ἁνδάνω

[Bart]

Question on morphology: εὔαδε is the second aorist of ἁνδάνω. Why dit it lose its spiritus asper? My dictionnary tells me εὔαδε is derived from ἔσϝαδε. ἁνδάνω apparently has ϝανδ as stem. Does the loss of the diggamma has anything to do with this (though I can't figure out how)?

[mwh]

What makes you think it lost its spiritus asper?

[Bart]

Right, of course. So is εὐ the form the augment can take before a ϝ?

NB: I'm finally able to type the ϝ on my i-pad!

[Paul Derouda]

mwh's point is, as I understand it, that the υ in εὐ id derived from ϝ and that aspiration didn't disappear word-internally, only it isn't written. So εὔαδε would represent εὔhαδε (or εὔἁδε, if you prefer).

I think the ν in ϝανδ isn't part of the stem, it's there only in the present tense (like in μανθάνω, λανθάνω etc.). The stem would rather be *σϝαδ or something like that.

[Bart]

Thanks Paul, for this exegesis of mwh's laconic dictum
Yes, I understood more or less the same. I liked mwh's reply btw, because it made me take a second look at the verb and reformulate my question.
Thanks as always.

[mwh]

Worse than laconic, evasive. The question I dodged is Why should the digamma lengthen the augment? The digamma is not even always operative (μοι αδειν Il.3.173, μοι correpted), so we wouldn’t expect it to lengthen a preceding short syllable. Is this a rare (unique?) case of the long-gone σ- being operative in addition to the digamma? (We’ve visited this question before—in fact wasn’t in relation to φιλε εκυρε in the preceding verse?) I expect there’s a better explanation. Anything in Chantraine? Or could the articulation be ευ αδε (unaugmented)?!

Edit. I've just looked up Leaf, who says:
It is generally regarded as = “ἔϝαδε”, the vocalization of “ϝ” between vowels being an Aiolic peculiarity, e.g. Lesb. “εὔιδον” = “ἔϝιδον”. Schulze however (Q. E. p. 55 after Wackernagel) prefers to derive it from “ἔ-σϝαδ-ε”, with assimilation of “ς” to “ϝ”, through the forms “ἔϝϜαδε, εὔϝαδε”. It cannot be said, in the absence of clear evidence of such assimilation of “σϝ”, that this is more satisfactory than the ordinary explanation.

[Qimmik]

Who decided to aspirate ἁνδάνω in the text of the Iliad (apparently in accordance with pre-Hellenistic Attic pronunciation), and not to aspirate εὔαδε . . . and what standard did they have to rely on?

Even if you believe in the existence of a single fixed early Ionic text predating Athenian recensions (I'm personally agnostic and skeptical), not only would that text have not marked breathings, Ionian aoidoi/rhapsodes wouldn't have used aspiration in reading, singing or reciting the text, would they? Wouldn't Ionic, like most forms of Greek other than Attic, already be psilotic by the time such a text was reduced to writing?

Breathings wouldn't have been added until at the earliest the Hellenistic period and at the latest the 9th century AD/CE. While Hellenistic scholars might have had access to a tradition that was nonetheless filtered through Attic usage, such a tradition would have been highly attenuated and unreliable as the centuries progressed. And in any event, what would such a tradition have represented? Certainly not an early Ionic pronunciation.

I guess my real question is how much weight should be placed on the diacritical marks in Homeric texts (and, more broadly, in other ancient Greek texts, too), and to what extent the diacritical marks reliably represent ancient pronunciation, especially when they give rise to questions such as Bart's. These are perhaps rhetorical questions that really can't be answered with certainty. Grammatical discussions surviving from antiquity suggest there was a considerable amount of controversy over many of the details.

[mwh]

Words don’t lose their accents and breathings by being written without them. With forms of ανδανειν I’d assume that the aspirate will have been present in Homeric recitation by rhapsodes (to be sure, not in all areas) and persisted in Attic and subsequently. Why would it be in the tradition otherwise? I don’t know (haven’t looked) if there’s epigraphic evidence for ανδαν- or αδ- to validate the aspirate. But I don’t see any more reason to represent the word as psilotic than to represent say Εκτωρ likewise.

As to εὔαδε, I take it that it is aspirated, on the verb stem, so there’s no inconsistency between ἁνδάνω and εὔαδε. (Internal aspiration is often marked in papyri, and we could do the same.) And though historical linguistics is not at all my thing, I’d reconstruct εὔαδε < ἔϝϝαδε < ἔϝαδε, the PIE /s/ having disappeared earlier, and the prolongation of the ϝ analogous to e.g. ἔλλαβεν. Or does the extra ϝ replace the erstwhile /s/? Either way the prolongation/gemination I’m postulating seems needed to account for the prosody.

[Qimmik]

I’d assume that the aspirate will have been present in Homeric recitation by rhapsodes (to be sure, not in all areas) and persisted in Attic and subsequently. Why would it be in the tradition otherwise?

I'm wondering whether the tradition of the diacriticals -- at least the breathings -- was imposed on the texts when the Athenians took over stewardship after the late 6th century and doesn't go back to Ionia. Words that aren't Attic are psilotic in the received text: e.g., ἦμαρ vs. ἡμέρα.

[jeidsath]

Don't tell me that there might be mistaken aspiration marks in the texts from those halcyon days.

[mwh]

Actually I’m not at all sure ημερα was not psilotic in Attic. But on the general question, it is of course possible to argue that all aspirated words in Homer, not only those with linguistically validated aspirates, gained or regained their aspirates in 6th-cent. Athens. But that doesn’t nullify aspiration as a historical reality (at some places and at some times), and if it belongs anywhere, it belongs on Εκτωρ and ανδανειν. You could print Homer psilotic if you wished, if you believe that 7th-century performances did not realize the latent aspiration, but that would be less than helpful, quite apart from its running counter to doctrine and practice alike from at least 6th century on. As you half acknowledge, you couldn’t do the same with accents, where the written accents, when they were introduced for purposes of disambiguation, merely represent the spoken ones (which is not to say that absolutely all of them are necessarily right). It will be the same with aspiration. After all, there must have been some continuous tradition that knew which words had aspirates and which not. Otherwise, since they knew even less than me of historical or comparative linguistics, they wouldn’t have got so many of them right.

[Qimmik]

Your point about the tradition getting so much right without knowledge of historical linguistics is convincing.

I certainly don't want a text of the Homeric poems (or any other ancient author) that omits breathings or accentuation. My personal preference would be for a relatively conservative text that reflects the medieval manuscript tradition, and takes into account the ancient mss., too--I guess one that aims at presenting something that might have circulated in the Hellenistic era. From what I've read--and I'm no expert by any means--I'm not confident anyone can get much further back than that.

[jeidsath]

Well, in the particular case of ἁνδάνω we can can be somewhat confident of the aspiration, since we have basically the same Indo-European word in Sanskrit and Latin (and English!) with an initial s. That initial s tends to leave an aspiration when it drops out.

[Qimmik]

Chantraine sec. 74:

Mais l'aspiration qui remplace à l'initiale le s ou le yod qui est tombé est notée avec une certaine irrégularité: Il apparait qu'en éolien et en ionien d'Asie l'aspiration a disparu: Jamais l'h initiale n'est noté et dans l'élision ou la crase c'est toujours la sourde, jamais l'aspirée, qui est écrite ...

Chez Homère le texte traditionel est plein de contradictions et d'inconséquences.

* * *

D'une manière générale la forme à aspirée dans la vulgate se trouve dans des mots qu'ont conservés l'ionien-attique et la koiné, tandis que l'esprit doux est noté dans des mots proprement homériques.

He writes that εὔαδε is visiblement éolien.