What is the origin of the Homeric τευ/τεῦ for τινός? I loosely understand the appearance of other stem variants (e.g. τέο) before τιν- was generalised but can’t find anything on this specific form.
Edit: I am also quite puzzled as to how τῶ came to be used as a variant of τῷ ‘therefore’.
τευ and τεῦ exclusively ionic, Herodotean as well as Homeric. Both at Il.18.192, Achilles to Iris, ἄλλου δ᾽ οὔ τευ οἶδα τεῦ ἂν κλυτὰ τεύχεα δύω,/ εἰ μὴ Αἴαντός γε σάκος Τελαμωνιάδαο. Presumably reduced from disyllabic τεο.
τῶ/τῷ just orthographic, τῶ to distinguish from dative?
To supplement Michael’s post, in brief, the form τίνος, not the form τεῦ, calls for an explanation. Gen. τεῦ, contracted from τέο (corresponding to Attic τοῦ) is derived from the original form of the gen. of the interrogative pronoun (and, without accent, the indefinite pronoun).
Originally, the accusative would have been unattested *τίν. However, -α was added to form τίνα, by analogy with 3rd decl. nouns having acc. sing. in -α, such as φλέψ, φλεβά. Then τίνα was reinterpreted as derived from the stem τιν-, and the declension of the pronoun was generalized to yield the form τίνος as an alternative to τέο/τεῦ (and Attic τοῦ), as well as other forms in τιν-.
References: Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Latin and Greek, §§ 326, 381; Chantraine Morphologie historique du grec,, § 142.
Disclosure: I knew none of this before looking it up just now.
This is very helpful thank you. However, I am still wondering how is τεῦ contracted from τέο?
Edit: Just found this in Buck: ‘In Ionic εο often has the value of one syllable in poetry, and this diphthongal pronunciation came to be represented by ευ (cf. εο = original ευ)’.
Oh ok interesting, I didn’t realise that was an option. So τῶ is just the inferential conjunction τῷ but without the iota subscript employed in order to avoid confusion with the dative singular τῷ?
The medieval manuscript tradition of the Homeric poems, which is the form in which they’ve come down through the centuries, as well as the manuscript tradition of Herodotus, generally represent as ευ the diphthong resulting from the contraction of ε+ο.
But there’s actually evidence from Ionic inscriptions in Asia Minor that the spelling εο, though probably pronounced contracted as a diphthong, remained prevalent until long after the era when the earliest written texts of the Homeric poems came into existence (sometime in the 8th or 7th cc. BCE, certainly earlier than the 5th c. BCE), and that the spelling ευ didn’t come into use until the 4th c. BCE.
The texts of the Homeric poems and Herodotus, as well as of other early authors, underwent editorial revisions by scholars in the Hellenistic era, and the medieval manuscript traditions on which today’s texts are primarily based reflect these revisions. If the spelling εο was original to written texts of the Homeric poems, it’s possible that the ευ spelling could have been introduced in the course of the Hellenistic revisions.
The late M.L. West, in his influential editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, adopted the εο spelling in his texts, in an effort to produce texts as close as possible to what he thought were the originals.
Attic texts spell the contraction of ε+ο as ου. In Athens it was apparently pronounced as a monophthong. That’s why ου is traditionally called a “spurious” diphthong: it’s a digraph – a sound represented by two characters – but not pronounced as a true diphthong.
UPDATED: Cross-posted with mwh.
So τῶ is just the inferential conjunction τῷ but without the iota subscript employed in order to avoid confusion with the dative singular τῷ?
That’s just a guess. And the early manuscripts often dispense with iota adscript anyway.
Incidentally, note that in that Iliadic verse I quoted for τευ/τεῦ the original disyllabic forms can be restored:
ἄλλου δ᾽ οὔ τεο ϝοιδα τέ’ ἂν κλυτὰ τεύχεα δύω.
(But monosyll. τέο in correption probably better than τέ’ in elision. [In Attic this τέo would be οὗ, the relative pronoun.])