Egbert J. Bakker – A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language

Автор: Egbert J. Bakker
Название книги: A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Древний мир и Античность
Страницы: 699
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

A comprehensive account of the language of Ancient Greek civilization in a single volume, with contributions from leading international scholars covering the historical, geographical, sociolinguistic, and literary perspectives of the language.
A collection of 36 original essays by a team of international scholars
Treats the survival and transmission of Ancient Greek
Includes discussions on phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics

Few of those interested in Greek antiquity, and certainly no one whose interest in
ancient Greece is professional and academic, will deny that familiarity with the
language, and knowledge about it, is indispensable for any study at any level of critical
engagement with Greek antiquity. Those who approach the world of the ancient
Greeks without such knowledge will have to rely on a translator’s reading skills. For
without texts, linguistic evidence, our knowledge of antiquity would not exceed that
of other lost civilizations whose ruins and artefacts merely increase the enigma, raising
questions that only language can answer.
Yet in spite of such unanimous acknowledgment of the central importance of
language, there are widely different attitudes to it within the Classics profession,
often coinciding with international fault lines. Whereas in some national traditions
the Greek language is seen as an important area of research in its own right –
although the angle under which the research is done is not homogeneous – in others
the study of Greek as a language is relegated to the pedagogical context of the freshmen
classroom, where instructors are typically graduate students whose own research
interests have often nothing to do with the Greek language. In such a context, the
Greek language becomes an object of reflection mainly as a pedagogical challenge:
learning the language as first step toward, and necessary condition for, access to the
ancient world.
The grammars used for reference in this context (in English, e.g., Smyth 1956) are
based on nineteenth-century German scholarship that considers deep knowledge of
the language as the most powerful – and necessary – hermeneutic tool in the philologist’s
arsenal. The Greek language is seen as a highly refined (and evolved) means of
expressing an author’s thought, so that knowing the language’s syntax in all its nuances
can give the philologist access to this thought and to the world that shaped it. Such a
conception of language as indissolubly interconnected with the task of interpretation
leads to a natural end point. Critical research into the language comes to a halt when
the point has been reached at which the language’s refined syntax has been described
in such detail that all linguistic obstacles between the critical reader and the author’s
thought have been removed. Such an end point can be found in the monumental
reference grammars of Raphael Kühner and Eduard Schwyzer (K-G and S-D, respectively).
Insofar as the Greek language in itself has traditionally been an object of scholarly,
linguistic, interest, the sector studied is not syntax, but morphology and phonology.
The perspective is historical-comparative, in that Greek (and Latin) is studied against
the background of the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, with an eye toward
structural similarities between the two ancient languages as well as toward either language’s
contribution to the reconstruction of the proto-language. Greek was found
to be a valuable branch in the Indo-European tree, providing important evidence for
what the stem or the root was like. The historical-comparative method has also yielded
benefits for the Greek language itself, in the form of deep insight into how linguistic
prehistory has shaped the language’s morphology and phonology as it can be observed
in our texts.
Historical-comparative linguistics is an established subdiscipline of Greek philology
and it is practiced in all national traditions. But it is no longer the only way to do
critical research on the Greek language. The genetic outlook of historical linguistics,
which places Greek in time, the time of the diversification of the Indo-European
proto-language, has come to be complemented with a more functional perspective, in
which Greek is placed in the geographical space in which it was spoken. The language,
we have come to realize, is not only shaped by the regularity of Indo-European sound
laws, but also by the interference with the languages, whether genetically related or
not, of the peoples encountered by the speakers of Greek. This perspective complements
the conception of Ancient Greek as an amalgam of inherited features and
involves a variety of language contact phenomena, such as linguistic borrowing, bilingualism
on the part of Greek speakers, or the use of Greek by non-Greek speakers.
In another development, the study of the language “itself” has now moved past the
pedagogical-hermeneutical positions of the reference grammars. “Greek linguistics” is
for some the systematic study of the actual use of the Greek language as we see it
deployed in our texts, with reference not only to the understanding of the texts themselves
but also to research into the syntax, semantics, even pragmatics, of modern
living languages.
The general de-emphasis of “norms” and “default cases” in recent thought in the
humanities, furthermore, has stimulated interest in language use other than “standard”
or “good” Greek. The “marginal” aspects of the use of the Greek language
coming to the fore in this way include spoken language, the “low registers” of the
language, the speech of marginal groups such as women, slaves, or foreigners. The
margin remains in full focus when we consider the expansion of Greek eastward under
Alexander the Great and the profound influence of the resulting “periphery” on what
was traditionally the “center.” The story of the Greek language is not finished, in
more than one way, with the morphology of Homer or the syntax of Demosthenes.
The present volume brings together the traditional perspectives and the newer
approaches in what is hoped is a comprehensive overview of the language in its various
manifestations (literary texts, papyri, inscriptions) and viewed under a variety of angles:
historical, functional, syntactic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic, to name a few.
Part I deals with the materiality of the Greek language. In order for us to be able to
know the language and read its literature, Greek had to be transcoded to written signs
in such a way that its sounds and syntax can be recognized; moreover, the objects on
which the signs were written physically had to survive the centuries, even the millennia.
During its long history the Greek language came to be written down a number
of times in a script that was originally designed for another language. The first time
was the adaptation, around the middle of the second millennium BCE, of a Cretan syllabary
for the purposes of record-keeping in the Mycenaean palatial economy. As
Silvia Ferrara shows in a survey of the resulting new script (Linear B) and its linguistic
and archeological context, much was lost in translation in the way of adequately
representing the language’s sounds – and due to the nature of the texts not much
syntax was committed to writing; but the Linear B texts do provide us with an invaluable
window on a stage of the language some 500 years before the earliest surviving
archaic inscriptions. Roger D. Woodard discusses in detail the second transcoding, the
Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, which in its turn, as recent archeological
discoveries have established, was the descendent of an adaptation of Egyptian logograms
to stand for the consonants of a West Semitic language. In the adaptation of the
resulting consonantal Semitic alphabet, Woodard, argues, Cypriot scribes must have
played a key role, and Cyprus must have been the springboard for the expansion of
the new invention over the Greek world.
Rudolf Wachter and Arthur Verhoogt provide introductions to the study of the main
types of documents and their materials that have come down to us from antiquity:
inscriptions and papyri. They discuss the types of text that have survived in these
documents, which include laws, decrees, transactions, contracts, etc., but also poetry
and literature, in the form of funereal or dedicatory epigrams and copies of literary
works from Roman Egypt. The great majority of literary texts, however, come to us
through Byzantium, heir to the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire.
Niels Gaul discusses – in addition to such material issues as the birth of the codex and
of cursive writing – the sometimes violent cultural debates to which the copying of the
Classics was subjected through the centuries, reminding us that much of what we take
for granted might well not have survived if events had taken a different turn.
Part II presents the Greek language from the perspectives of the traditional linguistic
subdisciplines. The type of Greek discussed is mostly the “standard” Classical Attic
usage, though diachronic perspectives are also offered. Philomen Probert discusses the
standard pronunciation of Classical Attic from the point of view of modern phonology,
taking into account not only the evidence from inscriptions (the Attic alphabet is
discussed), but also from the representation of Greek words in Latin. Michael Weiss
presents morphology, the “form” of the words of the language and the ways in which
they are derived from other words in the language as well as from Proto-Indo-
European. Michael Clarke, in a new discussion of the meaning of words (lexical
semantics), addresses the pedagogically conditioned ways in which classical philology
does lexicography. Instead of an organization of lexical entries in terms of “senses”
that are – or are not – related by way of metaphorical extensions, he offers a cognitive
approach which places not the lexicographer in the center, but the actual speakers of
the language, who utter their words with an eye toward their assessment of what their
interlocutors take to be the word’s basic meaning.
The two final chapters in Part II move from the sound, form, and meaning of
words to larger linguistic units. Evert van Emde Boas and Luuk Huitink present the
syntax of Classical Greek, the way in which words combine to form clauses and clauses
combine to form larger structures. Among the many topics succinctly presented are
the functionally motivated structure of sentences as arguments surrounding a verbal
core, the tense, aspect, and mood of the verb, and the order of words in the sentence.
In the last chapter, Egbert J. Bakker turns to pragmatics, the ways in which language
is uttered (and shaped) in conversational discourse contexts. His two case studies are
the system of deictics in the language and a cognitively motivated approach to the
Greek verb. He shows that the “prototype” of these linguistic features as they are used
in interactive conversation in “real life” remains intact also when they are used in formal
written texts, arguing that the structure of those texts always remains, to a greater
or lesser extent, a matter of interactive communication.
Part III presents the Greek language as subjected to forces deriving from the dimensions
of time and space, from its formative period in the second millennium BCE to the
end of the Roman Empire and from the traditional Greek heartland to the far-flung
regions of the Hellenistic and Roman world. The first two chapters concentrate on the
temporal dimension by offering historical-comparative perspectives. Jeremy Rau
demonstrates the importance of Ancient Greek for the reconstruction of the Indo-
European proto-language and, conversely, shows how deeply the inherited features of
that language shape Greek as we know it. Rupert Thompson then discusses the oldest
actually attested Greek. The language of the Linear B tablets, he shows, may be highly
archaic in some respects, but it is not to be equated with Proto-Greek: some of its
features are shared with only a subset of the dialects we know from the Archaic and
Classical ages. Those dialects are the subject of Stephen Colvin’s chapter, which shifts
the focus from time to space, the space of the Greek language. In his discussion of the
geographical variants of Greek, Colvin resists the earlier paradigm of diversity developing
out of an original unity in some kind of “autonomous” development. Such a
reductive, purely linguistic, model, he argues, obscures such complicating factors as
ethnic identity and language contact.
These factors come directly to the fore in the remaining chapters in this section,
which deal with the rich set of phenomena, linguistic and social, resulting from the
encounter between speakers of Greek with the languages surrounding it, or – and no
less important – between the speakers of those languages and Greek. Shane Hawkins
gives an overview of the evidence we have, directly linguistic or indirectly literary, for
the contacts between Greek and its speakers and a variety of languages in the Near
East. The picture that emerges is one of a wide variety of contacts over the centuries,
from high-level diplomatic exchange in the second millennium to exchanges between
Greek and Carian mercenaries in sixth-century Egypt.