Lesson LXVII, commentary on verse 473: παιήονα is linked to παίω, strike. However, the translation that I have seems to link the same word to παιών, ῶνος, ὁ. Is there any etymological relationship between παίω and παιών?
I was going to say “clearly not” but Beekes isn’t so sure:
παιάν, -ᾶνος [m.] ‘choral song, hymn’, especially for Apollo, ‘paean’; also personified as ‘divine physician’ (Hom.); epithet of Apollo, ‘physician, savior’; also name of a foot (Arist., Heph.). «PG»?
•VAR παιήων, -ονος (Il.), παιών, -ῶνος (IA), πάων, -ονος (Aeol.); παιάν, -ᾶνος (Dor., trag., Hell.).
•DIAL Myc. pa-ja-wo-ne /Paiāwonei/ [dat.].
•DER 1. παιών-ιος ‘belonging to a paean, healing, saving’ (A., S., Ar.), fem. -ιάς (AP), -ίς (S. E.); also -ία [f.] epithet of Athena (Paus.), as a plant name ‘peony’ (Thphr., Ps.-Dsc.); παιανίδες [pl.] epithet of ἀοιδαί (Pi.); Παιηόνιος = Παιώνιος (APl.); παιανίας [m.] ‘paean-singer’ (Sparta). 2. παιωνικός = παιώνιος (Plu., Gal.), παιανικός ‘paean-like’ (Ath.). 3. παιηοσύνη· ἰατρεία ‘medical treatment’ (H.). 4. παιωνίζω (IA), -ανίζω (Dor.) ‘to strike up a paean, to worship with a paean’, παιωνισμός [m.] (Th., Str., D. H.), -ισται [m.pl.] ‘guild of the paean-singers’ (Rome, Piraeus, II–IIIp).
•ETYM Probably taken from the exclamation ἰὴ παιήων, ἰὼ παιάν (as the begining of a song). The basis is παιά-(ϝ)ων like Ιά(ϝ)ονες, κοινά(ϝ)ων (see 
Ἴωνες and κοινός), but is otherwise unclear. Perhaps ‘who heals illnesses through magic (Apollo)’, from παῖϝα, *παϝίᾱ ‘blow’, related to παίω ‘beat’; otherwise, related to παύω? In origin, the word may well be Pre-Greek.
Beekes, R. (2010). In A. Lubotsky (Ed.), Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Vols. 1 & 2, p. 1142). Brill.
Thank you very much, Barry.
ἐπιπείθω
This verb is included in the vocabulary of Lesson XLVI. This form, however, I could only find in one old (1864) Greek-Romanian dictionary; other dictionaries seem to record only the middle/deponent form ἐπιπείθομαι. I wonder if this verb should have been better included in Pharr’s manual in this latter form.
Are any of the other forms included with the same entry (ἐπιπείσω, ἐπέπεισα (ἐπιπέπιθον), ἐπιπέποιθα, ἐπιπέπεισμαι, ἐπεπείθην**) actually found in ancient texts?
Hi Vasile,
Pharr includes “assumed forms” of a verb by designating them with an asterisk, so in this case ἐπιπέπεισμαι* and ἐπεπείθην* apparently have no attested usages in Ancient Greek. Going to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, I managed to get 37 hits for ἐπιπείθομαι, most of them from the Homeric texts (26). There were a few single hits from Hesiod , Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Plato (who’s quoting Homer) and then several hits from Koine authors. I could find no usage of the active ἐπιπείθω. Without the preposition ἐπί, the simple form πεἰθω is of course quite common.
Hi Aetos,
Thank you…
I was indeed aware about assumed forms, but these two particular forms, followed by an asterisk (as compared with those preceded by an asterisk), should be “Attic, analogous to known Homeric forms, but not found in Homer” - see Note on page 20 (Lesson XII). As for the others, not marked with an asterisk, one would expect them to be found in Homer.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I am trying to translate this manual into Romanian. When translating vocabularies, I try, as much as possible, to use a Romanian dictionary. The newest one is now under making: only the first five volumes (covering α through ι) are available at this moment. This dictionary only has ἐπιπείθομαι (not ἐπιπείθω) as a distinct entry. The new Cambridge Greek lexicon has the same. The French dictionaire étymologique de la langue grecque has only πείθομαι as a separate entry.
My problem is, should I change the entry in my Romanian translated vocabulary from ἐπιπείθω to ἐπιπείθομαι?..
I would anyway. Beyond lack of attestation, επι has no possible object in the active. What’s it doing? It’s a nonsense form. (Persuade against?)
Hi Vasile,
Sorry about that-I really need to use my reading glasses more often! I have difficulty distinguishing commas from periods these days (especially in the Loebs!) and for breathing marks I need a magnifying glass! As to the note on the use of asterisks, you’ll also find it at the beginning of the vocabulary list in the back.
Having looked through the available lexica on Logeion, the only article I find for ἐπιπείθω is in Cunliffe and even in that entry, all the citations are for middle forms:
https://logeion.uchicago.edu/ἐπιπείθω
Perhaps you could include a note that only the middle form is found in Homer and give that meaning in Romanian. I don’t know what Pharr used for a source to come up with meanings for the active form. I suspect they are conjectured.
No one could conjecture επιπειθω though. It’s meaningless. It’s just an example of error (maybe Cunliffe’s, not Pharr’s).
I know people who think there is no dish that can’t be improved by slathering it with salsa. The Greeks are the same way with prepositions on the front of verbs. Sometimes they’re just intensifiers without any specific link to the semantics of the prepositions. With a total lack of evidence, I would speculate that in many cases the propositions glommed on as meaningless decorations, and then they took hold because people thought they would sound more intelligent if they used the fancier verb – sort of like my high school PE teacher who always had to say “individuals” and could never bring himself to say “kids” or “people.” I bet if we check back in the year 5000 AD, Greeks will be using words like αποεπιπερικαταπηγαινω. (Note the lack of an acute accent – they were eliminated in the year 4072 as elitist and undemocratic.)
It’s attested. Do you trust the LSJ?
ἐπιπείθομαι, to be persuaded, εἴ τις ἐμοὶ ἐπιπείσεται .. οἴκαδʼ ἴμεν Il.17.154; ἐπεπείθετο θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ Od.2.103.
2. trust to, put faith in, μαρτυρίοισι A.Ag.1095 (lyr.), cf. IG14.1389 ii 32.
3. comply with, obey, τινί Il.1.218, Hes.Sc.369; εὖ παραινεῖς, κἀπιπείσομαι S.El.1472.
Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Jones, H. S., & McKenzie, R. (1996). In A Greek-English lexicon (p. 650). Clarendon Press.
No, no, no. The discussion is about whether the active form exists. In fact, it is not in the LSJ. Nor is it in the entire Greek corpus indexed by the TLG. And anyone claiming expertise in the language (not that I have any, myself) should be able to see why that would have been likely by looking at the word.
While your argument seems mostly satire, it’s an interesting hypothesis. To the extent that it’s true though, it’s actually later Greek where I see the prepositions begin to lose their power and begin to draw more of their meaning from usage and custom. In earlier Greek, they are still very generative of meaning, and much more powerful than the weak things that we tack onto words in English. And even in later Greek, it’s never really anything like “random slathering”.
I feel (partially from seeing threads like this) that understanding the force of the prepositions is actually one of the great blind spots of dictionary word-memorization based learning. I also suspect creeping gloss-addiction is the reason that CGL and CGCG have both dropped composition sections for the prepositions (despite a considerable space devoted to them in older grammars and dictionaries, like Smyth and the LSJ). Happily, sight-reading practice and contributing to the random Greek passages thread can cure us all of these sorts of problems.
Glad you recognized it as satire, although you conspicuously fail to describe it as funny satire. Don’t worry, after 25 years of teaching, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my jokes are never funny to anyone but myself. Actually, that’s not quite true. Once in a while I would get a student who would laugh at my jokes. I would always smile and make eye contact in order to encourage that behavior. I would then make a notation in my lecture notes to use that joke every semester, and make sure to give that student an A.
You may be right – your knowledge of Greek certainly exceeds mine by orders of magnitude. But here are some examples from the Homeric vocabulary that have seemed to me like the prepositions were mere intensifiers:
ἄνωγα is etymologically = ἀνα (intensifier) + ωγα (to say)
καταπέσσω
ἐπιπείθω
διαπέρθω
διατμήγω
I think maybe reduplication is also used sometimes for intensification, as in μερμηρίζω. (I probably got this from Beekes, haven’t checked.)
As a non-Greek example where intensification creeps in and becomes just normal, there is French ne pas.
By the way, I checked the historical record, and in 4983 there was an effort to change αποεπιπερικαταπηγαινω back to the Homeric κιω, but it was rejected by an EU committee in Brussels as too difficult for schoolchildren. And in case you were wondering, the pronunciation of that verb is ipiipipirikitipiyini.
I have gratefully received the confirmation I needed. Thank you all…
My apologies, I misread what was being said. You are absolutely right of course. Now watch somebody publish a papyrus where it is attested… 
The best gift that you can give to a comedian is to play the straight man. In another thread, we can switch up roles.
I don’t really have a worked out theory of the prepositions. But if we want to to think of them from an information standpoint, I will point out that they are necessarily, just from their frequency, going to have a low Huffman encoding, and therefore a lower information content than verbal or substantive roots. The analogy to a Fourier frequency domain is almost precise: you can cut off this high-frequency stuff, like the prepositions, without losing as much signal as you would from cutting off low-frequency signals.
Back down to earth, this would mean that the closer that someone is to the beginning of his progress at a language, and the more focused he is on getting the big picture items of the signal, the easier it is that he can do without these low-information parts of a sentence. What he wants is the gist of the information being provided. To him, prepositions and word order and anything that gives color to a sentence, will be the things that he can ignore without much consequence.
However, it is a mistake to conclude from this fact (that they are not especially useful to him at this stage) that they carry no information. That would be like looking on a landscape and assuming that there is no information being carried by light outside the visible light spectrum. No, there is, but your eyes just can’t see it.
Translations (and therefore dictionary glosses) are related to this beginner problem. It is extremely hard to translate color and effect. It’s like trying to create a new version of a painting from having seen it once, or having heard it described. Again, following the Fourier analogy, that sort of process will tend to leak the high-frequency elements.
I don’t think this is actually intensity in any of the cases presented. And even when it is elsewhere, intensity is not a “mere” anything. It’s important to know, for example precisely where a prospective girlfriend would lie on the “not a good fit”, “bad news”, or “will chew you up and spit you out” scale. Intensity matters.
But here are what they mean to me, anyway, though this is meant as a set of personal jottings-down, to give you an idea of how I’m thinking about them, rather than any communication of real knowledge:
That the augment modifies that initial vowel in ἄνωγα is a strong reason to think that the ανα is no longer productive, and only has etymological significance. That said, I suggest you compare ανα with verbs of saying. It makes αναγορευω or ανειπον something public or official, that is a message going out throughout the people.
καταπέσσω suggests completion to me. Compare κατεσθιω. For me, the sense of ανα’s “throughout” is “haphazardly”, but κατα’s “throughout” is “completely.”
ἐπιπείθω is under discussion. But επιπειθομαι, to me, indicates yielding to a force brought to bear, sometimes represented by a dative object. (Outside Homer, this can also be an object of faith, again represented by a dative object).
διαπέρθω destroy something to smithereens. The δια refers to the distributed state of the object after the act.
διατμήγω, again, moves the emphasis to the distributed state after cutting, and therefore the completeness of the severing.