textlinguistics and Attic poetry/tragedy

Greek Learning Greek
1

I was mulling over some lines in Antigone[1] this morning and comparing it to Elizabeth Wyckoff’s translation. It seems to me that Attic Tragedy is a genre not well suited for the kind of textlinguistics expounded in Stephan Levinsohn’s Discourse Features of NT Greek (2nd Ed SIL 2000). Helma Dik picked samples from Attic Tragedy and did a lot of hard work to explain how this methodology might be used for this genre. But I am not convinced that it is a good fit. Prose narrative is much better material for demonstrating word order patterns.

Sophocles might appear to some of us to be working by same rule that Hemingway used (eliminate everything that can be assumed). Sophocles pushes this principle much further than Hemingway. The result is cryptic. The translations must paraphrase, there is no alternative, nobody could read it otherwise.

I think this approach to word order analysis has served its purpose in bible translation. Steve Runge is the current guy pushing this framework for biblical studies. The framework is now quite old and I suspect it will be either discarded or enveloped by a new framework.




[1]
ΧΟ. Ἀλλὰ θεός τοι καὶ θεογεννής,
ἡμεῖς δὲ βροτοὶ καὶ θνητογενεῖς.
Καίτοι φθιμένῃ μέγ<α κ>ἀκοῦσαι
τοῖς ἰσοθέοις σύγκληρα λαχεῖν
ζῶσαν καὶ ἔπειτα θανοῦσαν.
838

ΑΝ. Οἴμοι γελῶμαι. Τί με, πρὸς θεῶν πατρῴ-
ων, οὐκ οὐλομέναν ὑβρίζεις,
ἀλλ’ ἐπίφαντον;
Ὦ πόλις, ὦ πόλεως
πολυκτήμονες ἄνδρες·

2

Well, yes. Doesn’t that go without saying? The best way to learn the workings of Greek word order, in my opinion, is to read lots and lots of Greek prose, with close attention to the organization of the words. But then I’m an empirist. For analysis, the best place to go is Dover’s book, as mentioned by Chad. Dover (unlike Levinsohn et al.) is someone who knew Greek inside out, and had a fearsome intelligence to boot. It is a few years old now, but ancient Greek is not subject to fashion. For stylistic matters, if you have German, Norden’s Antike Kunstprosa is still unmatched.

As you seem to have come to recognize, you’d be better off without the SIL people. As I see it, there are two things undoing any value their work might otherwise have:
(1) They’re primarily focussed on the NT (for evangelical purposes). This means their data base is ludicrously small and arbitrarily chosen. To understand NT Greek you have to bring in a whole lot of other Greek. And there’s no such thing as NT Greek anyway. On the one hand there’s koine Greek. That should be the data base. On the other hand there’s Paul’s Greek, Mark’s Greek, etc. etc., none of which can be properly understood except in the context of a far wider body of texts.
(2) They’re excessively concerned with translation. Translation is useful for communicating what one takes something to mean, but it’s is a purely ancillary activity. The aim in learning a foreign language is to understand without having to translate. You need to study the language on its own terms. People have been doing that with ancient Greek for centuries, from Apollonius Dyscolus on, and very successfully. Some people on these boards (not you, csb) seem to think they can simply deny established facts. But no new approach is going to invalidate or supplant those gains.

As for Sophoclean lyric, or any lyric, there’s no point in looking at it until you’ve mastered the basics of Greek word order—which is basically simple enough, when all’s said and done, especially when viewed from a syntactical and comparative linguistics perspective. Lyric verse is useful in indicating the limits of word-order abnormality, but first one has to know what’s normal. With tragic dialogue, as with lyric, what makes it interesting (from a word-order point of view, that is!) is (a) the interaction of language and meter and (b) the nature and extent of linguistic elevation (i.e. deviation from prose usage). With the Antigone passage you quote, the first steps would be to understand the meter and to understand how Greek lyric characteristically works. I fail to see much affinity with Hemingway; Sophocles certainly doesn’t “eliminate everything that can be assumed.” To translate it (or to paraphrase it, but all translation is a form of paraphrase) is to destroy it.

All this should be axiomatic. Sorry to sound so dogmatic, but there it is.

3

It is all axiomatic, but don’t apologize for saying it. I feel somehow it still needs to be said.

4

I spent some time looking at Helma Dik’s book on Tragedy this morning. Wondering if I could run some sort of test where I would read the passages she discusses before reading her discussion, use the methodology she employs which I didn’t learn from her and see if we come up with similar results.

That seems to be a point of contention. If every attempt at analysis comes up with a different reading then we conclude with Capt. Willard “I don’t see any method at all.”

I don’t think this is going to work. Perhaps having Steve Runge host a virtual conference with H. Dik, R. Buth, S. Levinsohn, give them all 10 samples of text and see what they come up with. That would level the playing field. I haven’t bothered to study Runge’s work since he came along after my interest in this approach to things was past its peak and in decline.

After all the analysis is in, I am still prone to ask the question: So what?

I will continue to follow Helma Dik’s general guidelines for reading Tragedy.

5

For me that’s a bit of a catch 22. It is quite impossible for me to read lots of Greek prose and the word order is one of the main reasons. For that reason I do find Helma Dik’s book worth dipping into now and them. It is incredibly hard going for me - it is not a book intended for people at my level at all. However, the textbooks intended for my level ignore the issue so she is my best alternative.

6

Friend of my from Spain posted this 10 years ago. Apparently there are classics people from Spain doing functional linguistics.


ripped from b-greek archives
http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/lists.ibiblio.org/2004-June/030400.html

Although it does not cover specifically koiné, some list members may
be interested in this new book on the syntax of Classical Greek:
Crespo Güemes, Emilio; Conti, Luz; Maquieira, Helena. (2003).
Sintaxis del griego clásico. Madrid. XI + 502 pp. Hardcover. (In
Spanish)

It is a reader-friendly introduction to the syntax of Classical Greek
intended mainly for University students, written from a functional
perspective (a functionalism closer to Dik’s than to Givon’s, for
instance), but with the Classical philologist in mind, and it is much
more descriptive than speculative. Very clearly written, it avoids
all non indispensable jargon and gives well chosen examples, all of
them translated into Spanish. The ordering of the contents is not
quite the traditional arrangement one may find in classical manuals
like Kuehner-Gerth, Schwyzer, Smyth, or Krueger-Poekel-Cooper, but
readers may find it preferable at least for a number of syntactic
questions. It contains indexes of Greek words, main concepts and loci
citati.

–

Daniel Riaño Rufilanchas
Madrid, España

POSTSCRIPT:
OCLC shows the closest copy is Univ. of Chicago. Perhaps that is close enough. Now if I only was fluent in Spanish. I have a text book on linguistics (Generative) in Spanish. I will practice reading it while waiting on ILL to get Sintaxis del griego clásico.

7

Hi, Clayton,

You can test what linguists claim about English and evaluate the results. Rutger Allan

http://www.brill.com/middle-voice-ancient-greek

claims that the difference between βούλομαι and θέλω is like the difference between “oak tree” and “oak” or “puppy dog” and “puppy.” I asked a dozen fluent English speakers about these pairs and got no agreement about anything. Nobody said anything close to what Allan (who I don’t think is a native born English speaker) said about “puppy dog” (that it is marked for indicating the essential “dogness” of the animal while “puppy” is “unmarked” for this.) Most people said that there is no real difference, or the differences are too subtle to be pinned down or that the differences are stylistic, not semantic.

I’ve run these tests several times and have concluded that in the real world language is too complex and fuzzy for the type of pseudo-scientific analysis that linguists like to do. It’s not the claims are wrong, exactly, but they are too subtle, subjective and non-falsifiable to be of much use. One winds up arguing about the claims rather than the Greek that the Greek the claims are supposed to illuminate. But that’s just me. Others find linguistic metalanguage helpful for learning Greek or (more often) interesting in its own right.

If every attempt at analysis comes up with a different reading then we conclude with Capt. Willard “I don’t see any method at all.”

For those of you in Yorba Linda:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdNsltQXTVU

8

I think that I have as little patience for mumbo-jumbo as Markos, and see it in a lot of linguistic academic writing, but the following sentences are different:

  1. She’s a witch and he’s an oak.

  2. She’s a witch and he’s an oak tree.

In the first we have a character description, but in the second a man has been transmogrified.

Also:

  1. He trailed behind the pizza delivery girl like a hungry puppy.

  2. He trailed behind the pizza delivery girl like a hungry puppy dog.

More subtle, but I would think that the man in the first sentence is a beau. In the second he’s just hungry.

How fluent would you have to be in English to see the difference between these sentences? But then again, thinking of Apocalypse Now, Joseph Conrad was Polish, and didn’t learn English until his twenties.

9

Well said. It’s always the context that matters.

As to βούλομαι and θέλω, I think βούλομαι is often used in a context where a preference between alternatives is implied and in those cases its meaning is close to prefer, although you could probably give a number of examples where there’s no effective difference between the two. I didn’t bother to look for any examples though. I don’t know if the difference has anything to do with βούλομαι being a middle verb.

10

In response to daivid (see PS):
Yes I see the problem. What makes things difficult for English-speakers, as you’re aware, is that Greek is not a subject-verb-object (SVO) language like English but one whose word order has been described as “free.” SVO, OSV, SOV, VOS, VSO, OVS are all perfectly fine. That’s the beauty of an inflected language. When reading it’s essental to register the case endings as you go along. (Eventually this will become unconscious, but meanwhile you have to stop and make sure you know exactly what each word ending is telling you.) Then the sentence structure unfolds before you. (Do not go hunting for the subject, or the verb; just take things in the order in which they come, or you’ll never learn to read with any fluency.) Get comfortable with that procedure, and the difficulties of reading Greek begin to fade away.

Unlike in English, the word order makes little semantic difference. Obviously it makes some, and that’s where it gets interesting, but it’s not a simple matter, or one that can readily be reduced to formula (rules such as “What comes first has salience” only get you so far—only as far as what comes first, in fact). Which is probably why conventional textbooks don’t say much about it (except for attributive/predicative use of the article and for proclitics and enclitics, which aren’t really words at all)—it doesn’t fit into the accidence-and-syntax framework that they all use, where there’s right and wrong and little inbetween. Dover’s book could be your guide when you get to that stage. And/or you could get into pragmatics, which has definite advantage over tradiitonal approaches when it comes to elucidating word order. That’s more Dik’s orientation, but she’s developed her own analytical methodology which you have to get on top of, and she’s dealing with tragic dialogue, where word order is slightly deviant. Simon Slings, an excellent Greek scholar, pioneered pragmatics for hellenists, who were shamefully late in taking to it; this was in the early 90’s, and if you have institutional affiliation or access to an academic library you could read his introductory article Written and Spoken Language, a good starting-point.

Less advanced than Dik, and linguistically traditional, would be something like Susan Stephens’ Greek Prose Composition. I seem to remember she has an early chapter on word order (though it might not say much more than I said in my first para. above, which is the all-important one). I don’t myself like the organization of the book (which is much the same as Smyth’s when it come to types of clauses and sentences—I don’t like that either), but you might find it useful.

Word order does matter, but as a rule it’s subtle. Plato is said to have rejuggled the words of the first sentence of the Republic multiple times before he was happy with it. Κατέβην χθὲς εἰς-Πειραιᾶ μετὰ-Γλαύκωνος-τοῦ-Ἀρίστωνος …—16 possible permutations already, any one of which would be perfectly acceptable, and with precious little difference between them.

PS I wrote the above this morning but didn’t get to post it until now, 12 hours later, in which time I see this thread has been busy!.
Briefly and quickly:
to C.S.B.: I don’t know the book but it sounds as if it could be good. Thanks for the reference.
to Markos (whose cherry-picking of my original post was a little distortive): for the difference between βούλομαι and θέλω LSJ is a better guide than anyone giving false English analogs, which I see no value in pursuing.

11

Word order: Finnish is an inflected language and also has “free” word order, but clearly some word orders are more marked than others. With the risk of pursuing false analogues, I’ll still give a few examples. The focalized word I give in italics – note that in the OVS example, it’s the last word of the sentence.

SVO: Pekka söi aamiaisen. “Pekka ate breakfast” (“default”, unmarked word order)
OSV: Aamiaisen Pekka söi. “Pekka ate breakfast (although he didn’t eat lunch)”
VSO: Söi Pekka aamiaisen. “Pekka did eat breakfast (although you claim he didn’t)”
OVS: Aamiaisen söi Pekka. “It was Pekka who ate the breakfast (and not someone else)”.
SOV: Pekka aamiaisen söi. A strange word order, probably acceptable only in poetry (but common there).
VOS: Söi aamiaisen Pekka. Even stranger than SOV, but certainly also common in poetry.

But what strikes me is that while these distinctions are clear in everyday speech and in prose, in poetry they are blurred – not only is word order is much freer in poetry, but in poetry all six would tend to mean by default the same as the unmarked SVO, and you would need to give more context to make these fine distinctions (or, to put it another way, you could use any of the six to say what would require SVO in prose/everyday speech). Word order in poetry seems to be a very delicate business to me.

I’m sure it doesn’t work the same for Greek, but it would be nice to do the same kind of exercise in Greek.

Needless to say, when I want to impress with my Finnish writing, I do a lot of juggling with word order.

12

I think that’s a good point, and it does work the same (more or less) in Greek.

13

Thanks for all the advice. I’ll check out Susan Stephens’ book. I had not heard of her before.

14

This from Plut. Caes. 23.2

ἡ δὲ ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς στρατεία τὴν μὲν τόλμαν εἶχεν ὀνομαστήν πρῶτος γὰρ εἰς τὸν ἑσπέριον ’ Ὠκεανὸν ἐπέβη στόλῳ, Καὶ διὰ τῆς Ἀτλαντικῆς θαλάττης στρατὸν ἐπὶ πόλεμον κομίζων ἔπλευσε: καὶ νῆσον ἀπιστουμένην ὑπὸ μεγέθους καὶ πολλὴν ἔριν παμπόλλοις συγγραφεῦσι παρασχοῦσαν, ὡς ὄνομα Καὶ λόγος οὐ γενομένης οὐδὲ οὔσης πέπλασται, κατασχεῖν ἐπιθέμενος προήγαγεν ἔξω τῆς οἰκουμένης τὴν Ῥωμαίων ἡγεμονίαν.

Striped down to its basics the first bit seems to me to be
ἡ στρατεία τὴν τόλμαν εἶχεν. The expedition daring had.
That is SOV.

So have I misread it or is this a sign that word order is different in Ancient Greek (and if so what emphasis is implied) or is it that maybe even though Plutarch is writing pose he is giving it a poetical sound?

15

Plut. Caes. 23.2
ἡ δὲ ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς στρατεία τὴν μὲν τόλμαν εἶχεν ὀνομαστήν > u[/u] > πρῶτος γὰρ εἰς τὸν ἑσπέριον ’ Ὠκεανὸν ἐπέβη στόλῳ, Καὶ διὰ τῆς Ἀτλαντικῆς θαλάττης στρατὸν ἐπὶ πόλεμον κομίζων ἔπλευσε: καὶ νῆσον ἀπιστουμένην ὑπὸ μεγέθους καὶ πολλὴν ἔριν παμπόλλοις συγγραφεῦσι παρασχοῦσαν, ὡς ὄνομα Καὶ λόγος οὐ γενομένης οὐδὲ οὔσης πέπλασται, κατασχεῖν ἐπιθέμενος προήγαγεν ἔξω τῆς οἰκουμένης τὴν Ῥωμαίων ἡγεμονίαν.

(shouldn’t there be some punctuation between ὀνομαστήν and πρῶτος?)

Sure it must be different. I just wanted to give an example in my own language into what sort of thing I think we a dealing with, since it’s the one I know best, and perhaps also open a debate as to how these things work in Greek in comparison. My examples of course only apply to Finnish. Now while Finnish has “free” word order, it’s still doesn’t mean you could do anything. SVO is the “normal”, unmarked order, and in these examples OSV, VSO, OVS carry a special nuance; SOV and VOS (at least in this example) are ungrammatical (or almost) in prose. But in poetry you could argue that word order is really “free” – still not completely free, but so free you could use any of the six, even the “ungrammatical” ones; also, in poetry, the six different examples don’t necessarily carry the nuances they would have prose/every day speech (although they still could). What I mean that added “freedom” in word order in poetry also means that the analysis of word order becomes much trickier in poetry than in prose.

I’m still not sure if I’ve been very clear.

Now I’m not even sure what the unmarked word order is in Greek, and I think it’s a subject of debate even among specialists. Maybe SOV? If that’s the case, ἡ στρατεία τὴν τόλμαν εἶχεν would be more or less default, certainly not poetic. Anyway, if “default” word order in prose is debated even in Greek prose, what a difficult question word order must be for poetry.

Now, as far as I see, all the following reformulations are grammatical (if not, someone please correct me). But they certainly have some difference in meaning – I can’t pinpoint the differences, but I’m sure they are there. Finnish is no help here, except maybe to show what sort of thing to look for. (But compare for example “I have never seen him” vs. “Never have I seen him” or the (I think only marginally grammatical) “Him I have never seen”).

ἡ δὲ ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς στρατεία τὴν μὲν τόλμαν εἶχεν ὀνομαστήν
ἡ δὲ στρατεία ἡ ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς τὴν μὲν τόλμαν εἶχεν ὀνομαστήν
ὀνομαστήν δ᾽ εἶχεν τὴν τόλμαν ἡ μὲν ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς στρατεία
ἡ δὲ στρατεία τὴν μὲν τόλμαν εἶχεν ὀνομαστήν ἡ ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς
τὴν δὲ τόλμαν ὀνομαστήν εἶχεν ἡ μὲν ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς στρατεία
εἶχεν δ᾽ ὀνομαστήν τὴν τόλμαν ἡ μὲν ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς στρατεία

16

ἡ δὲ ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς στρατεία τὴν μὲν τόλμαν εἶχεν ὀνομαστήν

Helma Dik (Word Order Tragic Dialogue p38):
setting —> topic —> focus —> verb —> remainder

ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς limits στρατεία which is the topic. τὴν τόλμαν is focus. εἶχεν has no particular (neutral) salience. Not sure what to do with ὀνομαστήν. Possible focus constituent since it doesn’t have an article.

17

What’s exactly the difference between topic and focus? I’m sure I have read about that but I don’t remember. Can you give an example in English?

One more reformulation:
ὀνομαστήν δ᾽ εἶχεν ἡ ἐπὶ τοὺς Βρεττανοὺς στρατεία τὴν μὲν τόλμαν

Does this topicalize ὀνομαστήν?

18

I don’t think so. Fronting ὀνομαστήν would give it marked salience but wouldn’t make it the topic. The topic is defined differently by various practitioners. In a sentence like this from Plutarch the topic is the subject of the verb. It might be thought of as the entity about which the sentence makes a predication. But not all would agree with that.

19

I took ὀνομαστήν to simply be an adjective qualifying τόλμαν as in notable courage

topic would be the thing already mentioned or at least understood while the focus is the new stuff.
The British expedition hasn’t been mentioned before but in the previous line he talks about Caesar’s crossing the Rhine into Germany so, I guess, expeditions sre the theme and hence the British expedition as an example of the same is the topic while the focus is the courage that makes this expedition special.
Does that sound right?

20

Ah. Would ὀνομαστήν be the focus then?

I’d translate “Celebrated (indeed) was the daring of the expedition against the Britons.”