the
Baptism of our Lord"
excerpt from a letter "to a Uniate Priest, on the Procession of the Holy Spirit",
collection Chetverkoff, II, pp. 55-57, in The Orthodox Word, vol. 11, no. 5, 1975,
Platina CA
Now, isn't that passage absolutely beautiful as a defense of the True Faith. So
clear a mind alwyas is capable of translation form one language to the next.
Torturous phraseology however, does not.There is always a clear way to express
ideas, but few are capable.
Galina Schneider
sp...@erols.com
sp...@erols.com wrote:
> Ross Clark wrote: patronizing things
>
> Panayiotis Karras wrote: something interesting:
>
> 'The Greek language is incomparably superior to all the other languages of
> > the world considered with respect to its wisdom, beauty, depth, wealth of
> > words, and priceless richness of expression.'
> > Paissy Velichkovsky, in a letter to
> > Elder Theodosius in Zitie i pisanija
> > Moldavskago, Moscow, 1847.
> >
>
> Biography and writings. If the BLessed (was he canonized yet by the Orthodox
> church, and if so, in which jurisdiction?) Paissy was writing to Staretz Teodosi in
> Moscow from NIAMETS the monastery he founded in Moldavia, one presumes he would have
> used a Slavic language to convey these great feelings about the Greek tongue. He
> was a consummate diplomat in many respects, able to begin monasteries with the help
> of the Phanar and panslavic contributions, at a time when money was tight,
> establishing these in virgin territory (i.e. new monasteries).. His translations of
> church texts still stand. He is an incredible saint. Eh, let me hunt up a fun
> quote of his.....hmmmmmm.......:
>
> "The Divine Prophet David says: 'By the Word of the Lord were the heavens
> established, and all the might of them by the Spirit of His mouth' (Psalm 32.6) Do
> you see ? He calls the Father Lord, but he calls the Son the Word, as pre eternally
> begotten of Him, and He calls the Holy Spirit the SPirit of His lips, as proceeding
> form the Father alone. One could search out many other testimonies also form the
> Old and New Testaments, which show more clearly than the sun that the Holy SPirit
> proceeds form the Father alone and reposes in the Son, as was disclosed also in the
> Baptism of our Lord"
>
> excerpt from a letter "to a Uniate Priest, on the Procession of the Holy Spirit",
> collection Chetverkoff, II, pp. 55-57, in The Orthodox Word, vol. 11, no. 5, 1975,
> Platina CA
>
> Now, isn't that passage absolutely beautiful as a defense of the True Faith. So
> clear a mind alwyas is capable of translation form one language to the next.
> Torturous phraseology however, does not.There is always a clear way to express
> ideas, but few are capable.
>
> Galina Schneider
I am sorry when i used the spell checker it changed Paissy's monastery from Niamets to
Names.
George Baloglou
>You are making several fallacies here: (1) That it is claimed the early IE
>were "savages," whatever that means. (2) That the IE savages were nomads
>before entering Greece. (3) That nomadic culture is poor in words. (4) That
>flexibility of thought and rationality is crucially dependent on word-building
>capabilities of a certain sort.
While the Iliad and the Odyssey are under 20,000 lines each, I understand
that the Siberian (Circassian) epic "Manas" runs into 250,000 lines; of
course, as the Greeks said, "ouk en to pollo to eu" ("quality is not
contained in quantity"), but, still, this says something about the ways
of nomadic cultures with words! [I got my information from a book (p. 198)
titled "Toward some Greek Folk Song Poetics" and written (in Greek) by
Aristotle University professor G. M. Sifakis. The same book makes an
interesting comparison (p.89) between Greek folk songs (normally consisting
of under 100 lines) and "Yugoslav" folk songs (running into hundreds, and
some into the thousands, of lines), as well as the longevity of oral
tradition in the two nations (again the "Yugoslavs" did better -- why?).]
I understand that the above paragraph can be viewed as a diversion from
the main topic, but, if anyone can comment on it tying it to this thread,
please do :-) As for other aspects of this thread, I must say that, as a
Greek, I find it pointless to try to establish any kind of "uniqueness"
for the Greek language. Such efforts have in fact produced little effect
in Greece itself, where many high school philologists would rather not
teach Ancient Greek if allowed to do so :-( [On the other hand, the number
of ancient Greek works read by the public -- in translation of course,
which is shamefully needed even for Papadiamantis or Paparigopoulos -- is
on a fast rise; and having the original face the modern Greek rendering
is a great idea (establishing the unity of Greek in a split second for
those still having eyes to see) ... even though I was disappointed to hear
that a very intelligent and knowledgeable friend of mine read the Odyssey
from such a translation (while pregnant) "looking at the original text
(only) from time to time".]
So, dear Panayiotis (and other fellow Greeks), let's consider ourselves
lucky for for being able to speak -- and in some cases read -- the
language in which three of the most influential works in the history
of mankind (Homeric Epics, Euclid's Elements, New Testament) have been
written ... and let's concentrate on how we can save that language's
face in Greece proper: for as long as Philology teachers must drive a
cab or wait on tables at night to make ends meet (which is often the case
when no other income is available) and the average Greek cannot appreciate
the beauty of the original text even with the help of a face-to-face
translation ... "dev dikaioume8a dia va omiloumev" :-)
George Baloglou -- http://www.oswego.edu/~baloglou
(broadcasting from the southeastern shores of Lake Ontario)
"H Pwmavia ki' av enepacev av8ei kai fepei ki' allo"
"Even though it faded, Hellenism blooms and branches out again"
Gregory Dandulakis
In article George Baloglou <balo...@oswego.edu> wrote:
...
>So, dear Panayiotis (and other fellow Greeks), let's consider ourselves
>language in which three of the most influential works in the history
>of mankind (Homeric Epics, Euclid's Elements, New Testament) have been
>written
From the three texts that you refer to, I single out only one as
a truly (1) Once discovered (no independent equivalent discovery),
and (2) Raising to full _Consciousness_ what distinguishes humans
from any other physical system. That is: Euclid's Elements. Even
though Aristotle's _Logic_ was the real breakthrough, and a number
of previous thinkers critically helped to crystallize the concept
_Logic_ (Thales, Heraklitus, Pythagoras, Plato were few of them),
Euclid did a unique job into concisely and lucidly exposing the
power of Deductive Logic, therefore making it widely known and
respected. No surprise that _The Elements_ were the most printed
book until this century, only second to Bible (which was in essence
though a virtually mass consuption product; that is, a fully political
propaganda manual; as Homeric Epics were/are too).
Gregory
Gregory Dandulakis
In article Gregory Dandulakis <gd...@watt.seas.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>
>In article George Baloglou <balo...@oswego.edu> wrote:
>...
>a truly (1) Once discovered (no independent equivalent discovery),
>and (2) Raising to full _Consciousness_ what distinguishes humans
>from any other physical system. That is: Euclid's Elements.
As an aside, from what I have heard, there is also good reasons to
believe that Euclid was, if not fully Black, at least Mulato. (He
flourished in Egypt).
Any more knowledgable/factual comments on that?
Gregory
George Baloglou
In article <35723fa9....@news.wxs.nl> m...@wxs.nl writes:
>
>The IE word for wine, *woin-os, looks suspiciously similar to the
>Proto-Semitic root *wajn- and the Proto-Kartvelian root *Gwin-. The
>Kartvelian word was probably borrowed from Proto-Armenian (*gwini).
>Whether the word was borrowed into IE from Semitic or the other way
>around is unknown, although the Hittite and Luwian words (wiyana,
>wayana) suggest a native IE origin (from the root *wei- "to wind", cf.
>Latin vitis (*wei-t-is) "vine"). In that case, the word would have
>been borrowed from IE into Semitic. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov take this
>as an indication that the Indo-European homeland was in the Caucasus
>or Eastern Anatolia.
>
This article arrived here late (today), I have not followed this thread
from ther beginning and my question might be a bit off, but, anyhow,
let me state it: do we have any examples in these languages of uses
such as "oinops pontos" = "drunken/wild/dark sea" and "oinops vous" =
"drunken/wild/dark ox"? Or of "Oinops" as a name, and in particular
*an ox's name* (as a find in Knossos indicates)? Furthermore, can
anyone direct me/us to works, including dictionaries, that explore the
Homeric Epics with the help of IE research? [Please use the address
balo...@oswego.edu in case you e-mail me -- thanks!]
Terry Smith
> From: pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
> Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 08:18:20 -0600
> Well, I am sorry, but, as far as I know, neither Hungary, neither
> the Unkraine, neither the Caucasus, neither India, neither the Ural
> Mountains, neither the Caspian Sea are famous for their wine produce
> and tradition.
Neither are the levantine lands, but it figures prominently in that areas
mythology regarding an extension of the Magic Invisible Sky-pixie. Most of
the area you refer to is now Islamic. That puts rather a large dry area
between the home of Metaxa purple after-shave and saki.
Terry
--
|WIN95 -a 32bit GUI on a 16 bit patch of an 8 bit OS from a 2 bit cracker.
Colin Fine
In article <352ab95c...@news.demon.co.uk>, "Robin R. Langton"
<Rob...@roblang.demon.co.uk> writes
>On Wed, 01 Apr 1998 12:03:49 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>
>> So, /bh/ is not quite fully voiced, but whispered, while /ph/ is voiceless.
>> Well, I would be more certain if I heard them both.
>
>It is a difficult sound to imagine if you have never heard it, but it
>does occur in Indian languages, so if you fancy a curry, you could ask
>for a demonstration as a side dish. :-)
>
>In /bha/ the lips are closed and pressure is built up behind them with
>air coming through vibrating vocal chords (i.e. voiced air) and then
>the lips open causing a little explosion of air. After this the vocal
>chords continue vibrating, emiting more air than is usual to make a
>vowel sound, causing the first part of the vowel (/a/ in this case) to
>sound different (more breathy) then the rest of it.
As a first approximation, consider the consonant (cluster, in English)
in the middle of 'clubhouse'. Don't try and take it as gospel though.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Colin Fine 66 High Ash, Shipley, W Yorks. BD18 1NE, UK |
| Tel: 01274 592696/0976 635354 e-mail: co...@kindness.demon.co.uk |
| "Don't just do something! Stand there!" |
| - from 'Behold the Spirit' (workshop) |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
sp...@erols.com
Colin Fine wrote:
> In article <352ab95c...@news.demon.co.uk>, "Robin R. Langton"
> <Rob...@roblang.demon.co.uk> writes
> >On Wed, 01 Apr 1998 12:03:49 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> >
> >> So, /bh/ is not quite fully voiced, but whispered, while /ph/ is voiceless.
> >> Well, I would be more certain if I heard them both.
> >
> >It is a difficult sound to imagine if you have never heard it, but it
> >does occur in Indian languages, so if you fancy a curry, you could ask
> >for a demonstration as a side dish. :-)
> >
> >In /bha/ the lips are closed and pressure is built up behind them with
> >air coming through vibrating vocal chords (i.e. voiced air) and then
> >the lips open causing a little explosion of air. After this the vocal
> >chords continue vibrating, emiting more air than is usual to make a
> >vowel sound, causing the first part of the vowel (/a/ in this case) to
> >sound different (more breathy) then the rest of it.
>
becomes a plosive
> As a first approximation, consider the consonant (cluster, in English)
> in the middle of 'clubhouse'. Don't try and take it as gospel though.
>
b in club __>p before the h
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr
Ross Clark <d...@antnov1.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> > gdw...@earthlink.net (Garry Williams) wrote:
> > > Would you mind explaining just what you mean by "richness in word
> > > building"
> >
> > I had the impression that this quality of the Greek language was common
> > knowledge among people occupied with linguistics and/or classical studies.
> > I have already given some examples illustrating my point and I have got
> > only some naive replies putting forward elementary derivations within
> > English or Sanskrit which are supposed to discredit my point.
>
> It seems odd for you to be using the word "naive" here, since your
> reaction to the list of Sanskrit forms was essentially "My goodness, I
> have never seen such a thing before". In this and other ways you have
> indicated your own innocence of the evidence on which Indo-European
> linguistics is based.
My reaction to the list of Sanskrit forms was "I am amazed!".
I have not studied Sanskrit and it was indeed amazing for me to diagnose
some analogies between the Greek and Sanskrit derivations from two related
respective word roots.
However, I still maintained my viewpoint that the derivative and expressive
capabilities of Greek are incredible and I immediately expressed my impression
that Sanskrit does not match it.
Finally, I have never doupted the existence of evidence on which the claim
for a relation between Greek and Sanskrit is based. I am doupting other,
arbitrary assumptions of a palaeontological extension of the IE linguistical
theory, concernig where and when people talking 'IE' languages lived and how a
supposed 'proto-IE' language was and sounded.
> > Anyway, since you are not convinced by my examples, which can never be
> > perfect, I will bring forward a quotation:
> >
> > 'The Greek language is incomparably superior to all the other languages
> > of the world considered with respect to its wisdom, beauty, depth, wealth
> > of words, and priceless richness of expression.'
> > Paissy Velichkovsky, in a letter to
> > Elder Theodosius in Zitie i pisanija
> > Moldavskago, Moscow, 1847.
> >
> > This may offer you some indication on what I mean.
>
> Perhaps someone will one day publish an anthology of similar ecstatic
> quotations about languages of many different families around the world.
> We have a useful word in English which is only half-Greek:
> "ethnocentric".
No, I am sorry, it is full-Greek. Which part did you think is not Greek?
> It refers to people who see everything from the point of
> view of their own culture, and have not taken the fundamental step of
> learning that things look different to those brought up elsewhere, and
> that those people are not necessarily wrong.
So, are Mr Paissy Velichkovsky and Mr Cedric Whitman ethnocentrists?
Were all the Latin, French, English and other scholars who have been copying
the Greek language ethnocentrists or what?
You know, it is not due to my 'ethnocentrism' that the Greek language is
universally accepted as the primary language of thought.
It was not due to some 'ethnocentrism' that some Basque delegates in the
European Parliament have proposed the Greek language to be the primary
language taught everywhere in the EU.
> > Keep reading to see more of what I mean.
> >
> > > and how you've figured out that Greek has this quality to a
> > > greater degree than other languages, for example English,
> >
> > I have figured this out through my own experience and knowledge of
> > English and other languages, as well as through the testimonies of
> > English-speaking professors of Greek, like the one that follows:
> >
> > 'Our earliest monuments of Greek are the Iliad and the Odyssey, and
> > already in these poems the vocabulary is so large and the expression so
> > varied that it is impossible to translate them with anything like the
> > richness of the original. I sometimes discourage my students by telling
> > them that for each new Greek author, they must practically learn a new
> > language. But then in my own turn I am discouraged that in them too, the
> > wealth of words and idiom is so great that the problems for a foreigner
> > seem almost endless.'
> > Cedric Whitman in 'Greek Language and Culture
> > Their vitality and imporatnace today.'
> > Published by the Institute for Byzantine and
> > Modern Greek Studies, Inc. 2nd Edition, 1995.
>
> We have some other terms in English, like "hellenophilia" and
I think you mean 'philhellenism'.
I am sorry, this is an original Modern Greek term.
> "hellenolatry".
Also full-Greek, by the way.
> This adulation of everything Greek, and disparagement of
> other cultures and languages by comparison,
I am sorry, I have not 'disparaged other cultures and languages by
comparison'. I just put some emphasis on understanding the qualities of Greek
and its implications on the arbitrary details of the IE theory.
> has exercised a powerful and
> not always beneficial influence on English-speaking cultural life.
What do you mean? Was it e.g. not beneficial that parliamentary democracy
was established in England on the model of Greek democracy? Anyway, the
effects of the qualities of Greek culture on English-speaking cultural life is
out of the subject here.
> Nowadays it can be used to feed the vanity of Greek linguistic
> supremacists.
Thank you for this characterization. I add it in my collection. Up to now it
contains:
- 'hyperpositivist'
- 'arrogant and ignorant'
- 'innocent'
- 'ethnocentrist'
- 'Greek linguistic supremacist'
> Here's another quote for you:
>
> The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
> structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and
> more exquisitely refined than either;...
>
> Sir William Jones, Third Anniversary Discourse
> on the Hindus, 1786
This could be true. But certainly both Greek and Sanskrit are far more
'wise, beautiful, deep, wealthy, expressive, varied' or 'wonderfully
structured, perfect, copious, exquisitely refined' than any other 'IE'
language, aren't they? Besides, the quotation above uses Greek and Latin as
models of comparison, while Romans themselves were fascinated by the qualities
of Greek compared to their language, weren't they?
[...]
> > It demonstrates that Greek is not symmetrical to other 'IE' languages,
>
> You have used this term "symmetrical" again and again without explaining
> what you mean by it. Do you mean anything more than "similar"?
Thank you for providing me an example of a Greek word that can not be
accurately enough translated to English.
"SYMMETRIA" between two things does not mean 'similarity' of them.
It denotes rather a deep analogy of structure between the two parts, so that
for any element of the former an element of the latter with analogous
properties and function can be found.
What would you say in English? 'Co-measurity' maybe? :-)
Therefore, my claimed "Symmetry between 'IE' languages" demands that since
'IE' languages have a 'sibling' relationship, they should be 'symmetrical'
between each other, and thus Mr. Whitman should not be in the position to
claim: 'I am discouraged that in them too, the wealth of words and idiom is so
great that the problems for a foreigner seem almost endless.'
> > as well as that it can not have been the language of a group of savage
> > 2.000 B.C. invaders of the Greek peninsula.
>
> Of course it does not demonstrate any such thing, any more than that the
> manifest literary and linguistic richness of English "demonstrate" that
> it could not have been the language of a bunch of savage invaders of
> the British Isles about 500 AD.
I think that the English language was formed much later than the Anglo-Saxon
invasion of the British Isles. There were the Viking raids and the Norman
invasion to follow first.
Anyway, I do not find any 'manifest linguistic richness of English' to
demonstrate such a thing, just like Mr. Whitman doesn't.
> >The rest follows according to reason.
>
> If whatever you're translating as "reason" is the dominant intellectual
> process in Greece these days, it may account for the sudden efflorescence
> of crackpot linguistic chauvinism from that country....
Here I have a new entry in my collection:
- 'crackpot linguistic chauvinist'
> > > If English wasn't rich before, it sure is now! It's absorbed *lots* of
> > > words from lots of languages and has a pretty good-sized vocabulary,
> > > don't you think?
> >
> > Yes. English has absorbed a plethora of Greek vocabulary.
>
> No, he said "from lots of languages", a fact which you could confirm by
> consulting an English dictionary.
I did not doupt about that. I just made a special statement concerning Greek
vocabulary loans. Of course I agree that '[English] has absorbed *lots* of
words from lots of languages' and I am delighted that you also agree on that,
since it proves my claim that there was not such a thing as a 'manifest
linguistic richness of English' at the first place, before the massive
borrowing took place.
> Such a dictionary would also explain what "symmetrical" means in English.
What do you mean? Does it mean something different that the original Greek
sense of the word?
Then it is you who have to check a Greek dictionary to find out an
explanation of the adjective 'symmetrikos'.
I usually use Greek words with their Greek sense even if I am talking in
English. I apologize about that.
> > > but looking at your example and without hunting down a Greek dictionary,
> > > I'm thinking that your "titheemi" means more or less "to place, put,
> > > set" in English, right? Ok, so, we have the English verb "to set", we
> > > have the noun "setting" (like a place setting for a table, for
> > > instance), then there's "setter" a type of dog that sets when game is
> > > spotted, and of course when we set ourselves down, we do so on a "seat",
> > > and having put ourselves there we have "settled" down, sort of like the
> > > "settlings" at the bottom of a teacup. Should I bother to drag in
> > > "sit" and its variations too, or have I made my point?
> >
> > ...which verifies how naive you think. Just check out the quotation of
> > Cedric Whitman above.
>
> Sorry, Whitman doesn't seem to be saying anything about English words
> like "setting" and "seat".
I did not imply he does. I just hoped that it would help you understand.
Anyway, I'll try to explain you myself.
First of all, most of these English words are simply forms of the verb 'set'
and 'settle' (setting, settled, settlings). The remains are 'setter', 'seat'
and 'sit' with its variations.
Maybe it is really hard for you to understand that Greek derivations go far
beyond this level of objects directly related to the original form, and
produce several new meanings like 'thesmos', 'themis', 'thema' and all the
others I had mentioned. Then it is exactly this quality of the Greek language
that provides it the dynamism to be an adequate medium for the establishment
of the first mathematical, philosophical, legal, political and scientific
endeavours of humankind.
Or, to put it again as a quotation:
"The Greek language is superior to all other languages, according to the
confession of all well-educated men of the various nations. The reason for
this is the fact that it has many merits which the others lack. The first of
these is that out of one root there spring the expressions of things of the
same kind, and thus their common principle becomes evident, representing them
as a certain family. The second merit is that it explains ideas through the
synthesis and analysis of words and hence a knowledge of this language is
somehow connected with the knowledge of the various branches of knowledge. A
third merit is that it has been the teacher of many arts and sciences, whose
words have been taken over by foreign languages and been absorbed by them."
Benjamin of Lesvos, in Logos peri Paideias
("Address on Education"), published in
Hermes ho Logios, 1818.
Please disregard the third merit mentioned above, which is out of the
subject here and has already caused a lot of confusion in this discussion.
> > > The funnest part of this is that you don't realize that I was able to
> > > pull an example like this up exactly because English and Greek are
> > > both Indo-European languages and thus have much in common not only in
> > > the way of vocabulary, but also in ways new words are formed.
I should have already written here that the disappointing part of this is
that you are unable to understand that the 'ways new words are formed' are far
from being in common between Greek and other 'IE' languages.
Let me repeat here the example of thge verb 'phainoo', already presented in
another posting:
phainoo -? phasis, phaneros, phaneroo, phaneroosis, phanee, phanos,
phantasia, phantazoo, phantasma, phaneroos, phasma, phainomenon
, from which 'phase', 'phantasy' and 'phenomenon' are used in English as
word loans. I hope you will not try to present a 'set'-like antiparadigm from
English again. Perhaps you could instead provide me some native English words
for 'phase' and 'phenomenon'. The only ones I can think of are 'show' for
'phase' and 'shown' for 'phaenomenon', which are far from delicately
expressing the desired notions.
> > ...with the minor detail that it is impossible to translate a Greek text
> > to English without losing the original accuracy, wealth and beauty,
> > although English has borrowed massively from Greek.
>
> And of course your studies of translations of English texts into Greek
> have established beyond reasonable doubt that the original accuracy,
> wealth and beauty of the English are fully preserved (perhaps even
> enhanced?) in translation.....
They are indeed at least preserved.
As far as scientific publications are concerned, translation is almost
unnecessary...
Robin R. Langton
>In article <352ab95c...@news.demon.co.uk>, "Robin R. Langton"
><Rob...@roblang.demon.co.uk> writes
>>On Wed, 01 Apr 1998 12:03:49 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>>
>>> So, /bh/ is not quite fully voiced, but whispered, while /ph/ is voiceless.
>>> Well, I would be more certain if I heard them both.
>>
>>It is a difficult sound to imagine if you have never heard it, but it
>>does occur in Indian languages, so if you fancy a curry, you could ask
>>for a demonstration as a side dish. :-)
>>
>>In /bha/ the lips are closed and pressure is built up behind them with
>>air coming through vibrating vocal chords (i.e. voiced air) and then
>>the lips open causing a little explosion of air. After this the vocal
>>chords continue vibrating, emiting more air than is usual to make a
>>vowel sound, causing the first part of the vowel (/a/ in this case) to
>>sound different (more breathy) then the rest of it.
>
>As a first approximation, consider the consonant (cluster, in English)
>in the middle of 'clubhouse'. Don't try and take it as gospel though.
Yes, that will certainly be the case for some English speakers. Some
also use a voiced /h/ in "behaviour". Not very likely to be the case
in the English of a foreigner who has learned the language though, so
it probably won't help Mr Karras. I still think his best bet's a
biriani with a bhaji on the side... :-)
Mihalis Panagiotakis
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>
> Ross Clark <d...@antnov1.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> > It seems odd for you to be using the word "naive" here, since your
> > reaction to the list of Sanskrit forms was essentially "My goodness, I
> > have never seen such a thing before". In this and other ways you have
> > indicated your own innocence of the evidence on which Indo-European
> > linguistics is based.
>
> My reaction to the list of Sanskrit forms was "I am amazed!".
>
> I have not studied Sanskrit and it was indeed amazing for me to diagnose
> some analogies between the Greek and Sanskrit derivations from two related
> respective word roots.
>
> However, I still maintained my viewpoint that the derivative and expressive
> capabilities of Greek are incredible and I immediately expressed my impression
> that Sanskrit does not match it.
Foul! If you do not know a language it is impossible to judge its
"derivative
and [especially] expressive capabilities. Indeed you have no way of
knowing how
extraordinary or not these capabilities are unless you *know* quite a
few.
>
> Finally, I have never doupted the existence of evidence on which the claim
> for a relation between Greek and Sanskrit is based. I am doupting other,
> arbitrary assumptions of a palaeontological extension of the IE linguistical
> theory, concernig where and when people talking 'IE' languages lived and how a
> supposed 'proto-IE' language was and sounded.
Quite a number of people in this (and related) threads have
demonstrated the rules of inference in linguistics. Someone gave
examples of actual *predictions* from
these. The evidence presented is good enough and certainly better than
any other
alternative theory. The problems with the "out of Greece" theory that
you seem to
be proposing is that it doesn't natch the known linguistic and
archeological
facts. How for example are we to imagine that a Greek derived language
was introduced
and dominated India from the 2d millenium BC?
>
> > > Anyway, since you are not convinced by my examples, which can never be
> > > perfect, I will bring forward a quotation:
> > >
> > > 'The Greek language is incomparably superior to all the other languages
> > > of the world considered with respect to its wisdom, beauty, depth, wealth
> > > of words, and priceless richness of expression.'
> > > Paissy Velichkovsky, in a letter to
> > > Elder Theodosius in Zitie i pisanija
> > > Moldavskago, Moscow, 1847.
> > >
> > > This may offer you some indication on what I mean.
> >
> > Perhaps someone will one day publish an anthology of similar ecstatic
> > quotations about languages of many different families around the world.
> > We have a useful word in English which is only half-Greek:
> > "ethnocentric".
>
> No, I am sorry, it is full-Greek. Which part did you think is not Greek?
Indeed it is fully Greek
>
> > It refers to people who see everything from the point of
> > view of their own culture, and have not taken the fundamental step of
> > learning that things look different to those brought up elsewhere, and
> > that those people are not necessarily wrong.
>
> So, are Mr Paissy Velichkovsky and Mr Cedric Whitman ethnocentrists?
>
> Were all the Latin, French, English and other scholars who have been copying
> the Greek language ethnocentrists or what?
The point is that all sorts of scholars have been making similar
comments about a
host of languages, not only Greek. The "copying" of the Greek language
was due
to the fact that Greece was the place that the roots of Latin and
European thought
developed, and therefore it had the vocabulary to express the ideas
ready-made.
It's the same nowadays with computers and English or fashion and French.
Also
don't forget the reverence of all things Greek during the rennaissance
and the
enlightment.
>
> You know, it is not due to my 'ethnocentrism' that the Greek language is
> universally accepted as the primary language of thought.
>
> It was not due to some 'ethnocentrism' that some Basque delegates in the
> European Parliament have proposed the Greek language to be the primary
> language taught everywhere in the EU.
No it was mostly due to the respect that the ancient texts command in
all of Europe
and ofcourse to "small language solidarity" in the EU, where smaller
language speakers
support each other and fight against linguistic dominance of the "big"
languages
(english especially, but French, German and Spanish too).
>
> > > Keep reading to see more of what I mean.
> > >
> > > > and how you've figured out that Greek has this quality to a
> > > > greater degree than other languages, for example English,
> > >
> > > I have figured this out through my own experience and knowledge of
> > > English and other languages, as well as through the testimonies of
> > > English-speaking professors of Greek, like the one that follows:
> > >
> > > 'Our earliest monuments of Greek are the Iliad and the Odyssey, and
> > > already in these poems the vocabulary is so large and the expression so
> > > varied that it is impossible to translate them with anything like the
> > > richness of the original. I sometimes discourage my students by telling
> > > them that for each new Greek author, they must practically learn a new
> > > language. But then in my own turn I am discouraged that in them too, the
> > > wealth of words and idiom is so great that the problems for a foreigner
> > > seem almost endless.'
> > > Cedric Whitman in 'Greek Language and Culture
> > > Their vitality and imporatnace today.'
> > > Published by the Institute for Byzantine and
> > > Modern Greek Studies, Inc. 2nd Edition, 1995.
> >
> > We have some other terms in English, like "hellenophilia" and
>
> I think you mean 'philhellenism'.
> I am sorry, this is an original Modern Greek term.
Hellenophilia is an English word of Hellenic etymology. Modern or
ancient is moot.
>
> > "hellenolatry".
>
> Also full-Greek, by the way.
>
> > This adulation of everything Greek, and disparagement of
> > other cultures and languages by comparison,
>
> I am sorry, I have not 'disparaged other cultures and languages by
> comparison'. I just put some emphasis on understanding the qualities of Greek
> and its implications on the arbitrary details of the IE theory.
>
> > has exercised a powerful and
> > not always beneficial influence on English-speaking cultural life.
>
> What do you mean? Was it e.g. not beneficial that parliamentary democracy
> was established in England on the model of Greek democracy? Anyway, the
> effects of the qualities of Greek culture on English-speaking cultural life is
> out of the subject here.
Errr, actually _parliamentary_ democracy was NOT an ancient Greek
invention.
In ancient Athens one had _direct Democracy_.
>
> > Nowadays it can be used to feed the vanity of Greek linguistic
> > supremacists.
>
> Thank you for this characterization. I add it in my collection. Up to now it
> contains:
>
> - 'hyperpositivist'
> - 'arrogant and ignorant'
> - 'innocent'
> - 'ethnocentrist'
> - 'Greek linguistic supremacist'
>
> > Here's another quote for you:
> >
> > The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
> > structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and
> > more exquisitely refined than either;...
> >
> > Sir William Jones, Third Anniversary Discourse
> > on the Hindus, 1786
>
> This could be true. But certainly both Greek and Sanskrit are far more
> 'wise, beautiful, deep, wealthy, expressive, varied' or 'wonderfully
> structured, perfect, copious, exquisitely refined' than any other 'IE'
> language, aren't they? Besides, the quotation above uses Greek and Latin as
> models of comparison, while Romans themselves were fascinated by the qualities
> of Greek compared to their language, weren't they?
>
Yes but if *both* Greek and Sanscrit are far more wise etc. what makes
you believe that
they don't derive from a common source given their similarities?
> [...]
> > > It demonstrates that Greek is not symmetrical to other 'IE' languages,
> >
> > You have used this term "symmetrical" again and again without explaining
> > what you mean by it. Do you mean anything more than "similar"?
>
> Thank you for providing me an example of a Greek word that can not be
> accurately enough translated to English.
>
> "SYMMETRIA" between two things does not mean 'similarity' of them.
>
> It denotes rather a deep analogy of structure between the two parts, so that
> for any element of the former an element of the latter with analogous
> properties and function can be found.
>
> What would you say in English? 'Co-measurity' maybe? :-)
Actually one says *symmetry* in english. Commeasurable is something
else.
>
> Therefore, my claimed "Symmetry between 'IE' languages" demands that since
> 'IE' languages have a 'sibling' relationship, they should be 'symmetrical'
> between each other, and thus Mr. Whitman should not be in the position to
> claim: 'I am discouraged that in them too, the wealth of words and idiom is so
> great that the problems for a foreigner seem almost endless.'
Actually I can tell you that translating Joyce into Greek the Wealth of
words and
idiom is so great that the problems" for a Greek translator were so
"endless"
that it took him something like 20 years (if I remeber correctly) to
finish the
job. Having translated a couple of books from English to Greek myself I
can
tell you that there are quite substantial problems there. To mention but
one
in Greek mechanic, engineer and mechanical are but one word (MHXANIKOS).
>
> > > as well as that it can not have been the language of a group of savage
> > > 2.000 B.C. invaders of the Greek peninsula.
> >
> > Of course it does not demonstrate any such thing, any more than that the
> > manifest literary and linguistic richness of English "demonstrate" that
> > it could not have been the language of a bunch of savage invaders of
> > the British Isles about 500 AD.
>
> I think that the English language was formed much later than the Anglo-Saxon
> invasion of the British Isles. There were the Viking raids and the Norman
> invasion to follow first.
>
> Anyway, I do not find any 'manifest linguistic richness of English' to
> demonstrate such a thing, just like Mr. Whitman doesn't.
I don't know about Mr.Whitman but when I read Shakespear I am quite
impressed
by the manifest linguistic richness of English.
>
> > >The rest follows according to reason.
> >
> > If whatever you're translating as "reason" is the dominant intellectual
> > process in Greece these days, it may account for the sudden efflorescence
> > of crackpot linguistic chauvinism from that country....
>
> Here I have a new entry in my collection:
>
> - 'crackpot linguistic chauvinist'
Just a point. Although there are strong undercurrents of nationalism
developing lately back home. I can hardly see a "sudden efflorescence of
crackpot linguistic chauvinism
from that country". I mean newsgroups are hardly representative aren't
they?
>
> > > > If English wasn't rich before, it sure is now! It's absorbed *lots* of
> > > > words from lots of languages and has a pretty good-sized vocabulary,
> > > > don't you think?
> > >
> > > Yes. English has absorbed a plethora of Greek vocabulary.
> >
> > No, he said "from lots of languages", a fact which you could confirm by
> > consulting an English dictionary.
>
> I did not doupt about that. I just made a special statement concerning Greek
> vocabulary loans. Of course I agree that '[English] has absorbed *lots* of
> words from lots of languages' and I am delighted that you also agree on that,
> since it proves my claim that there was not such a thing as a 'manifest
> linguistic richness of English' at the first place, before the massive
> borrowing took place.
Succesful languages have no problem in borrowing and *assimilating*
words from
other languages. In modern Greek it is sad to see that foreign loan
words are
being introduced unassimilated (axwneutes 0a elega) in the language...
Well let's see: "set" as a mathematical concept (sunolo). "Set" as in
stage-set.
And then Baby-sitter, setup, upset and isn't "state" derived from a
common stem?
>
> Maybe it is really hard for you to understand that Greek derivations go far
> beyond this level of objects directly related to the original form, and
> produce several new meanings like 'thesmos', 'themis', 'thema' and all the
> others I had mentioned.
Set in math is definitely a new meaning and so is upset, setter as in
the dog and
probably many more.
>Then it is exactly this quality of the Greek language
> that provides it the dynamism to be an adequate medium for the establishment
> of the first mathematical, philosophical, legal, political and scientific
> endeavours of humankind.
>
Or was it the other way around? I mean wasn't the need for new words
the driving force
for forming them. It usually is.
> Or, to put it again as a quotation:
>
> "The Greek language is superior to all other languages, according to the
> confession of all well-educated men of the various nations. The reason for
> this is the fact that it has many merits which the others lack. The first of
> these is that out of one root there spring the expressions of things of the
> same kind, and thus their common principle becomes evident, representing them
> as a certain family. The second merit is that it explains ideas through the
> synthesis and analysis of words and hence a knowledge of this language is
> somehow connected with the knowledge of the various branches of knowledge. A
> third merit is that it has been the teacher of many arts and sciences, whose
> words have been taken over by foreign languages and been absorbed by them."
> Benjamin of Lesvos, in Logos peri Paideias
> ("Address on Education"), published in
> Hermes ho Logios, 1818.
>
> Please disregard the third merit mentioned above, which is out of the
> subject here and has already caused a lot of confusion in this discussion.
So Beniamin o Lesvios knew Sanskrit? Persian? How many Europeans of his
age knew
these IE languages?
>
> > > > The funnest part of this is that you don't realize that I was able to
> > > > pull an example like this up exactly because English and Greek are
> > > > both Indo-European languages and thus have much in common not only in
> > > > the way of vocabulary, but also in ways new words are formed.
>
> I should have already written here that the disappointing part of this is
> that you are unable to understand that the 'ways new words are formed' are far
> from being in common between Greek and other 'IE' languages.
Yes compared with Uralo-Altaic and Semetic languages there are alot in
common
in the ways new words are formed in English, Latin, Sanskrit etc. and
Greek.
I'll leave the real liguists to answer that in full...
>
> Let me repeat here the example of thge verb 'phainoo', already presented in
> another posting:
>
> phainoo -? phasis, phaneros, phaneroo, phaneroosis, phanee, phanos,
> phantasia, phantazoo, phantasma, phaneroos, phasma, phainomenon
>
> , from which 'phase', 'phantasy' and 'phenomenon' are used in English as
> word loans. I hope you will not try to present a 'set'-like antiparadigm from
> English again. Perhaps you could instead provide me some native English words
> for 'phase' and 'phenomenon'. The only ones I can think of are 'show' for
> 'phase'
Show? FASIS? More like appearence no- in its original sense? And
metaphorically "stage".
>and 'shown' for 'phaenomenon',
Effect, appearence, occurance....
> which are far from delicately
> expressing the desired notions.
>
> > > ...with the minor detail that it is impossible to translate a Greek text
> > > to English without losing the original accuracy, wealth and beauty,
> > > although English has borrowed massively from Greek.
> >
> > And of course your studies of translations of English texts into Greek
> > have established beyond reasonable doubt that the original accuracy,
> > wealth and beauty of the English are fully preserved (perhaps even
> > enhanced?) in translation.....
>
> They are indeed at least preserved.
Errr no. Not in most cases
>
> As far as scientific publications are concerned, translation is almost
> unnecessary...
Well try reading Weinberg's "Gravitation and Cosmology" with no
knowledge of English
and see how far you get. Actually translating an english *scientific* or
science related text into _modern_ Greek is a bitch, as I can attest
from experience. With Katharevousa
it would be actually easier. Modern Greek is just not so good in
accurate descriptions
and in detailing phenomena as Katharevousa. Why do you think that
Modern Greek
poetry has a much richer tradition than prose? ;-)
>
> Panagiotis Karras
>
> -----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
> http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading
Mihalis Panagiotakis
Brian M. Scott
pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> You know, it is not due to my 'ethnocentrism' that the Greek language is
> universally accepted as the primary language of thought.
It isn't. No language is.
> This could be true. But certainly both Greek and Sanskrit are far more
> 'wise, beautiful, deep, wealthy, expressive, varied' or 'wonderfully
> structured, perfect, copious, exquisitely refined' than any other 'IE'
> language, aren't they?
No.
> Therefore, my claimed "Symmetry between 'IE' languages" demands that since
> 'IE' languages have a 'sibling' relationship, they should be 'symmetrical'
> between each other,
That's your arbitrary requirement; it isn't entailed by a sibling
relationship.
> Anyway, I do not find any 'manifest linguistic richness of English' to
> demonstrate such a thing,
From which we may safely conclude that either your linguistic
hellenophilia blinds you to the obvious, or your knowledge of English
isn't very profound.
> > Such a dictionary would also explain what "symmetrical" means in English.
> What do you mean? Does it mean something different that the original Greek
> sense of the word?
> Then it is you who have to check a Greek dictionary to find out an
> explanation of the adjective 'symmetrikos'.
You're the one trying to express the idea; it behooves you to find a
word that your readers will understand correctly.
> I usually use Greek words with their Greek sense even if I am talking in
> English. I apologize about that.
If you do this because, being ignorant of the English meanings, you have
no choice, then you are obviously not capable of judging either the
linguistic richness of English or the accuracy of Greek translations of
English literature. If you do it through sloth, you're simply
discourteous.
> > And of course your studies of translations of English texts into Greek
> > have established beyond reasonable doubt that the original accuracy,
> > wealth and beauty of the English are fully preserved (perhaps even
> > enhanced?) in translation.....
> They are indeed at least preserved.
It's not clear that you have an adequate basis for forming such a
judgement.
> As far as scientific publications are concerned, translation is almost
> unnecessary...
A considerable overstatement, but in any case scientific publications
have little to do with the subject. Few of them are very stylish to
begin with.
Brian M. Scott
Nikos Sarantakos
On Mon, 06 Apr 1998 10:26:15 -0600, pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>
>
> It was not due to some 'ethnocentrism' that some Basque delegates in the
>European Parliament have proposed the Greek language to be the primary
>language taught everywhere in the EU.
>
First of all, EP members (delegates is not the correct term) tend to
propose various worthy things in their motions for resolutions, but
only a handful of these are deemed important enough to be discussed
in the plenary session. Mr Imaz's motion was never discussed, let
alone voted, and the same fate had earlier (1989?) a previous motion
by another Spanish Basque MEP, Mr. Garikoetxea <sp?>.
Secondly, I am sick and tired to read some Greek media basking
under the Basque motion (sorry for the pun!) and making various
inaccurate references, for instance that it was proposed that Greek
would be made the only official language of the EU. So, I rejoice
seeing Panayote Karras approaching at least the truth about the Basque
motion.
Well, here is the whole text of the said motion, so as to avoid future
inaccuracies.
Nikos Sarantakos
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant2/
(new page is featuring a collection of links to ModGreek literature
-in Greek- online)
31 March 1995 B4-0507/95
MOTION FOR A RESOLUTION
pursuant to Rule 45 of the Rules of Procedure
by Mr IMAZ
on the teaching of classical Greek language and
culture
The European Parliament,
- having regard to the continuous and alarming decline in the
teaching of classical Greek language and culture in the
curriculums of the various countries,
A. whereas Greek language and culture are the fundamental basis of
Western culture, especially European culture,
B. whereas classical Greek trains the human intellect and is a
proven way of encouraging thought and criticism,
C. whereas in Europe, classical Greek has been the language of
science par excellence,
D. whereas it is essential to reassert the identity of the
European Union by restoring and reinforcing the specific
culture and system of values on which it is based,
E. having regard to the need to restore the full humanist meaning
of European culture,
1. Calls on the Commission to draw up a study plan for classical
Greek language and culture to ensure that they are at least
taught at all levels of compulsory education in all Member
States through the respective curriculums, and that Greek
becomes the shared language of all cultured Europeans.
Gregory Dandulakis
In article Mihalis Panagiotakis <mih...@chem.fsu.edu> wrote:
...
>The "copying" of the Greek language was due to the fact that
>Greece was the place that the roots of Latin and European thought
>developed, and therefore it had the vocabulary to express the ideas
>ready-made.
Some further clarification is needed here. It was not just,
or even mostly, of the "ready made" of the Greek-words;
it was the relevant original _text_, which gave a clear defi-
nition or physical-reference to the relevant terms. I fact,
there is a testimony of a Roman scholar (name?) in his despe-
ration of translating those "Greek mind tricks" into Latin.
Heidegger had made a superb work into exposing the frequently
great degradation that ancient Greek concepts had suffered
during their transference into Latin (and later European lan-
guages).
He gives the unique example of the word _Physis_, which was
identified in Latin (and used in translations) with the
word _Natura_. And he goes on to argue very convincingly
that a whole philosophy about nature changed, when the Greek
Physis, which means _self-blossoming_, was confused with
Natura, which means _born_. (And also confused and identified
with the biblical _creation_). From "self-respect", it was
switched to "parental respect", to eventually "super-master
respect".
> Actually I can tell you that translating Joyce into Greek the Wealth of
>words and
>idiom is so great that the problems" for a Greek translator were so
>"endless"
>that it took him something like 20 years (if I remeber correctly) to
>finish the
>job. Having translated a couple of books from English to Greek myself I
>can
>tell you that there are quite substantial problems there. To mention but
>one
>in Greek mechanic, engineer and mechanical are but one word (MHXANIKOS).
The same text in poetry is never understood by two people exactly the
same way. In fact, the same text in poetry is never understood the
same way by the same individual when read at different times. Do you
expect a translated poetry to be uniquely mapped?!...
Word-specific and context-specific concepts are to be found in all
languages, as well as an immense variaty of word-overtones are to
be expected (except the Mathematical language).
>Actually translating an english *scientific* or science related text
>into _modern_ Greek is a bitch, as I can attest from experience. With
>Katharevousa it would be actually easier. Modern Greek is just not so
>good in accurate descriptions and in detailing phenomena as Kathare-
>vousa.
No. You know Katharevousa better than Demotic, that is. Or better
said, Katharevousa and Demotic functioned as occupationally comple-
mentary sublanguages.
>Why do you think that Modern Greek poetry has a much richer tradition
>than prose? ;-)
Wrong inference. Correlations do not imply causations.
Kazantzakis is far more read (both in numbers and extent) than
all the Nobelists poets. After all, Nobel is a W/N European
academic evaluation, not a Greek readership one.
Gregory
Torsten Poulin Nielsen
On Mon, 06 Apr 1998 14:35:50 -0700,
Mihalis Panagiotakis <mih...@chem.fsu.edu> wrote:
>pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
> Errr, actually _parliamentary_ democracy was NOT an ancient Greek
>invention.
>In ancient Athens one had _direct Democracy_.
And that is not even a uniquely Greek phenomenon. Before the rise of
feudal power in Scandinavia, free men had their say at the 'thing'. The
king actually had to be elected or acknowledged by those institutions
and there are examples of kings having their status revoked. And
pre-Christian Scandinavia doesn't show many signs of significant
Greek influence ...
-Torsten
Gregory Dandulakis
In article Torsten Poulin Nielsen <tor...@diku.dk> wrote:
>>invention.
>>In ancient Athens one had _direct Democracy_.
>
>And that is not even a uniquely Greek phenomenon. Before the rise of
>feudal power in Scandinavia, free men had their say at the 'thing'. The
>king actually had to be elected or acknowledged by those institutions
>and there are examples of kings having their status revoked. And
>pre-Christian Scandinavia doesn't show many signs of significant
>Greek influence ...
This is a quite widespread belief among those who have a very vague
understanding of what "Athenian democracy" was. What you describe
was very close to what the Spartan political system was. In fact,
in Sparta they had two Kings elected simultaneously in order to
balance the system better. But Sparta is being described as a
"tribal oligarchic" system. The key to Athenian democracy was
that opposite _parties_ were functioning as _long-term incubators_
of _alternative policies_, and that constant education and oration
was an integral part of the political system. Plus, in Athens
every single citizen would get his chance to become a _decision
maker_ about the common matters, not just a periodic party voter.
Professional politicians was not what they were looking for.
Of course, in practice, money bought virtually everything, as
Thucydides says... (in perfect correspondence with modern times)!
Gregory
George Baloglou
In article <35294A...@chem.fsu.edu> Mihalis Panagiotakis
<mih...@chem.fsu.edu> writes:
>pka...@cc.ece.ntua.gr wrote:
>> "SYMMETRIA" between two things does not mean 'similarity' of them.
>>
>> It denotes rather a deep analogy of structure between the two parts, so that
>> for any element of the former an element of the latter with analogous
>> properties and function can be found.
>>
>> What would you say in English? 'Co-measurity' maybe? :-)
>
> Actually one says *symmetry* in english. Commeasurable is something
>else.
Sure, but how would I explain the term "symmetry" to my students, for example?
Going back to the Greek origins of the term, I would opt for something like
"total measure". Funny, although I always analyse "isometry" (a distance
preserving transformation) as "equal distance", I never thought of explaining
"symmetry", a much better known term to be sure. [I would guess that, while
"symmetry" is indeed Greek, "isometry" is one of those Greek words born in
the Diaspora :-) ]
Marvel at the gem's awesome beauty,
born to its veins' disarranged arrangements
Greek Anthology 9.695