Greek Form Research Articles

A very short history of Greek

Abstract I have written this article primarily as an overview for students who are studying Greek at A level and beyond; it may also be useful for their teachers. It covers the period from the Archaic age up to the beginning of Medieval Greek (c. 750 BCE to 500 CE). There is an emphasis on Classical Greek both within and beyond the Classical period, since the Classical form, or approximations to it, has never ceased to be learned, the only form of Greek of which this can be said. It has also left a sizeable imprint on Modern Greek, especially but not exclusively on its more educated forms. I hope though that the article will serve to draw the users’ attention to the many other forms of the language apart from Classical Greek. I know that I could have done with something like this when I was a student: I was hardly aware of the existence of the κοινή, except perhaps as a form of Greek used by Christian writers long after the end of the Classical period.

On Smrti

“April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire… ” So, begins T.S. Eliot’s iconic poem, “The Wasteland,” challenging the memory of Chaucer’s April from Canterbury Tales, as being a delightful month to go on pilgrimage. Platonic teachings emphasize that you don’t create, you just remember. Might the inverse might also be true, “You don’t remember, you just create.” As the oneirocritic, Robert Bosnak, contends, you do not actually remember your dreams. You remember your memory you recreate the dream in this time. Since the challenges of post-modernism, this is no longer a far-fetched idea. The eminent historian of immigration, Deborah Dash Moore, defines history in this regard, as “a search for a plausible narrative.” “History” is not a record of what happened, but rather, is a record of what we believe happened, or what we want to believe happened. This brings to the fore Foucault’s documenting the relationship of knowledge to power, as well as Freud’s assertion that material which is unacceptable to the ego, is disguised, in order to make them palatable. This places the notion of memory in a different light. There are incidents that occurred fifty years ago that seem as if they occurred five minutes ago. The depth psychologist and champion of the imagination, James Hillman, referred to this process as “soul-making.” Back to T.S. Eliot: when he studied Sanskrit at Harvard, he was certainly aware that the Sanskrit word for memory, smara (from which smrti “that which is remembered,” is derived) is also an epithet for Kama Deva, the Indian Cupid. Hence, the mixing of memory and desire. Perhaps, in this light, the study of history, which is a form of collective memory, is also a form of mass therapy, an effort to process the collective past. Hegel and Marx both believed classical India to be an inferior civilization because it had “no history,” but collections of mythologies. Maybe classical India, however, held an awareness that all memory is myth, a word which in its early Greek form literally translates as “plot.” Jesus declares (in the Gospel story) “Let the dead bury the dead.” As the Jesus narrative exemplifies, however, burying the dead is no easy task. Perhaps our ongoing, ever-morphing narratives, allow us an oblique opportunity to connect with and process our pain. And in this theatre of memory, the goal may not be to accumulate or catalogue what has been spoken (itihasa), but look a good miller, to process the grain into its essence: from what has passed, and is passing, and is to come, into what always is. Perhaps, the pilgrimage of the mind, on its endless perigination of story, is meant to ultimately take us to love, but that may be unspeakable. Keywords: memory, desire, narrative, history, myth, power

On the Question of the Adoption of the Epiclesis ‘Euergetes’ by Ptolemy III

In 2020, I published the monograph From Basileis-Pharaohs to Pharaohs-Basileis: The First 100 Years of the Ptolemaic Monarchy. In that book, I proposed to move the date of the famine that occurred during the reign of Ptolemy III from 245/244 BC to the period between 243 and 238 BC, drawing on the evidence of the Alexandrian ‘synodal’ decree of 3 December 243 BC. If my hypothesis is correct, it becomes necessary to reconsider the background of Ptolemy’s adoption of the Greek form of the sacred epiclesis ‘Euergetes’ (Benefactor), which earlier I associated with the help that the population of Egypt received from the king during that famine. In modern historiography, there are a number of alternative suggestions regarding the prior actions of Ptolemy III, supposedly consistent with the Hellenistic ideas about euergetism. Among them are the victorious end of the Asian military campaign (246–245 BC); suppression of unrest in Egypt; return to Egypt of the statues of local gods and cult objects that had been removed by the Persian conquerors; and deeds for the benefit of Egyptian temples and sacred animals. But these actions of Ptolemy III either did not meet the definition of a ‘beneficent act’ or concerned only ethnic Egyptians. Traces of the Greek semantic content of the epiclesis ‘Euergetes’ should be sought in the Alexandrian ‘synodal’ decree produced by the Egyptian priesthood. It contains a list of the king’s merciful acts during the first years of his reign, including the easing of fiscal policy and proclamation of a mass amnesty. Such actions were understood as euergetism in the Egyptian and Greek (especially Hellenistic) traditions. Either of them could become the reason for the official deification of the Hellenistic ruler. Responding with an apotheosis to a large-scale act of economic euergetism became everyday reality in the Hellenistic world. Amnesty for prisoners also directly brought the benefactor closer to the Olympian gods, led by Zeus himself.

The Names of the Georgian Jews

 Historical documents, literary works and recorded materials provide direct evidence that until the 1970s the Jews were mostly given biblical names and, in particular, the ones found in the Torah. It should be noted that one of the manifestations of the identity of Georgian Jews was their names. In some cases, both non-Jews and Jews were given biblical names in Georgia. In such cases, Georgians preferred the Greek forms, while Jews would use the Hebrew variant for self-identification purposes. Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews also lived in Georgia. They had different names. From the 1970s, in order to avoid being ridiculed, most of the Jews chose common Georgian names for their new-born babies. Despite the fact that some Jews changed their names for various reasons, almost none of them was less Jewish.After repatriation to Israel, the Georgian Jews choose different kinds of names for their infants. The names can be divided into categories according to their origin (biblical and modern Hebrew, Yiddish and other languages) and popularity in the Jewish (Israeli) community. &nbsp

Ὦ μωρῆς παιδίον: schedae ineditae ex ms. Vat. Pal. Gr. 92 (Pars prior)

The Byzantine Empire had a long tradition of educational practices, including schedography. It became popular in the 10th century and continued to be cultivated until the 19th century, with a peak in the 13th century. In the late 19th century, scholars began to take an interest in the relevant texts. In the mid-20th century, there were attempts to study these texts as a curious kind of paraliterary production. Currently, in the 21st century, there have been editions of different schedographical collections. Schedographical texts are a very specific kind of written documents and do not fit well with the usual editorial practices. They were written to be read aloud, intended to teach, not to entertain, and generally, they do not have the aesthetic value of a literary text. Finally, these texts appear in collections of very different origins. In many cases we do not know their original context, which makes them difficult to be interpreted. In this article, 23 schedographical texts from manuscript Vat. Pal. Gr. 92 are published. This manuscript consists of 239 ff. and it was copied in the last decades of the 13th century in southern Italy. The manuscript contains more than 425 schedae. In contrast to other paratexts used in schools, the manuscript includes glosses with forms of popular Greek, such as, e. g., the use of σπίτι for “house”. A complete edition of the manuscript will certainly reveal more expressions similar to this one. 29 remaining unpublished texts will be published in the second part. The humorous phrase that heads this article, ὦ μωρῆς παιδίον, is the schedographical resolution of the phrase ὀμμ’ ὀρεῖς (glossed as ἐγείρεις) παιδίον, included in one of the schedae published here for the first time.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXTUAL DOUBLETS IN THE PROLOGUE IN VERSE FROM ITS TURNOVO EDITION

This article discusses textual doublet, excertped from the Tarnovo edition of the mid-fourteenth century Prologue in Verse. Special attention is paid to the textual doublets of nouns. The presented lexical units are accompanied by their Greek form, and еach doublet is given in context, and the specific volume, page, and line of work are indicated in brackets. In addition, the word formation of the given lexical units is also included.

A note on Greek ἰκμάς

Abstract The Greek word ἰκμάς ‘moisture’ and its derivatives reflect a PIE root usually reconstructed as either *sei̯kʷ‑ or *sei̯k‑. After a survey of the comparanda, it is concluded that only the Greek form points to *sei̯k-, while reflexes in other branches, particularly Germanic, explicitly require *sei̯kʷ‑. A solution to this problem is then suggested in the form of a new Greek sound law *Kʷm > Km. The traditional view, which treats the development of *Kʷm as identical to that of *Pm, is shown to be untenable: forms such as ὄμμα ‘eye’ (Transponat *h₃okʷ‑mn̥) do not reflect inherited formations, but are rather to be understood as created within Greek after the general post-Mycenaean development *Kʷ > P. The sequence μμ found in such words therefore reflects underlying *Pm rather than *Kʷm. Finally, three further possible examples of Kʷm > Km are presented.

Rhakhis: A workflow for managing the WFO taxonomic backbone

In 2021, the World Flora Online (WFO) Council agreed that the team at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh would take on the technical role of managing the WFO Taxonomic Backbone (WFO-TB). This presentation outlines the implementation of a system to manage the associated data and explores possible future developments. The WFO-TB is a global concensus checklist of plants including bryophytes, pteridophytes, gymnosperms and angiosperms. The checklist data consists of two parts: facts concerning the nomenclatural acts that establish the names under the nomenclatural code, and consensus expert opinion on the placement of those names into a single, authoritative taxonomy. WFO-TB is unique in that it is both global in scope and curated by a large team of experts from multiple institutions. There are currently around 280 specialist contributors organised into 37 Taxonomic Expert Networks (TENs). The primary function of the WFO-TB is to provide structure to the hundreds of thousands of descriptions, images and other pieces of Content that make up the WFO’s main web portal, but periodic snapshots of the taxonomic data are also made available as public downloads and published as the WFO Plant List. The WFO Plant List is unique in that it remembers each version of WFO-TB that was published and links between them thus providing a stable, citable resource. In addition, data can be released in any format that researchers may find useful including through ChecklistBank and so be potentially incorporated into the Catalogue of Life and GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility). All checklist data are released with a Creative Commons (CC) license of CC0 so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law. Prior to 2022, the WFO-TB was managed as part of the main WFO data resources supporting the WFO Portal by the team at Missouri Botanical Garden. Moving responsibility for hosting the backbone to the team at Edinburgh added significant resources to the project as a whole, but created technical challenges. The first requirement of the new system (called Rhakhis, a Greek form of rachis, the ‘backbone’ of a leaf or inflorescence) was to demonstrate that it could feed data back to Missouri in a way that could be incorporated into the WFO infrastructure without causing disruption to the Content curation process. This was completed in early 2022, and, by June, the primary copy of the WFO-TB data had been entrusted to Rhakhis. The June 2022 version of the WFO Plant List and the WFO-TB was published using the previous system, switching to publication from Rhakhis in December 2022. The system architecture of Rhakhis is quite simple. A MySQL database holds all the data and is exposed via a GraphQL API to a web-based user interface written in Javascript using React and Bootstrap. User authentication is handled via a link to ORCiD (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). Authorisation for editors is delegated hierarchically down the taxonomic tree. This provides the ability for TENs and the TEN Manager to oversee and manage the live data directly and to delegate authority to colleagues. The TEN Manager has access to a plain HTML bulk loader interface that enables the ingestion of CSV and files in DwC-A (Darwin Core Archive) format supplied by TENs as well as updates from other data sources, such as IPNI (International Plant Names Index) and WCVP (RBG Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants). Rhakhis is designed as a standalone data management tool for taxonomists involved in the project rather than a public website, and is hosted on a WFO server on the Google Cloud. The WFO Plant List is run on a separate system and designed to be a performant public-facing website. Periodic snapshots of the WFO-TB are imported into a Solr Index that is then exposed via another GraphQL API as well as Semantic Web-compliant HTTPS URIs. A web-based user interface to WFO Plant List is implemented as part of the Craft CMS (Content Management System) that also runs the About pages of the WFO Web Portal, but it would be possible to build other interfaces to this data. The periodic snapshots of the WFO-TB, which are published through the WFO Plant List, are archived in Zenodo and assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), as well as contributed to Catalogue of Life ChecklistBank. The archive formats currently supported include: Darwin Core Archive and Catalogue of Life Data Package, but other formats will be considered in the future. We are interested in investigating the creation of data papers, e.g., through the Biodiversity Data Journal at Pensoft, to provide additional accreditation for contributors and exposure of their data.

Philo’s Hellenistic-Jewish Approach in On the Decalogue and On the Contemplative Life: Blending Wisdom of Solomon’s Critique against Idols with a Hellenistic Notion of Moderation

Abstract Philo draws on the Wisdom of Solomon in his tripartite critique against idols found in On the Decalogue and On the Contemplative Life. As he fashions these critiques in the pursuit of upholding Mosaic law, Philo not only criticizes Greek and Egyptian forms of worship, he also integrates the notion of moderation evident in Hellenism and Hellenistic-Egyptian Isis worship. This essay demonstrates ways in which the pursuit of moderation and Isis as lawgiver are integrated into Philo’s concepts of Moses as lawgiver and pursuit of law in opposition to Roman forms of excess. The essay considers various texts, including excerpts from Greek philosophers and Hellenistic Egyptian hymns to Isis, in addition to considerations of contemporary Roman excesses vis-à-vis Philo’s Decalogue, Contempl. Life, and his uses of Wis. Philo’s Hellenistic Judaism emerges from a simultaneous criticism yet also integration of both Hellenistic and Hellenistic-Egyptian concepts and traditions.

Die Mär vom griechischen und/oder wölfischen Ursprung von Lykiern, Lykaonen, Lukkā und Luwija

The Greek name for the Trm͂mili people in Asia Minor was Λύκιοι, naturally explained by some Greek authors as from λύκος, ‘wolf’, either directly or via a personal name. This has inspired modern explanations by means of the same word. The first was that the Hittite country of Luwija was, just like Lycia, named after wolves, i.e. from a word for ‘wolf’ cognate with the Greek word, whereas the Akkadian name-form Lukku of another country have been influenced by the Greek form. The second explanation was that the Lycians, the Lycaonians and even the Hittite land of Lukkā were named after λύκος, but that this would be a word of pre-Greek origin. The third retains λύκος as a Greek word, making out that Lycians and Lycaonians, together with Lukkā, were originally Greek worshippers of a wolfish Apollo. The fourth turns the Lycians – and then also Lukkā – in the wake of the racist ‘Männerbund’ ideology, into a wolfish Greek ‘Jungmannschaft’, which became the ruling class in the later Lycia. This is certainly a fantasy without any linguistic or archaeological basis, and the explanation of Lukkā via a non-Greek but Proto-Anatolian *lukos ‛wolf’ is not a viable alternative. And there is no need to explain the name of the Bronze Age land of Luwiya via a putative Proto-Indo-European *lukwos either. Lukkā, Lykioi and Lykaones are more plausibly derived from the PIE root *leuk-/louk-/luk-, like English light. An independent attempt, which depicts the Lycians as former Aegean migrants who abandoned their Greek language, is based on two Greek loanwords, a putative link between a Lycian and a Greek word, and two phonological developments which have parallels in Greek, but are of a very different age. This is certainly not enough to corroborate that hypothesis.

Vetus Latina: Die Reste Der Altlateinischen Bibel, 14/1: Danihel, Fascicule 1: Introduction, Dn 13,1–10; Fascicule 2: Dn 13,11–64; 1,1–3,17. Edited by Jean-Claude Haelewyck

Following his delivery in recent years of the Vetus Latina editions of Esther, Judith, and the Gospel according to Mark, Professor Haelewyck now takes on the book of Daniel. This is a writing of considerable text-critical interest, in which the Old Latin versions match the variety in the Greek tradition. Tertullian, the first substantial Latin source, normally corresponds to the early (and poorly attested) Septuagint text. The exception is the disputed Adversus Iudaeos, which is based on the version attributed to Theodotion—although this Greek form actually appears to date from more than a century before Theodotion’s translation. Cyprian’s text reflects the correction of the Septuagint towards the later version, a form which persists in later African writers. The European Old Latin texts are based on the Theodotionic version: this also supplies the basis for Jerome’s Vulgate revision of the Greek additions, although the majority of Vulgate Daniel is supposedly a new translation from Hebrew and Aramaic sources. In his Commentary on Daniel, written some 24 years after his revision of the biblical text, Jerome relies on the Vulgate for the biblical lemmata but explicitly mentions variant readings from the Septuagint.

Isaac Transfigured: The Aqedah as Mashal in Matthean Midrash

This article combines intertextual and comparative midrashic approaches to argue that the story of Jesus's transfiguration in the Gospel of Matthew, understood in light of a set of concerted intertextual connections among Matthew, the story of Isaac's Aqedah in Genesis 22, and a number of parallel Jewish interpretive traditions, should be read as a proleptic passion narrative. By assessing the intertextual relationship between Matt 17:1–9 and Gen 22:1–19 LXX more thoroughly than has been done previously (particularly as regards the Greek form of the Aqedah) and by giving sustained attention to points of contact between Matthew's use of the Aqedah as a narrative explicating the life of Jesus and early Jewish midrashim interpreting the Aqedah in light of the history of Israel, I argue that the ancient story of Isaac functions according to the midrashic technique of the mashal.

Recontextualising the style of naming in nomenclature

In this paper, we brought compelling clarities as to why the current practices of binomial nomenclature should be revised and adjusted by the scientific governing bodies. We highlighted the current emphasis on Latinisation and Greek forms for scientific names has given fewer possibilities for the inclusion of cultural and native scientific names. With regard to zoological matters, we further pointed out that the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) has an obligation to rationalise the applicability and suitability of the existing Articles and Recommendations in the Code. The Code has been designed to assist scientists in naming an organism with its guidelines. However, the practicality of the Articles and Recommendations need to be further explained in order to reduce several misperceptions within the scientific community; which include the correct usage of Latinised and Greek language forms that can be quite confusing to those who are not well-versed in the structures. The discussion also underlined the novelty of having more localised and hybridised scientific names, and the necessity to avoid norms of abusive, offensive and colonising names since the Code did not emphasise enough on the level of integrity needed with the naming procedures. We further illustrated the magnitude of having a gender-neutral naming system in the world of nomenclature, as the current practices of Latinised and Greek forms are heavily navigated towards masculine naming styles. We also suggest that the non-compulsory Recommendation section of the Code to be made relevant, and perhaps mandatory in some cases, with an infinite approach to accentuate beyond inclusivity and diversity.

Elimelech or Abimelech? A Study on the Textual Variant of the Name of Noemin’s Husband in LXX-Ruth

Abstract This paper analyses the textual variant of the name of Noemin’s husband in the book of Ruth: Elimelech according to the Masoretic Text and Abimelech according to the Septuagint. It investigates if this textual variant is linked to a different Hebrew Vorlage, whether it is carried out during the process of translation of the text in its Greek form, or whether it is due to its transmission in its Greek form. Finally, this study analyses the literary criticism of this variant by showing how a coherent character is created by name and through actions and how, in this way, God’s presence is accentuated in the narrative.

Susanna and the Elders: A Hebrew Legend with Egyptian Wordplay?

The Egyptian word seshen (“water lily,” a cognate of the Hebrew name Susanna, written with hieroglyphs depicting a door bolt, a garden pool, and water), may have inspired the setting of the Theodotion form of Daniel 13:1–27. This may constitute a novel type of “bilingual visual paronomasia,” and point to an Egyptian source of the details of Susanna’s bath, absent in the earliest (Old Greek) form of the biblical text of Daniel.

VARIETIES OF GREEK: DISORDER AND CONTINUITY

Social magic always manages to produce discontinuity out of continuity.Social dialect, which can be defined negatively as dialect associated with variables other than geographic region, was hardly recognized as a linguistic category until the twentieth century. Although it has been recognized since antiquity that groups at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder speak differently from the elite, non-elite idioms did not merit serious investigation since they were regarded merely as corrupt or decadent approximations to the prestige variety. There is evidence that the Greeks also recognized gender as a variable in linguistic production. Age occasionally figures in discourse about language, but the association is vaguer since it was tangled up with the idea that earlier generations spoke a better or more authentic form of Greek.

The Use of the Earliest Greek Scripture Fragments in Text Editions

Abstract This article deals with the relation between the early papyri of the LXX and the presumed original text of the translation units. The assumed dates of these units can be compared with the assigned dates of the earliest preserved fragments. Do the oldest known fragments reflect the purest form of the Old Greek or had they been revised to MT? Some modern editions of the LXX tend to disregard the possible guidance of some early fragments, recording them almost always in the apparatus rather than in the reconstructed eclectic text. Due to the recognition of revisional traits in several early fragments, a prejudice developed against them, except for P.967 covering Ezekiel and Daniel. Because of their early date these papyri should have a central place in reconstructing the original text of the LXX in text edition, certainly in the Torah.

Greek Durative Verbs with the Nasal Infix and Suffix

The Indo-European nasal infix presents have not been explained so far from the semantic point of view. The present author argues that the infix *-n(e)- originally expressed the feature of durativity. Due to the diachronic externalization of inflection this nasal morpheme later evolved into a suffix added to the verbal root. Numerous durative verbs with the nasal marker -an- are attested as early as the 2nd millennium BCE in the Anatolian languages; cf. Hittite iy-ann-a/i- ‘to march, go a long distance’, Palaic iyannnai ‘he marches (a long distance)’ vs. Hitt. i- ‘to go’, Luw. i-, Hier.Luw. i-, Lat. eō, īre, Lith. eĩti, OChSl. iti ‘id.’ (< PIE. *h1ei- ‘to go’). The durative verbs in question, as well as the related nouns with the durative suffix *-ano-, also appear in other Indo-European languages, cf. Toch. B yaneṃ ‘they walk, go (for a long time)’. Numerous Greek present forms (e.g. ἁνδάνω, θιγγάνω, λαμβάνω, λανθάνω, λιμπάνω, μανθάνω, πυνθάνομαι and so on) document the same nasal morpheme not only infixed into a verbal root, but also in the form of the suffix -αν-. It is to be explained as the effect of the diachronic externalization of the durative (nasal) morpheme. The Greek verbal forms with the nasal infix and the nasal suffix should be treated as intermediate or hybrid. Newer forms (indicating the durativity of the action) in Greek contain only a nasal suffix (e.g. αὐξάνω, ἱζάνω, ἰσχάνω, κευθάνω, ληθάνω, οἰδάνω, ῥοφάνω).

‘Atticismo’, excerpta lessicografici e prassi didattiche in età paleologa

Abstract The search for purity of language during the Palaeologan age has often been regarded as a revival of the Atticist movement of the second century AD. Students who had access to the higher education aimed at mastering this new form of Attic Greek: a large set of ancient authors deemed to be models of language and style served as repositories of lexical materials. Within this framework the need of school handbooks, dictionaries is quite understandable. In the first section of the paper I offer an overview of the multifarious typologies of scholarly texts largely used in the first Palaeologan age. Then, I focus more specifically on some miscellaneous excerpts merged into anthological manuscripts, by taking into account a largely overlooked series of grammatical and lexical annotations on Lucian. Differently from what is often stated in the catalogues, I show how the order of the items follows closely Lucian’s texts. These annotations could be the transcription of teachers’ notes and/or lecture notes taken during collective/private readings of texts.

Dialect Classification From a Single Sonorant Sound Using Deep Neural Networks

During spoken communication, the fine acoustic properties of human speech can reveal vital sociolinguistic and linguistic information about speakers and thus, these properties can function as reliable identification markers of speakers’ identity. One key information speech reveals is speakers' dialect. The first aim of this study is to provide a machine learning method that can distinguish the dialect from acoustic productions of sonorant sounds. The second aim is to determine the classification accuracy of dialects from the temporal and spectral information of a single sonorant sound and the classification accuracy of dialects using additional co-articulatory information from the adjacent vowel. To this end, this paper provides two classification approaches. The first classification approach aims to distinguish two Greek dialects, namely Athenian Greek, the prototypical form of Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek using measures of temporal and spectral information (i.e., spectral moments) from four sonorant consonants /m n l r/. The second classification study aims to distinguish the dialects using coarticulatory information (e.g., formants frequencies F1-F5, F0, etc.) from the adjacent vowel in addition to spectral and temporal information from sonorants. In both classification approaches, we have employed Deep Neural Networks, which we compared with Support Vector Machines, Random Forests, and Decision Trees. The findings show that neural networks distinguish the two dialects using a combination of spectral moments, temporal information, and formant frequency information with 81\% classification accuracy, which is a 14% accuracy gain over employing temporal properties and spectral moments alone. In conclusion, Deep Neural Networks can classify the dialect from single consonant productions making them capable of identifying sociophonetic shibboleths.