It’s funny, though, how much the English language likes the plural of the original language, from formulae, matrices, genera, corpora, Cyclopes, and phalanges to Poltergeister, châteaux, criteria, miasmata, and cherubim, to name only a few.
Formulas, genuses, corpuses are all perfectly acceptable, and poltergeists, phalanxes and miasmas are standard. Cyclops is so rarely used in the plural that as a native speaker I’m not sure how to pluralize it. The problem is the final -ps. Cherubs is also standard in the sense of cute toddlers–cherubim is used in religious contexts and maybe in the sense of putti. Criteria is often used as a singular (and even plural criterias occurs), though that’s considered substandard. I think German is more likely to preserve Greek and Latin plurals than English.
However, Greek words in -sis often have English plurals in -es: hypothesis/hypotheses; hypothesises is unacceptable.
Recently I stumbled in conversation because my brain was confused about the plural of octopus (octopuses, not octopodes or octopi). Before studying Greek it would not have been a problem. How’s that for the idea that classical languages benefit your command of your mother tongue?
I grew up in New Mexico where there were plenty of opportunities to get away from the city lights.
And I came here for enlightenment on the epigram. Never mind.
Metropolises? Really? Keeping the accent on the 2nd syllable? Hypothesises would be no more awkward.
I’ve never encountered (and would never use) criteria as singular, but evidently it’s gone the way of data.
Plural of apparatus? I say apparatuses, pluralizing in English fashion, but I could count on being criticized for that, just as I’ve been criticized for codexes (and Cyclopses). I think I’ve heard apparati, which is barbaric but unobjectionable in principle, like octopi.
Pleiades is normally pronounced with the –es long as in hypotheses and so on. I pedantically keep it short however, as with all such formations, I can’t help it. Incidentally there’s nothing morphologically untoward about πλειαδα. It’s perfectly regular. The singular is common in post-classical Greek, referring to the constellation as a single entity. Of course they started out as plural. Hesiod genealogizes them as daughters of Atlas, and Aratus counts them, seven sisters.
So back to the epigram. It’s a paraklausithuron. It was a dark and stormy night, and our poor lover-boy is mooching about in the rain complaining about being shut out—same as in opening scene of Menander’s Misoumenos and a multitude of epigrams. I doubt the author had any clear idea of what he meant by μεσην δ’επι πλειαδα δυνει, which seems an impossibly muddled phrase. None of the proposed emendations has any plausibility. It shouldn’t be primarily a seasonal marker (despite the long night and the χειμα and e.g. Ovid Amores 1.9.15f. quis nisi vel miles vel amans et frigora noctis | et denso mixtas perferet imbre nives?) but ought to refer somehow to the passage of the night, cf. e.g. the recurrent tempora noctis eunt in Ovid’s paraclausithuron Am.1.6. But for all its seeming specificity it’s quite incoherent. The inept closing conceit about Kypris not shooting Eros is in its way even worse. I wouldn’t waste time worrying about it.
Incidentally, that soppy δεδυκε μεν poem is certainly not by Sappho. I doubt that it’s even hellenistic.
Thank you. Apparently the case of the plural is very convoluted. OED gives oc’topodes and octopuses, Cyc’lopes but also Cyclopses (and variant sg. Cyclop), plural apparatus as rare alongside the more common apparatuses, has no entry criteria but only criterion, whereunder are the plural criteria and criterions, the latter deemed as less common. It only has codices, but formulae & formulas as equal, only seraphim (this being the main entry instead of seraph), and I don’t understand what’s its take on metropolis’s plural.
Persian plurals will be another good example along with the English and German ones. Persian has great many Arabic loan-words, and it has adopted many Arabic plurals, as well. But I would say that e.g. ketabha ‘books’ is much more common than Arabic kotob. I think that more educated people are more liable to use more of those Arabic plurals than so-called everyday people.
Finally, OED has Pleiad : Pleiads, but states that Pleiades is more common, and gives the diphthong -ei- a German-style pronunciation, i.e. like ply instead of play which I as a non-native would have used.
I find this fascinating. I don’t have Lobel and Page’s PLF at hand, but if I remember correctly it does include this famous Δέδυκε poem. Could you please clarify your reasoning? Wasn’t the poem attributed to Sappho already in the Classical antiquity?
It’s quoted by Hephaestion (2nd-century metrician) for its meter, in a context that seems to imply it’s an “Aeolian” i.e. Lesbian composition (like others that he quotes first), but that’s probably based only on its dialect, and over-educated people were writing epigrams in Aeolic (as well as in Doric) in the hellenistic and imperial ages, showing off their literary dialectal mastery. Julia Balbilla, a member of the emperor Hadrian’s entourage, graffitoed some on the colossus of Memnon at Luxor during Hadrian’s ill-fated Egyptian tour. The attribution to Sappho was made in the Renaissance, but it was decisively rejected by Wilamowitz and I don’t think either Lobel or Page deigns even to mention it. It seems nothing like Sappho to me, and the more Sappho we get the less it looks like her.
Here is the original Wilamowitz rejection (see the footnote).
übrigens ist es eine sünde, das reizende volkslied der Sappho zuzuschreiben. überliefert ist es nicht, und wenn das gedicht unter ihren werken gestanden haben sollte, so würde das nichts verschlagen. dies mädchen harrt bei offener kammertür auf den geliebten: das soll Sappho sein?
“By the way, it’s a sin to attribute this pretty folk song to Sappho.”
It was first attributed to Sappho by Arsenius (1465-1535) in a marginal note about his father’s collection of proverbial material. Arsenius describes the collection ὥσπερ ἐν πολυανθεῖ λειμῶνι γενόμενος, ἄλλο τι ἐξ ἄλλου δρεψάμενος.
But here is A. E. Housman:
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
Far sighs the rainy breeze:
It sighs from a lost country
To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And I lie down alone.
Imagine what fits that will give people in a 1000 years!
I can accept all that (though I don’t understand the Latin parallels), except for the part about the Pleiades not being a seasonal marker. Surely the Pleiades are the winter constellation par excellence, visible only during the colder half of the year. Not that the author necessarily had anything very specific in mind with μεσην δ’επι πλειαδα δυνει meant (I proposed earlier that it was somehow related to the Odyssean half-line μένον δ᾽ ἐπὶ ἕσπερον ἐλθεῖν).
Thank you, mwh — and thanks, Joel, really well and rapidly found. This is all immensely interesting. Will Page’s Sappho and Alcaeus (1959²) still be recommendable and worth reading as an introduction on this subject, or is it dated? We have, of course, a few new finds published this century.
I’d be most surprised if Housman thought the original was by Sappho, though you can understand how it would have appealed to him. No-one would call his adaptation a pretty folk song.
@Paul D. OK, Pleiads point to nasty weather, the off-season, it’s hard to know just what was in the epigrammatist’s head. Shut-out lovers (exclusus amator is the Latin term) can complain of winter weather as compounding their ill-treatment, as the Latin I quoted acknowledged. “Who but either a soldier or a lover will put up with the cold of night and snows mixed with heavy rain?” (a combination known as “wintry mix” in this part of the world). The refrain from the actual paraklausithuron, tempora noctis eunt, lit. the times of night are going, will mean something like the night is passing, i.e. I’ve been out here for ages, please please let me in before dawn comes. Also hard to know if that Odyssey phrase played any significant part. I doubt it myself despite the elements in common.
@Timothée. Page’s S&A dated? And how! For the larger fragments his texts and linguistic commentaries retain some authority, but he and Wilamowitz both in their different ways were obsessed with Sappho’s moral character, now recognized as a non-issue. And as you say we’ve now acquired considerably more, against all expectation. Two people I think worth reading on Sappho are Margaret Williamson and André Lardinois. She’s still a highly controversial figure.
I’m checking out for a while. But I’ll check back in now and again, just to show I’m still here.
mwh’s comment that the Pleiades are not functioning as a seasonal marker, and Housman’s poem have given me a new theory about AP5.189. I feel that it is coherent, and I hope convincing to everyone (unlikely as that may be):
In addition to functioning as the seasonal marker mentioned above, the Pleiades travel the sky like a nighttime sun (hence Housman’s “westering”). Like the sun, they sink at the end of their course.
In fact, it is highly probable that the subject for the verb δύνει is the Pleiades. They are commonly used with the verb, and no other noun in the sentence could fit.
Therefore ἐπὶ does not govern Pleiades, even as an accusative subject to an infinitive.
There is no sense from μέσην modifying the Pleiades. It must be doing something else.
There is no possible accusative/infinitive construction, and no way to fit either nominative πλειαδες or nominative πλειας in metrically. I think that the author thought must have run into πλειαδα has a poetic equivalent for πλειαδας, and assumed (understandably given the nature of the constellation) that this rare poetic term was a neuter noun.
μεσην επι == μέσην ἔπι == ἐπὶ μέσην == ἐπὶ μέσην ἀμφοτέρων. It the middle of the night and storm.
Therefore, given (5) and (6), the line needs only an accent change: Νὺξ μακρὴ καὶ χεῖμα, μέσην δ᾽ ἔπι Πλειάδα δύνει. And the translation is: “A long night and storm, in their middle sink the Pleiades.” (The Pleiades are on their way towards sinking, not really pinpointing a time of night.)
Note that the second line runs parallel (subject + prepositional phrase + verb of motion): κἀγὼ πὰρ προθύροις νίσσομαι ὑόμενος. “And I, to her doorstep come rained upon.” This parallel nicely motivates the initial κἀγὼ.
As usual, I didn’t actually have much hope, but I did have some evidence for my idea of Πλειάδα confusion: Hephaestion’s Enchiridion and scholia can’t seem to decide whether Πλειας is a normal noun or a collective feminine singular when referring to the τραγῳδοί.
A collective singular feminine is a strange thing to me. Why would we even have “διὸ καὶ πλειὰς ὠνομάσθησαν” when there is the perfectly good, and more common, plural form? I could especially see a context like 30, 21 causing confusion.
There’s really nothing strange about it. In archaic times the constellation was called the Πλειάδες (epic form Πληιάδες), plural, seven stars in total, then later (from 5th cent. on) it could alternatively be called the Πλειάς (acc.Πλειάδα), singular for a single constellation, as I said earlier. Aristotle for instance regularly uses the singular as you can see from LSJ. The –άς gen.-άδος formation is perfectly regular, there’s no way πλειάδα could ever be nominative. Seven illustrious tragedians in the mid-3rd cent. BC were collectively nicknamed the Πλειάς—just as Hephaestion says.
(In the 3rd quote Πλειαδας must be in error for Πλειαδα, as the latter part of it confirms. The 4th is unintelligible.)