What Language Was Latin For The Greeks?

Textkit Community Civilization and Culture of the Greeks and Romans
1

As everyone knows, for centuries in the post-Roman West, the study of Latin grammar was considered essential as the foundation of the Seven Liberal Arts. Of course it is unnecessary to go into the detail of why, except to say that the study of a foreign language was considered necessary in order for a student to properly learn how grammar works, since the study of the grammar of your native language was too easy and so the student wouldn’t grasp it. Latin was the obvious choice for many reasons.

That begs the question, to which we already know the answer: what language did the Romans study to get that benefit? Of course they studied Greek.

By now you may already have figured out where this is leading, because that answer begs another question: What language did the Greeks study? Was the study of a foreign language part of Greek education, and if so, what language(s) did they study? Or did they just study Greek Grammar?

2

Maybe nothing like for the Americans? :smiley:

3

Ha! you’re over-estimating how many people back then underwent anything like a course of study. There are essentially two elements to the answer.

i) Bilingualism was common in the ancient word and how a lot of specific encoded information was passed from one culture to another. But this didn’t necessarily take a formal angle. No one really sat down as read the Akkadian Classics though we know of Greeks with access to such information.

ii) Grammatical study was rather rare and by the time it became in anyway common the Greek of the texts was sufficiently differentiated from the Greek of even educated speakers so as to make it challenging enough. Most work took the form of scholia on texts or dictionaries, grammar lagging somewhat behind.

So basically, yes they studied their own language and not a Latin equivalent but it was hardly native either.

4

Persian would have been the logical choice.

Also, to a limited extent Homeric Greek would have served that function. It at least taught Athenians about morphological change.

5

No it wouldn’t, Persian was spoken by actual Persians and perhaps understood with a little difficulty by other western Iranian speakers but the languages of administration were Aramaic, Akkadian and Elamite which would have made sense. Herodotus’ famous blunder of confusing the word for “companions” (which, ironically, the Macedonians under much Persian influence got right) with “immortal” clearly stems from a mix up in spoken Persian. But that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that he was much good in it or it was widespread. Especially because he had connections through the Carian Royal Family, right? So when Plutarch or whoever claims that Thucydides went and learnt Persian we should probably substitute that for some other language. Meh that entire episode smacks of typical nonsense anyway.

I dare say Homeric Greek could have served that function well, but honestly within the later Greek world people often over-estimate the concentration on Homer. It was too far different for all but a group of specialists and so concentration on what we call “Classical” Greek was enough for most people. But, guys, don’t forget that literacy and study were not the norm and the overwhelming cases of bi-lingualism were from intermarriage, trading and other social contact.

6

Thank you, Scibo. Actually, I wasn’t overestimating the number, as I was aware that it was mostly elites who got what we might call a formal education, and I’m not sure that it would have been all that formal in the modern sense anyway.

The first element of your answer is something that I had already assumed without knowing for certain, but it stood to reason, since many Greeks were merchants, sailors, soldiers, and mercenaries. I almost included a speculation on that idea in the original question but dropped it for brevity’s sake. I’m glad you brought it up since it provides confirmation.

The second element in your answer is quite interesting. I didn’t think of it. Greek has changed much more slowly over time than English, thus, classical Greek stands roughly in the same relationship to modern Greek as Elizabethan English does to modern English, and so I assumed that Homeric couldn’t be all that different from Classical. Perhaps I should break open an Homeric grammar some time.

So Homeric could play the part instead of a foreign language. That makes perfect sense, since Old English or Middle English could do it for modern English speakers.

Markos, I agree that Persian would have been logical. I was thinking Phoenician, Egyptian, or Akkadian. On the other hand, Persian, Egyptian and Akkadian might have been a little much because of the writing systems. I would have bet on Phoenician because at least it was alphabetical.

7

“Greek has changed much more slowly over time than English, thus, classical Greek stands roughly in the same relationship to modern Greek as Elizabethan English does to modern English”

No that’s one of those tedious internet facts and the kind of stuff one finds on the lips of ignorant Greek nationalists. The two aren’t even in the same ball-park. I’m pretty sure that’s even came up here a few times…It’s not even vaguely true.

As for the other languages, I repeat that Old Persian is not at all logical for the reasons I give above. It was highly restricted in usage throughout the Achaemenid Empire. If it wasn’t, we’d actually have basic things like full verbal morphology (we don’t). Tolman’s lexicon and inscription is available online for free if you’re curious about the language.

As for those other languages, we don’t have real evidence for direct Greek engagement with those literary cultures but we have several examples of information/literature originally encoded in those languages making their way into Greek. Actually the most interesting examples for modern students would be Berossos (maybe the Babylonian priest Bēl-rē’ušunu) and Manetho (Egyptian priest).

8

Your argument seems to be that since the Romans studied Greek, a parallel phenomenon almost certainly occurred with the Greeks, and they likewise studied some foreign language with a longer history than their own. Wouldn’t it be more logical to gather what evidence there is in the first place for any second-language study among the Greeks before permitting yourself to theorise about what that second language might have been?

9

Actually, I wasn’t assuming any such thing. I simply wanted to find out whether or not they did, and rather doubted it to begin with. Perhaps my question was misleading in the way that it was worded so that one might assume that I thought a parallel case existed, but then you can’t always think of everything when you ask a question.

10

Scribo, I said that the Greek language had changed that slowly because I had read it years ago in a book written by a linguist sometime during the late 30’s or early 40’s, and had seen it repeated elsewhere since then, in books and on the internet, but not on websites connected with Greek nationalists. Even so, it is easy to understand how such ideas can work their way even into books written by otherwise knowledgeable people. Propaganda invades every field of knowledge to some degree or other. You are the first person who has ever told me that Greek hasn’t changed that slowly. I had never really given it much thought, but I believed it because of the slow rate of change in Icelandic, which at least proves the possibility of such slow linguistic change, but I always thought it rather strange that Greek would change so slowly considering Greece’s total lack of geographic isolation and all the invasions, trade networks, etc.

Is there a good source from which can one find out how the Greek language has changed over time?

Lastly, you write as if you were a scholar. Are you a professor, perhaps a classical scholar or a philologist?

11

Nope not a professor, sorry, though all my hithero academic training has been in Classics.

It’s interesting you point out propaganda, and it kind of is nowadays, but I think the myth of conservatism partially arose out of indifference! If you look at manuals of “modern” Greek from the 10’s and 20’s you’ll see very little ancient there. Classically educated Europeans were keen to speak Greek and Greeks in the diaspora were presenting as Classicised a version of Greek as they could get away with. There’s a lot of interesting intellectual history here actually. Suffice to say when these people went to Greece they couldn’t actually speak with actual Greeks lol.

The problem is the sense of “conservatism”, conservative in what? there are several facets to each language (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon - semantics thereof, etc) and no language is going to be equally conservative across ALL. Greek is impressively conservative in the sense that it hasn’t broken up into differing languages - yet even so pre-modern dialects are quite different! Tsakonion, living Doric, has θ as Σ and η pronounced like ε (contra modern Greek ι) and υ as ου where standard as ι again. Romeika in Turkey has an infinitive, Pontic is morphologically more complex and hasn’t been as iotacised etc etc. Even so we haven’t seen the level of break up which gave rise to the Romance languages.

“but I always thought it rather strange that Greek would change so slowly considering Greece’s total lack of geographic isolation and all the invasions, trade networks, etc.”

This is key! Honestly most Classicists are bloody clueless of the early middle ages onwards, the foreign element in Greece was very…prominent, but are ignored by wishy washy thinking.

So if you briefly sketch out changes from ancient to modern. You have phonology (which I shan’t cover, well known), the loss of dative (which means no verbs with dative etc), the loss of several third declensional noun classes save very literary Greek (but again Pontic has retained some), the lack of participles (one of the defining features in ancient Greek syntax, we only have a few left and they’re not productive), athematic verbs, infinitives, optative mood, subjunctive mood (να + verb isn’t really a proper subjunctive), the particles, several clausal markers have been list or assimilated etc I could go on but I’m actually bored of this list. That is a huge ass list and the difference between Modern and Elizabethan English isn’t a fraction of that (which is largely a productive of orthography outside of the vowel shifting).

A lot of the so called conservatism, then, is a product of everyone learning ancient Greek and propaganda.

There are several good sources. The best for post-classical Greek is definitely Geoff Horrock’s “A History of Greek and Its Speakers” which has, thankfully, finally came out in paperback form. As an undergraduate I had to fight to get hold of this book, it’s the best book in any language on such a topic and translations will apear most surely. There’s been a Greek one for a few years and I’m sure more will follow. Other than that, I always recommend the Blackwell Companion to Ancient Greek Language here because it has some bloody good articles, especially the one on phonology (though it pales in comparison to its Latin cousin, alas).

Btw it’s interesting you mention Icelandic. I’ve always thought it was hyper-conservative though, but I’ve recently been told by a friend (who is a Germanic Philologist) that actually this conservatism is recent, that there was a deliberate purging of the language a while back and thus it’s not natural conservatism. I had NO idea this could be successfully done. Honestly, clawing my way through the Volsung saga very slowly…I’m envious that they get such a head start.

Sorry we’ve sort of veered off topic, but to bring us back may I just say that these changes were precisely the reason why Greeks studied their own language and got similar benefits to Romans learning Greek.

12

Well a certain single-mindedness was evident in the thread title for a start: “What was Latin for the Greeks?” You did qualify this at the end of your first post by asking “Was the study of a foreign language part of Greek education?” but then at the end of your next post you began again on the original tack, discussing Persian and Phoenician as theoretical second languages, without offering any evidence that either language was actually studied by the Greeks.
I’m sorry if you feel unfairly criticised for your approach, but the question that preoccupies you can only be answered by the discovery of supporting evidence, not by speculation as to what would be “logical” or what it would be fair to “bet on”.
Classical scholarship and Ancient History have been bedevilled over the years by speculation on all sorts of matters. Rigorous scholarship surely starts with being rigorous with ourselves, acknowledging the limits of what is currently known, and working from there towards insights which, if small, will at least have a sure foundation.

13

Scribo, people have been trying to convince me to read Robert Browning’s Medieval and Modern Greek, but it isn’t that easy to get a hold of it; are you familiar with that one? If you are, is it comparable to Horrock’s?

14

I can imagine it might be quite difficult to get hold of nowadays, though I always see second hand copies in stores. I haven’t read it since 2008 and only flicked through it since. It’s ok. Often where it claims we don’t know or don’t have enough information, the intervening decades have made clearer. It’s very…condensed, treating HUGE periods in a single chapter (iirc, one “Hellenistic and Roman Greek”!! another “600-1100 a.d”!), but that is an evil of the format. It can be hard to follow because of this. Generally the more modern it gets the better it is, the medieval bits are quite illuminating.

It’s not really comparable to Horrocks. Horrocks is by its nature dedicated more to post-classical Greek but it still begins with PIE, so that is a plus. Horrocks also gives lengthy examples where Browning will give brief summaries due to space. I mean Horrocks isn’t ever going to replace specific studies of phenomena, times and spaces, but for a general account it rules the roost.

EDIT: BTW going back to the title, we’re forgetting the fact that many Greek speakers also learnt Latin. There was an effected snobbery during the second sophistic towards Latin literature, but later Greek has A LOT of Latin loanwords for many objects and concepts (for example, king, ΡΗΓΑΣ from REX) and borrows whole-sale things like Roman law, rhetoric, administration titles. Technical literature becomes dominated with Latin. As to the literary influence of Latin, well that’s one of those incipient areas that we’ll know more about in a few years.

15

As should have been obvious, the title was meant to be purely whimsical, as are many titles of many posts by many posters on this forum. I would have thought you could have figured that out. After all, this is an informal forum, not a journal of scholarly research, and in any case I am no scholar and thus I am very unlikely to pollute the scholarly world with nonsense. Therefore I don’t need that lecture. I’m not sure why you even wish to argue about it, as I have better things to do, and any more posts of this nature from you will be ignored.

16

Thank you very much, Scribo. I will check out Horrock and the Blackwell Companion.

I wasn’t aware of that purging of Icelandic, but it is very interesting. It brings to mind some of the changes that were introduced into Dutch and Norwegian in the early 20th century, but I don’t know that much about them, except that they seem to have been attempts to make Dutch more different from German, and Norwegian more different from Swedish, but I believe these were more orthographic changes than anything else. There is also the case of Webster’s changes in English orthography in America, a phenomenon which was politically based, and was resisted by some people in the Mid-Atlantic and Southern states, including some prominent writers (William Faulkner for one), up until the 1920’s.

Speaking of the issue of Classically educated Europeans wanting to speak Greek and Greeks presenting as classicised a version of Greek as the could get away with, how about that problem the Greeks had during the war of independence, when they had to decide whether to present themselves to west Europeans as classical Greeks or as Byzantine Romans? Were they going to have a Roman restoration or a Greek republic? Now that’s an identity crisis I would never wish on anyone.

17



These ones grabbed my attention. I’m assuming that epoch and phenomenon gets a paragraph or two in case I manage to get my hands on the Horrock, right, Scribo?

Also, JC, do you happen to know where I could go to learn more about that Greek national Greco-Roman identity crisis of the XIX century?

Thanks a lot to both of you—

18

Hi, I can answer both but first off. Cicero, I know right? I had no idea about Icelandic and I had sort of had it drilled into me by my professors that it’s hyper conservative (who were, to be fair, Classicists not Germanicists) so I was surprised to hear from someone in the field. It is still the most conservative Germanic language, but still. I had no idea about the American spelling problem, I had assumed it had just naturally evolved like that, mutually divergent.

Right, modern Greek both as language and identity thing. Well Greece itself used to have a few good scholars on this but…well funding is low. Nor is the atmosphere still conducive to re-visiting national history - there was a wonderful documentary done a while back re-appraising the Tukric dominion. It was wonderful but drew a lot of ire, I mean serious complaints. (You can watch on Youtube but you’ll need Greek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwRaAFlGROE ). Anyway all that good stuff is in Greek, we want English.

So to answer your question you CAN find this stuff in Horrocks, naturally. But as I said Horrocks is meant to be a lengthy over view, not detailed on any particular area, so if you’ve already identified the era you want (and you have, modern) and don’t necessarily want philological (you don’t, you want socio-linguistic) you had best go to a more specific source. One of the best starting points is Peter Mackridge’s article “The Heritages of the Modern Greeks”. If you Google title + name it takes you to one of his websites where you can download it, so I’ve saved you that hassle. In general his work is good.

Also when it comes to the war of independence, bear in mind there was a large difference between the indigenous Greeks - hardy, hardcore, heirs of Constantine and the diaspora - foppish, weak-wristed fools. It was the latter who really pushed the “Ancient Hellenic” viewpoint. I think Mackridge talks more about this but in somewhat more dulcet terms. There’s a lot of work to be done in these areas, too.

Also I think this thread was actually interesting, however “whimsical” it may have been, these things always tighten up during discussion anyway. Which is the point.

19

Even internet forums very rarely provide an absolutely smooth bed for our vanity to lie down in. If your own vanity is as easily offended as this then there’s not much hope for you anywhere. I’d consider it a blessing if you did ignore me; overreactions as disproportionate as yours betoken a level of insecurity that may be unsafe to get too close to.

20

That bit of data, Sribo, I did not know. εὐχαριστῶ. Interesting. Some British Erasmians also conflate η and ε, and many continental Erasmians do this only in closed syllables. Purists of various sorts (including some Native Greeks :smiley: ) tend to object strongly, but it interesting to note the case of Tsakonion shows that this is only selectively “inauthentic.”