8 posts tagged “classical greek”

The Proto-Greek /j/ remains a fascinating phoneme. In the Iliad there's a small thing about this letter which is especially mysterious.When the Proto-Greek */j/ became /h/ it somehow it lost its consonantality (Neoglisms are there to use them!). How can we tell? Usually from metrical texts. For example: θέος ὡς 'like a god' is considered to be of the syllable shape short-short-long θέ-ο-ς ὡς.

Here the /h/ (or spiritus asper) completely loses it's consonantal value, we often assume that the phoneme would become an aspiration of the previous consonant. So something like /tʰéosʰōs/ would appear. This is also attested in words that have special notation for aspirated counterparts. Like τε + ὁ would give θ' ὁ (with elision of the epsilon).

In Homeric Greek though, this non-consonantal value is not always there! Many, often older, comparisons will show phrases like θέος ὡς to be interpreed as short-long-long θέ-ος-ὡς. This would mean, that the /h/ at the time of the composition had a consonantal value /tʰéoshōs/. People like to go as far as saying that this is proof that such a comparative formula comes from pre-Mycenaean Greek times when the /j/ had not yet changed into /h/. That's probably a bit too enthusiastic, but it is clear proof that at some point in time the /h/ was consonantal, and not just aspiration of the preceding vowel.

There's millions of interesting things like this in the Iliad and Odyssey, which seems to indicate a long standing oral tradition making use of formulae to quickly make sentences writing a dactylic hexameter. And luckily for us, these forms seem to have stagnated making 'wrong' forms in modern analysis of the post-dark-age Greek dialects, revealing all sorts of archaisms as stated above.

Other people might say that Homer was just a bad poet, but don't be fooled by them!

I'll interrupt my little series on Tocharian B (which I will continue) to talk a bit more about my theory that maybe /j/ in Proto-Greek was voiceless rather than voiced. I came to this conclusion completely without the intention to do so when I started to write an article to prove that /tt/ was in not a long consonant.

On review, /tt/ definitely is a long consonant, reading the Iliad at university made me realise without this assumption a lot of the poetic meter wouldn't work.

Nevertheless, I hypothesised that the /j/ in combination with <κ> <γ> and <χ> must mean it's voiceless to create a voiceless geminate like <ττ>. There's also a clear indication that <ττ> probably was closer to a [c:] rather than a [t:] due to the later development into <σσ>.

Altogether this would mean /j/ is in fact voiceless and would have been closer to the sound [ç] rather than [j]. Now there is actually some other proof that this /j/ was voiceless, at least in several other environments. I came to notice this as we were discussing the initial consonantal PIE *i- reflexes in Greek in my class of Historical Grammar of Greek.

Oddly enough, PIE *i- seems to have two reflexes, namely /h/ or 'spiritus asper' and <ζ>. /h/ is not an unlikely development you'd expect from a word initial /ç/, it's similar to Proto Germanic where *x became h in initial position.
The reflex <ζ> is more likely if you assume the phonetic value of /j/. It's just like how in French the initial i from Latin came to be pronounced as [dʒ] and later just [ʒ].

So why were there two reflexes for PIE *i-?

There's two theories which oddly enough, contradict themselves.

Some say /h/ comes from *Hi- with a laryngeal before i rather than a plain i. And that the <ζ> is from a plain *i-.
Others say that /h/ comes from *i- and <ζ> comes from *Hi-!

Isn't that wonderful? At my university the first theory is supported due to a single example in Sanskrit that seems to indicate this. Greek knows a word ὑσμίνης /husmínês/ 'combat' which in some terribly convoluted way seems to be related to the Sanskrit root yudh- युध् 'to battle'.

This doesn't tell us anything yet, but there is a certain compound verb in Sanskrit that seems to indicate that there's an initial laryngeal. this word is amitrāyudh- अमित्रायुध् 'to fight against those who are not friends'. This word consist of the elements: a- 'not' mitra- 'friend' yudh- 'to battle'. As you can see, for a mysterious reason the a in mitra- gets stretched. This is not a normal reaction for the noun in this position and, can only be explained by assuming there was a laryngeal in between mitra- and yudh- *mitraHyudh-. a laryngeal behind a vowel gives a long ā in Sanskrit, and this would prove that there was a laryngeal in front the indo-european stem *Hiudʰ.

There's one big problem with this though, we don't have any counter examples to prove that there wasn't an *H- in front of the *i that gives the Greek reflex <ζ>. In other words, we have proof that the /h/ reflex comes from *Hi- but no proof that <ζ> comes from *i-. With this hole it's not yet safe to assume anything.

The other theory is not so much based on proof, but rather on phonological reasoning. And Indo-European *H could be vocalised, in other words, it could be the nucleus of a syllable. It's extremely difficult to make a voiceless consonant the nucleus of a syllable, and therefore we often assume that the laryngeals were voiced consonants, which ones exactly, we don't know.

Now if you think about it this way, it becomes increasingly hard to believe that a sequence of two voiced consonants became a voiceless /h/. Therefore, one might want to assume this sequence became <ζ> and simple *i- became /h/ instead. But the first theory has more indirect proof than this one, as far a I know.

The latter theory does fit in better with my /j/ is a [ç] hypothesis. If /j/ were voiceless [ç], it would be quite likely for it to become a voiceless [h] in initial position. Also the other way around though, it's not completely unlikely to assume that if for some reason we're dealing with a voiceless laryngeal, a voiceless /j/ wouldn't be bothered to become an /h/ in initial position.

Which explanation is the right one, or if either of the two are wrong is hard to tell, one thing is for sure, we're not yet close to finding a definite answer to our questions about the odd reflexes in Greek of the PIE *i-.

NOTE: Halfway through my article, I just found an enormous gap in my reasoning which I'm going to pick out myself, before someone else does. I'm not sure if we're certain that the initial /h/ was actually voiceless! for all we know it was a voiced glottal fricative [ɦ]. The only thing that would be possible to assume as proof for a voiceless /h/ is what we see when a unvoiced unaspirated stop comes before  an /h/ initial word. Namely it becomes a unvoiced aspirated stop  C + h >  Cʰ, while if /h/ were voiced you'd expect a C[+voice]ʰ. Of course there's a gap in this reasoning, because there's no such thing as a voiced aspirated stop in Greek, nevertheless you'd sooner expect the combination to form a voiced stop, rather than a voiceless aspirated stop.

I'm on a bit of a Greek spree at the moment, because next week I'm starting Homeric Greek and historical grammar of Greek, so I'm just getting back into it.

Today I'd like to talk about Greek geminates and especially the absence of those in the spoken language.

Two common geminates especially drew my attention, namely: Attic ττ and Ionic σσ, which actually have the same root, look for example at Attic θαλαττα 'sea' vs Ionic θαλασσα 'id.'.

In normal analyses we would just say they were the lengthened form of τ and σ respectively. But I have reason to doubt this. To understand this, we must understand what exactly is the origin of these geminates, for this I'll have to consult both PIE and Greek verbal flection. I will focus on Attic Greek, but as far as I know replacing every ττ with σσ should yield you the Ionic counterparts.

I'll state three present tenses of three verbs, and their respective verbal stems.
φυλἀττω    φυλακ-
τἀττο         ταγ-
ταρἀττω     ταραχ-

As you can see the underlying stem is always a velar. it is never  a dental. These present stems were formed with a PIE present suffix *i(e/o) Simply put these are the shifts that took place from PIE to Greek
*-k-i(e/o)- > ττ(ε/ο)-
*-g-i(e/o)- > ττ(ε/ο)-
*-gʰ-i(e/o)- > ττ(ε/ο)-

Root of these PIE velars can actually also be palatovelars and labiovelars, but for now this'll be complete enough. now there is really no good phonetic reason why a [k] would change into a [t] after a [j], and especially not a [t:]. Although, when one of the two consonants is lost, there often is compensatory lengthening, this is notable not as common when we speak of clusters with [j] or other semi vowels for that matter. often [j] palatises the preceding consonant and then disappears itself. Then what would <tt> stand for? Well obviously the Greek writers were not in the possession of a letter for [c], so they had to use the alphabet they had, apparently to Greek ears [c] sounded closer to [t] than to [k], so they modified the letter <t> by writing it twice.

Later [c] probably shifted to an affricate [tʃ], which gives a lot more credibility to the shift ττ > σσ in Ionic. It's almost unheard of that a languages has this shift [t:] > [s:] but not [t] > [s]. Hebrew comes to mind though that had [t] > [θ] and [tt] > [t]. But this is not quite the same shift. With the 'doubling is modifying' hypothesis, also σσ is nicely analysed as [ʃ].

The only mystery that remains though is how did the voiced 'g' loose it's voice, It's not an obvious shift. The answer doesn't lie in g, but actually in the suffix -i(e/o)-.

Another series of presents with their respective stems:
κὀπτω           κοπ-
βλἀπτω         βλἀβ-
ῥἰπτω            ῥιφ-

As you can see, also the labial stems underwent this devoicing when followed by [j]. Here [j] was also assimilated to a stop, rather than the approximant it was. They only thing we can conclude from this is that [j] was not actually voiced, or at least not in this environment, else it would be incredibly hard to explain it's devoicing traits of the letter. Maybe /j/ was more like [ç]. Another possibility is to assume analogy took place, but I myself don't think this is a very likely instance of analogy.

These labial stem verbs though, do have some proof that /j/ might was able to change into a stop after another stop, which has some influence on my statement that <tt> cannot represent a longer version of the consonant, for /j/ isn't likely to affect length. Nevertheless the actually phonetic value of <tt> is very well disputable because [t] is not likely to come from [j], or proposed value [ç] for that matter.

So to conclude: I believe <tt>  nor <ss> had the phonetic values [t:] and [s:] respectively, but rather [tʃ] and  [ʃ]. To explain the odd devoicing you can either assume the /j/ had a true phonetic value of [ç] (at least, in some environments) or you could assume analogy has taken place.

Thank you for your time, and feel free to burn my theory down to the ground.

Today I was thinking about classical Greek dialects, and especially what happened to the 'waw' or digamma 'ϝ' which had a likely phonetic value of [w] it comes directly from a consonantal form of *u (some might transcribe *w, I don't) in Proto-Indo-European.

Most people familiar with classical Greek will not be familiar with the digamma, because it disappeared before the time that the bulk of Greek texts were written. The sound law it followed was very straightforward ϝ > Ø, it just disappeared in every context. Good example is the root νεϝο- 'new' which became νεο- ('New' is also related to the same PIE root *neu-).

This is all good, except there is one very strange chronological problem I bumped into. I'll be talking in particular about the Ionic and Attic dialect. These two dialects are particularly close, but there is one big difference, the Attic dialect tended to blend vowels together, where Ionic kept the original contrasts.

A good example for this is the word for 'light' which in Ionic is φάος but in Attic contracts to φῶς. Now there's also a typical contraction in Attic of εο > ου. But νεος does not contract to **νους. The reason why this does not happen can only be explained by assuming that these contractions took place before the ϝ was dropped. If the ϝ is there, the two vowels aren't adjacent so they can't contract to another vowel. That much makes sense.

But that these contractions took place before the dropping of ϝ is a bit of a problem. The most distinguishing part of Attic in comparison to Ionic is the contraction of vowels. But apparently after there has been so much dialect differentiation between the two, the sound change apparently still managed to act out upon both of the dialects. I'm not saying this is impossible, but you often see, that once dialects start to diverge, they tend to not come back together again, and especially not for such a fundamental shift.

Another problem is, that vowel contraction in Attic seemed to be an active process, even after ϝ was dropped. Especially in Attic poetry you can see that contractions are split up again on the go to support the meter. The above mentioned φῶς for example, is found in Hippolytus in both it's contracted as non-contracted form.

If such a sound law of contraction is still active although ϝ was lost, you'd expect that the sound law will also have effect on words that have lost their ϝ, after all, now two vowels are touching, and contraction is an active process. The fact that Attic poets were able to reconstruct the non-contracted forms without making mistakes, even shows that they were quite aware of the underlying phonemes, although this is not at all obvious in most forms.

How do we solve this anachronistic problem?

The only thing I can really think of, is that Attic had indeed merged all it's mergings, and the ϝ stopped it from happening because the contractions took place before the ϝ drop. φάος probably wasn't an existing word in Attic at all, but since the poets were of course well educated, they may have had knowledge of the Ionic dialectal words, and might have even had some insight that contractions had taken place. Thus only the more educated people had knowledge, and insight to be able to use non-contracted forms. These non-contracted forms were probably no where near different enough to be completely misunderstood by the Attic civilisation, especially not in the sparse use it had.

This still isn't completely satisfactory, because I could've sworn that ϝ > Ø took place way before there was any strong dialectal variation, but I guess my memory refuses to serve me properly.

Since my last article about the alternant nouns of Tocharian I've been thinking about the development of the feminine in other Indo-European languages.

The feminine gender will always be a rather mysterious thing. There's absolutely no reason why a language would have it; but still there's quite a couple of languages that do develop one. Most Indo-European and Semitic languages are the most well known ones.

But to figure out the need for the feminine; let's turn things around, and take a language that doesn't have a feminine and let it develop one.

Indo-European at one point did not have a feminine; sometimes you see it developed both a word for a female and a male animal (Like Bull and Cow), but more often than not; it just didn't distinguish at all.

Later when the Indo-Europeans were getting more settled; breeding of animals undoubtedly became more important. So let's say they wanted to breed wolves `*ulkwons' (Root is *ulkwo- an o-stem.), there was no such thing as a feminine suffix; because they simply never needed one due to a lack of grammatical gender. But they needed `something' to show that it was feminine, so they chose the suffix *-ih2 for o-stems and *-h2 for consonant stems.

These suffixes can be seen as abstractifying suffixes. And then *ulkwih2 should actually mean `wolfness', but due to the lack of other means to make a feminine, this word took on the meaning of a `female wolf'.

So there it is! That's how feminine nouns came to be! The bigger question is though; why did adjectives start to agree with the nouns?

One of the suggested possibilities is `the wanted it to rhyme'.

This works up to a certain extent; for example if you take o-stems in classical Greek, you'll definitely see extensive noun phrases with constantly the same ending, `this work' in Greek in the genitive case would for example be:
τουτου του εργου.
Even if you're not able to read Greek you'll see that the ου gets repeated a grand total of 4 times. People suggest that they wanted to achieve this effect with feminine words as well. And thus started suffixing the `feminine' suffixes to the adjectives.

This would sort of work; if it wasn't for other suffixes which end in completely different things. like the *-r/n stems, it's not like adjectives suddenly agree to the *-r/n suffix to completely the rime. And technically there's no difference between  *-r/n stems and *-ih2 stems.

So why this feminine developed; we're not sure. One thing is certain though; it developed after Hittite split off from the other languages, since there's absolutely no sign at all of a feminine in the Hittite language. Also Tocharian; although it has a feminine; shows quite a different view on it's development than other languages.

As soon as I come up with any ideas on the development of a femnine that are better than `they felt like it' I'll be sure to write about it.

I've been working on a theory with one of my classmates on the Indo-European present stem suffix *neu/nu.
As seen in the Greek δείκνυμι for example. I'm not sure if anyone else ever proposed this, but I think it's very likely that it is actually derived from the root for `now'  *neu/nu.

Not only Greek retains this suffix. Also Tocharian B has this suffix. *nu regularly gives nä. Which isn't attested along, but does appear with the suffix *-ske/o (which is -ṣṣä/ske in Tocharian B).

And the *nu version is then the suffix -nä-ṣṣä/ske. As seen in the word:
lännaṣṣä/ske- (here <a> is phonemically /ä́/) `to leave'
Interstingly, just like in Greek, besides the present there isn't another place where this *neu/nu suffix appears. Not in the subjunctive, nor the preterite or the preterite participle.

So the present class would mean something like `I VERB now', something very appropriate for a present tense I would say. There's the problem though, that you can never really prove that this is indeed the original.

Beekes though, proposes that this present suffix is actually derived from  verb roots ending in *-u with an n-infix. Which resulted in an ending in *-nu/neu which was then reinterpreted as a new suffix. Similarly he proposes that the *-nh2/-neh2 suffix is formed in a similar way but then for roots ending in *-h2.

I personally find the present marker *neu/nu as derived from the Indo-European word for `now' a far more appealing concept. This leaves us with being unable to explain where the *-nh2 is from though.

But we have another problem. Just like that the *nu-ske/o suffix appears in Tocharian B, there's also the *nh2-ske/o suffix. Which functions in same way as the other suffix. An example of the *nh2-ske/o is this:

kärnāṣṣä/ske- `to buy' (<ā> is phonemically /á/).

But unlike the *nu-ske/o suffix, this suffix also appears as a present marker without the *ske/o suffix. In fact it's one of the most productive present classes. The so called na-presents.

Example of a na-present verb is:

tärkana- `to let go' which has a preterite tarka-.

There's no such thing as a  nä-present though.  This distribution is  strange. If they would have the same sort of origin (as Beekes proposes) you'd expect them to have the same sort of distribution. This  could be seen as argument for our hypothesis that *-neu/nu comes from `now' rather than a clipping from n-infixed roots ending in *-u. Not a very strong one though.

I have not put any time into figuring out the origin of the *nh2/neh2 suffix, I will write a new post about that soon. Feel free to add any thought you might have on this subject, or questions for that matter.

I skipped a week, I'm very sorry. Been busy. I'll try to compensate by updating twice this week.

Today I wanted to discuss a Greek sentence, in English this time. Let's take a line by Socrates as written by Plato in Euthyphron:

ἆρα τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ὅσιόν ἐστιν φιλεῖται ὑπὸ τῶν θεῶν, ἢ ὅτι φιλεῖται ὅσιόν ἐστιν;

"Is piety loved by the gods because it's pious, or is it pious because it's loved by them?"

ἆρα -- Particle introducing a question
τὸ ὅσιόν -- `pious' neuter nominative substantivised adjective , preceded by a definite article.
ὅτι -- `because', expresses causality
ὅσιόν -- `pious' adjective nominative neuter.
ἐστιν -- `to be' 3rd person singular active present.
φιλεῖται -- `to love' 3rd person singular medio-passive present.
ὑπὸ -- `by' expresses the actor in a passive sentence, the complement takes the genitive case
τῶν θεῶν -- `god' Masculine genitive plural, preceded by a definite article.
ἢ -- `or'
ὅτι -- `because', expresses causality
φιλεῖται -- `to love' 3rd person singular medio-passive present.
ὅσιόν -- `pious' adjective nominative neuter.
ἐστιν -- `to be' 3rd person singular active present. followed by a `;'  which is the Greek question mark.

Sorry for the late update, and sorry for the rather inaccessible update. I have a word-per-word glossed Classical Greek text from Lysias. I'm sorry to say though, that for now, it's in Dutch, since I use it as my homework in my Greek classes. But I figured it'd be better than updating nothing at all. So here it is.

Link to Lysias