Zuntz: Lesson 5

Greek Learning Greek
1

Χαίρετε!

As before, I’m posting the exercises from Zuntz and would be grateful for someone to take a look at it. :slight_smile:


3. Translation English - Greek

a) Menschen sind politische Wesen.
Humans are political animals.
Οἱ ἄνθρωποι ζῷα πολιτικά ἐστιν.

b) Die Bücher sind zehn Obolen wert.
The books are worth ten obols.
Τὰ βιβλία δέκα ὀβολῶν ἐστιν.

c) Du gibst vor, gerecht (gut) zu sein, aber in Wahrheit bist du schlecht (im Wort, … in der Tat).
You claim to be just (good), but in fact you are bad.
Λόγῳ μὲν χρηστὸς εἶ, ἔργῳ δὲ κακός.

d) Man muss lernen, was gut ist (das Gute lernen).
One must learn what is good (the good).
Χρὴ μανθάνειν τὰ καλά.

e) Man darf nicht sagen, was schlecht ist (das Schlechte sagen).
It must not be said what is bad (the bad).
Οὐ χρὴ λέγειν τὰ κακά.

f) Phoebus wird dich befreien (lösen).
Phoebus will set you free (loose).
Φοῖβός σε λύσει.

g) Ihr werdet den Barbaren nicht [als Sklaven] dienen.
You will not serve the barbarians [as slaves].
Οὐ δουλεύσετε τοῖς βαρβάροις.

h) Was wird er sagen?
What will he say?
Τί λέξει;

i) Die Kinder werden das Beste (Neutr. Plur.) sagen.
The children will say the best (neutr. pl.).
Τὰ τέκνα λέξουσιν τὰ ἄριστα.

j) Die Taten schlechter Menschen sind schlecht.
The deeds of bad people are bad.
Τὰ τῶν κακῶν ἀνθρώπων ἔργα κακά.

k) Im Vergleich zu den anderen Lebewesen lebt der Mensch wie ein Gott.
Compared to other beings man lives like a God.
Παρὰ τὰ ἄλλα ζῷα ὁ ἄνθρωπος ὥσπερ θεὸς βιοτεύει.

4. Translation Greek - English

I A4 Ἄριστον ἐν τῶι κόσμωι ἄνθρωπός ἐστιν.
Das Nobelste auf der Welt ist der Mensch.
Man is the noblest thing in the world.

B4 Χαῖρ’, ὦ τέκνον.
Freu dich, Kind. / Sei gegrüßt, Kind.
Rejoice, child. / Hello, child.

E1 Φέρε δῶρον θεῶι.
Bring dem Gott ein Geschenk!
Bring a gift for the god!

F2 Τοῦτο οὐ λόγος ἀλλ’ ἔργον ἤδη.
Das ist nicht (nur) Gerede, sondern schon eine Tat.
This is not (mere) talk, but already action.

II A3 Τίς θεὸς λύσει με;
Welcher Gott wird mich befreien?
Which god will set me free?

B2 Βαρβάροις οὐ δουλεύσομεν.
Wir werden den Barbaren nicht als Sklaven dienen.
We will not serve the barbarians as slaves.

C2 Ἐπεὶ λέγειν χρή, λέξω.
Wenn es nötig ist zu sprechen, werde ich sprechen.
When it is necessary to speak, I will speak.

C4 Χρὴ λέγειν τὰ καλά.
Man muss Gutes sagen.
One must say good things.

C5 Ἀκούετε· ἤδη γὰρ λέξομεν.
Hört zu, denn wir werden eben jetzt sprechen.
Listen, for we are about to speak now.

2

Looks fine to me.

A few somewhat pedantic points.

I think it’s best to avoid “barbarian” with its pejorative overtones and use “foreigners”. At least one should consciously make a choice between the two. I know “foreigners” has pejorative overtones too but sometimes in Greek texts it doesn’t.

In ὦ τέκνον I am sure you know that τέκνον is vocative. You could indicate that by the somewhat clumsy “O Child”.

Ἀκούετε· ἤδη γὰρ λέξομεν. It is easy to drop into the habit of always translating γὰρ as “for”. Varying it is a good habit to get into. “Because” works here and “for” is not very idiomatic. It could also be omitted.

I am obviously not qualified to comment on your German. :smiley:

3

Subject/verb disagreement in 3a and 3i. (Though, if die Kinder are considered specifically as individuals, it could take a plural verb.)

4B2 inserts an article (EDIT: and 4E1)

4

Χαίρετε!

Thank you for your answers, very much appreciated!

Good point. Barbarian does sound weird at times.

I was thinking about this. But when I say “Hello, child”, I’m directly addressing that child, aren’t I? And isn’t that what the vocative with ὦ is telling me? If I translate it as “o child” I’m giving it a somewhat antiquated off-flavor that the original probably doesn’t convey and that you rightly criticized when I chose the somewhat clumsy “for” in that other sentence. And at least what I recall from Dickey’s chapter on ὦ, it’s not really clear that it had a distinct meaning as compared to the vocative without it. But I would have to re-read this chapter before making bold claims…

It tends to be better than the English at least :slight_smile:


It’s so easy to overlook these things, thank you. The sentence in 3a gave me pause, though. I did some research because I had a feeling that there would be at least the possibility of some kind of attraction of congruence in Greek, and (of course) there is. Of course, the present example is just an error on my side, but I’m curious: Kühner-Gerth I, §369 b) informs us that in such sentences with a copula the verb can agree with the closer predicate noun rather than the subject. The examples given are nothing like this little sentence here, but does anyone know if there is an instance of a similar case, i.e. where the verb agrees with the acc. pl. n. of the predicate noun instead of the subject?

(I would have liked to link to an English resource, but I can’t seem to find my way around Smyth…)

4B2: Yes, you’re right that article can go.

But to me 4E1 is trickier in this respect. If I say “Bring a gift for god.”, this sounds very Christian to me even if there’s no capital G, and that would distort the meaning. If I say “Bring a gift to/for a god.”, isn’t that more like φέρε δῶρον θεῷ τινι? It’s a subtle point, but does the missing article in the Greek sentence preclude the possibility that the speaker has a specific god in mind?

5

You’ll notice that Zuntz uses Christian examples as well as classical. 4E1 strikes me as a Christian one. The pagan Greeks did use singular θεος without the article in a general sense, but this seems specific. It might be worth a dive into the LSJ on it though. (Be careful of epic examples though, which have no article.)

I believe that 3a is giving you pause mostly because of barbarian language interference. EDIT: (Kühner’s examples are actually pretty spot on, now that I read them. I don’t actually know which would be more regular and which would be the exception. Here’s what I would have thought was more normal, from Plato’s Symposium: ὅσοι δὲ ἄρρενος τμῆμά εἰσι, τὰ ἄρρενα διώκουσι)

6

If I were to heed Dickey’s admonition that ὦ amongst all the modes of address receives more attention than it deserves I perhaps shouldn’t be replying. Although she says that a search for a [comprehensive] meaning of ὦ is “probably futile”, she also says that some authors, at least, have a more or less consistent approach to its use.

We should not elide the difficulties of interpretation with problems in translation, although of course the former is implicated in the later. What makes “o child” sound “odd” is little to do with it being “antiquated”, it is more a question of register. “O” occurs in any poem or speech which requires an apostrophe. It might sound out of place in everyday conversation except perhaps if it were meant satirically. So just as with all the other points about translation that I made in my first post how you translate should be based on a choice dictated by context. These short sentences unfortunately reveal few clues about their context. I drew your attention to your omission because at an elementary stage of learning Greek I think it would be best to include it.

This leads me to wonder why you are working your way through this book as you are clearly not a beginning student? No need to explain your choices, it is sufficient reason that you want to. Also it was a stimulus for me to look again at Dickey which is no bad thing. :smiley:

7

Hm, if there is any problem with this sentence, it’s just the missing context. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much to discuss I think. :slight_smile:

Given that the more appropriate translation: Οἱ ἄνθρωποι ζῷα πολιτικά εἰσιν., is also what most barbarian languages that I know would have in some way or another, I’m not sure if there’s interference. It’s more curiosty if the accidental mistake could actually be found in some examples in the wild and not be ungrammatical after all. But so far, I haven’t seen an example with an animate plural subject (m/f), a plural neuter predicate noun, and the verb agreeing with the pl. neuter rather than the subject. From what I’ve found so far, Οἱ ἄνθρωποι ζῷα πολιτικά ἐστιν. is not very idiomatic Greek.

Then we wouldn’t have this interesting discussion and that would be a pity!

Fair point! Register is indeed key here. Those little prose sentences on their own didn’t put me in a very poetic mood. And it’s a bit funny, I decided against putting the o in the translation because I wanted it to not look like the typical beginner’s translation but something I would actually write. :smiley:

This seems to cause a fair amount of confusion. But it’s very simple. I hadn’t read any Greek in a long time and only the first lockdown in March brought me back to it. I still know my way around some of the secondary literature but when I’m sitting in front of the primary texts, there show glaring deficiencies. So I decided to do something about it and work with the two courses I had long been wanting to try (Zuntz and the Italian Athenaze). So far, it’s been fun and as we see, some interesting discussions arise from those little sentences. That’s something I enjoy a lot. :smiley:

8

See from your Kühner example, αἱ Θῆβαι Αἴγυπτος ἐκαλέετο. I would have thought that’s very close to what is happening here. If there is any exception to the normal rules of agreement, it will have to be something like the exception that Kühner describes, and would include include neuter plurals along with anything else. The real question is how regular such an exception is. Asking to see it specifically with a particular gender and particular number is being over-particular. But it’s an easy enough TLG search, and here is Herodotus to oblige us: γενεαὶ γὰρ τρεῖς ἀνδρῶν ἑκατὸν ἔτεά ἐστι.

And the barbarian language interference that I was thinking of was Latin (according to Kühner’s footnote).

9

I think there’s a mistake in the first two translations into Greek.

a)Οἱ ἄνθρωποι ζῷα πολιτικά ἐστιν. It’s the third-person plural, therefore, Οἱ ἄνθρωποι ζῷα πολιτικά εἰσίν

b) Τὰ βιβλία δέκα ὀβολῶν ἐστιν. Same thing: Τὰ βιβλία δέκα ὀβολῶν εἰσίν

10

No, you are forgetting the “neuter plural rule,” that neuter plural nouns in Greek frequently take the singular verb. When the reference is specifically to people, then you sometimes see the plural verb, but not always. So these are not errors.

11

Both of you have missed the entire thread on the first…

12

Ups… Sorry! I saw it now :smiley:

I’ve had a long break from studying Greek anyway, I have to go study my grammar all over again hehehe

13

Οἱ ἄνθρωποι ζῷα πολιτικά ἐστιν looks highly irregular to me. I’d say it’s unacceptable.

(Just glancing through the avalanche of posts here γενεαὶ γὰρ τρεῖς ἀνδρῶν ἑκατὸν ἔτεά ἐστι stands out, but that’s hardly comparable. In English too we would use “is.”)

14

The Herodotus line and Google brought me to an English discussion: Gildersleeve Syntax 124.

15

It seems to me that for a) you could use a generic ὁ ἄνθρωπος . In translating, you want to reproduce the content and style of the original; there’s no need to copy the grammar and syntax, if that were even possible in another language.

Of course these are not real texts, and Zuntz had no message to convey; he only meant to help you learn grammar.

16

What would be acceptable? Here’s what Aristotle actually wrote:

ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον… (Ar.Pol. 1253a) (with ἐστιν understood from context).

So how would you write the sentence “Men are political animals?”

17

Joel, That’s an instructive assemblage, esp. the Hdt. excerpts.
Zembei, I don’t see that Οἱ ἄνθρωποι ζῷα πολιτικά ἐστιν will help anyone learn grammar!
Barry, That’s an easy one. Οἱ ἄνθρωποι ζῷα πολιτικά εισιν. Or οἱ ανδρες of course!

18

In the discussion linked by Joel, Gildersleeve gives an English example "The wages of sin is death.” I’m not a native speaker of English, but this seems to be a rather special case, we should certainly conclude that in English the copula typically agrees with the predicate.

“I are many things.”
“They is an army.”

Would anyone call these grammatical in English? What Gildersleeve gives as examples are special exceptions, they should not be generalized to mean that in Greek the copula typically agrees with the predicate. (I would have liked G. to give an explanation for these exceptions. I can guess for some of them, but not all.) The general rule for Greek is that the verb agrees with subject, except that if the subject is neuter plural, the verb is usually in the singular. Anything beyond that is not very helpful if we’re trying to learn basic grammar!

19

I thought about doing such a search with TLG myself but concluded I wouldn’t be able to find what I want. In a less busy moment you have to tell me how you did it :smiley:

That was clear from the beginning. But at least in my opinion, the rather terrifying beauty of Greek is that it has so many surprises for the unsuspecting reader that go beyond the simple and the basic. :slight_smile:

20

„Anthropos physei politikon zoon“. Wir übersetzen gemeinhin: „Der Mensch ist von Natur aus ein politisches Wesen“.

found at

So what happens when “der Mensch” becomes Menschen?