Dictionary Updates: Kriaras, Vol. XVII; Trapp, Fasc. VII

New volumes of Kriaras' and Trapp's dictionaries of Greek are out. Kriaras covers Vernacular Early Modern Greek, and Trapp covers (mostly learnèd) Late Mediaeval Greek, with some overlap. For background on these dictionaries—and on the coverages of the dictionaries of Greek in general—see my earlier post on Dictionary coverage of Greek.

Trapp's Dictionary, Fascicle 7 of 8, runs from right after προσπελαγίζω to the end of sigma. Currently it is available only in electronic form, from the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press; a print edition is expected in a month or so. As the linked blurb notes, Trapp has not ruled vernacular texts out of scope (and is more inclusive of non-literary texts than Kriaras); it is addressing the delay in the completion of Kriaras by using already published word lists of Early Modern Greek, to give indicative coverage. Trapp is also including words from later papyri; while its brief is ostensively late mediaeval, it does look backwards as well, given the gaps in lexicography.


Kriaras' Dictionary, Vol. 17 of an expected (20?) covers πνεύσις through προβίβασις. The volume is already available in online bookstores—I've just ordered it from Patakis. The announcement linked from the Greek Language Gateway (Πύλη για την ελληνική γλώσσα) notes that the volume will be made available online by them as well, as part of Emmanuel Kriaras' Collected Works. Vol 17 isn't up, but the others are, as scans (in the kind of page-by-page interface that makes me relieved to have paper copies :-) ). The abridged dictionary, covering the first 14 volumes, is also online in a searchable interface, through the Electronic Node (Ηλεκτρονικός Κόμβος) site—both from the Centre for the Greek Language.

ἐκαληθεύω: an ill-fitting prefix in Choeroboscus

The prepositions of Ancient Greek, which were also used as verbal prefixes, had a rich and subtle semantics. As is the doom of all linguistic subtleties, the system has not survived, and the couple of dozen prefixes of antiquity have collapsed to a handful in the modern vernacular.

(How does Nikos Sarantakos put it? Οι όμορφες διακρίσεις όμορφα καίγονται. Nice distinctions burn down nicely.)

The phonology of the prefixes, on the other hand, was the same as that of prepositions used as distinct words. This phonology was not particularly subtle, but it did have rules, which made sense in ancient phonology—although some prepositions dodged them. These rules have not survived into their much-attenuated modern vernacular counterparts.

The first rule is Elision: if a preposition ends in a vowel, that vowel is lost before another vowel. So μετα-μορφῶ /meta-morpʰɔ̂ː/ "I transform", but μετ-εμόρφωσα /met-emórpʰosa/ "I transformed"; ἀντί-θεσις /antí-tʰesis/ "opposition" but ἀντ-αλλαγή /ant-allaɡɛ́ː/ "exhcange", ἐπὶ τόπου /epì tópu/ "on the spot" but ἐπ’ ἀγροῦ /ep aɡrû/ "in the country". A couple of prepositions never followed that rule: περί, πρό, and in later Greek ἀμφί.

The elision rule persisted for the rest in learnèd Greek, and indeed in 19th and early 20th century coinages: μετεκλογικός "post-election", μεταπελευθερωτικός "post-liberation" (World War II). But it was abandoned in the vernacular's prefixes (whose meaning has changed a lot):

Ancient	Modern
μετ-εῖπον /met-eîpon/ "I spoke amongst"	ματα-είπα /mata-ˈipa/ "I said again"
παρ-έτρωγον /par-étrɔːɡon/ "I nibbled"	παρα-έτρωγα /para-ˈetroɣa/ "I was over-eating"
ἐξ-ίδρωσα /eks-ídrɔːsa/ "I perspired"	ξε-ΐδωρσα /kse-ˈiðrosa/ "I stopped sweating"
ἐξαν-έρχομαι /eksan-érkʰomai/ "I come forth from"	ξανα-έρχομαι /ksana-ˈerxome/ "I come again"

If anything, its the next vowel which can get deleted in Modern Greek: ξαναέκανα or ξανάκανα /ksana-ˈekana ~ ksaˈna-kana/ "I did again". And contemporary coinages, however well-educated, also no longer bother with elision.

• "Anti-national", which was coined in 1825, has elision: αντ-εθνικός. Usage has respected this: 9400 instances in Google of αντεθνικός vs. 93 of unelided αντιεθνικός. (Not least because the word got a lot of use out of the Colonels' regime.)
  
• "Anti-nationalist" on the other hand is very much a 20th century notion, and accordingly it lacks elision: αντι-εθνικιστικός (Google: 8:760).
  
• The World War II coinage "post-liberation" has elision, μετ-απελευθερωτικός (Google count: 9:1)
  
• But the Google count for "post-colonial" is 5:40 against elision, μετα-αποικιακός.

The second rule is aspiration: if a prefix ends in an unaspirated stop (once its vowel is lost), and it goes in front of a rough breathing, it becomes aspirated. In Ancient phonology, while /h/ existed, that is just common sense:

• μετά + ἐμόρφωσε /metá + emórpʰɔːse/ > μετ-εμόρφωσε /met-emórpʰɔːse/
  
• μετά + ἵστημι /metá + hístɛːmi/ > /met-hístɛːmi/ > μεθ-ίστημι /metʰ-ístɛːmi/
  
• ἀπό + ἄνθρωπος /apó + ántʰrɔːpos/ > ἀπ-άνθρωπος /ap-ántʰrɔːpos/
  
• ἀπό + ἥλιος /apó + hɛ́ːlios/ > /ap-hɛ́ːlion/ > ἀφήλιον /apʰ-ɛ́ːlion/
  
• ἐπὶ αὐτοῦ /epì autû/ > ἐπ’ αὐτοῦ /ep autû/
  
• ἐπὶ ἡμῖν /epì hɛːmîn/ > /ep hɛːmîn/ > ἐφ’ ἡμῖν /epʰ hɛːmîn/

The aspiration is concealed somewhat in the alphabet, because /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ are written as single letters, <φ θ χ>. But writing /met-hístɛːmi/ as μεθ-ίστημι is exactly what you'd expect to write using the Ancient Greek alphabet—so long as <θ> is pronounced something like /t-h/.

By the time of Christ, initial /h/ has disappeared, and /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ were on the way to their modern pronunciations as /f θ x/. So aspiration was no longer phonological common sense; it was becoming orthographic voodoo.

If a compound had survived from antiquity into your spoken language, you kept pronouncing it as an aspirated compound, even if you could no longer take it apart. That's how ἀφίημι /apʰíɛːmi/ < /apó + híɛːmi/ "I let" has ended up, after much analogical reformulation, as Modern αφήνω: noone would even begin to think of prying /af-/ apart from /-ino/, because there is no such verb as /-ino/. If you were making up new compounds in the vernacular, the fact that there used to be an /h/ there is meaningless. In any case, with elision gone for prepositional prefixes, you wouldn't get the chance to apply aspiration.

If you were writing in learnèd Greek, on the other hand, you still tried to apply aspiration to your compounds. But applying aspiration has now became a matter of rote memorisation: you had to remember which words used to start with an /h/ (and were still written with a rough breathing), and you would switch the final consonant of the prefix because the grammar books said so, not because changing a /p/ into an /f/ made any phonological sense to you. Because the spelling of Greek also retained rough breathings, correct spelling in polytonic Greek involved memorising tables of words starting with rough breathings—as everyone educated in Greece before 1981 still remembers.

Your correspondent is among the youngest people alive to whom ᾅδης ἅγιος ἁγνός "Hades, holy, pure" rings a bell. Or at least, he should be; but moral panic has brought the teaching of Ancient Greek forward; so "Hades, holy, pure" have now merely shifted from primary to secondary education.

So aspiration was a rule of Ancient Greek, that made no sense in the native language of the people still writing in Ancient Greek. That provides an opportunity for the rule to break down: for those writers to forget to aspirate their prefixes.

There are occasional such instances in Byzantium; and they are brought up in polemics against the polytonic. (Nikos Sarantakos in the linked piece cites ἀντυπουργήσειν in Constantine Porphyrogenitus and ἀντυπενεχθείσας in Gregory of Nyssa.)

One of the only linguistic arguments made for polytonic accentuation is that it enables you to do correct aspiration in compounds. The counterargument is that noone is using aspiration in compounding any more: peals of laughter would greet *ἀνθηλιακός "sun protection" or *ἀνθισταμινικός "anti-histamine". And if you want to passively make sense of a compound like ἀφήλιον "aphelion", there's little point memorising that ήλιος "sun" takes a rough breathing. It's more useful to deduce the rough breathing of ήλιος from ἀφ-ήλιον—or else, to do your rote memorising of /h/'s where it will have more of a pay off. Like learning English, and picking up Helium and heliocentric from there.

If the Byzantines slipped up in failing to aspirate compounds, we also expect them to do the opposite: to aspirate compounds where there is no justification in Ancient Greek. That is hypercorrection. Hypercorrection happens when speakers are trying to apply a rule in a language variant that is alien to them (such as the formal variant of their language). Speakers can't readily apply the rule, because the conditions of the rule don't make sense in their native version of the language. So they lurch for the more formal-sounding option from the rule, in the hope that it will pay off. English-speakers end up saying "between you and I", because they can't understand why they have to say "it is I" instead of "it's me".

Unsurprisingly, hypercorrect aspiration happens in Byzantine Greek. After all, it happens even now in Greece; Nikos Sarantakos mentions a teacher from Drama Prefecture so confident in his command of Ancient Greek (which he inflicted on primary school students), that he spoke against καθ’ επάγγελμα εκκλησιομάχοι, "professional anticlericalists". That's επάγγελμα, as in ἐπ-άγγελμα /epáɡɡelma/, and the prefix /ep(i)-/ has never begun with an /h/.

Hypercorrection in aspiration does not happen in Byzantine Greek as frequently as I'd expected; I've found maybe a hundred instances in the TLG. But it does happen often enough to show that not everyone was confident about how well they'd memorised their "Hades, holy, pure" tables.

• So when John of Gaza writes καθ’ ἧμαρ "by day" (Anacreontea 6.93), the καθ’ leaves no doubt that he has got the breathing of ἦμαρ wrong. He's trying to sound elevated by using a Homeric word; but he hasn't got the Homeric aspiration to go with it.
  
• When Ephraem the Syrian (or rather, his early Greek translators) write μεθέπειτα instead of μετέπειτα "afterwards" (De paenitentia, Frantzoles p. 81), they are making the same mistake as the teacher from Drama: /ep(i)-/ in /met-ep-eita/ has never begun with an /h/.
  
• When Paul of Aegina writes ἀφ-ουροῦντας "urinating away" (Epitomae medicae, 3.18.5.26), he's forgetting that the word is "urinate", not *"hurinate" (or, given how Ancient Greek relates to Indo-European, *"surinate").

So much for aspiration. Having gone through the rule violations in the TLG corpus, I wondered whether the rule for /ek-/ was also violated. That rule is: Movable /s/: ἐκ /ek/ becomes ἐξ /eks/ in front of a vowel. So ἐκ-βάλλω /ek-bállɔː/ "I throw out" but ἐξέβαλον /eks-ébalon/ "I threw out", ἐκ τοῦτου /ek tûtu/ "from this" but ἐξ αὐτοῦ /eks autû/ "from that".

But what is the likelihood that Byzantine writers would get the rule wrong? For a rule of Ancient Greek to be violated, the conditions for the rule have to be inapplicable to later Greek; that was indeed the case with aspiration, once aspiration had disappeared in the spoken language. Vowels, on the other hand, still existed in later Greek; so the rule for /ek/ going to /eks/ was still learnable by Byzantines, with reference to their spoken language.

The rule itself also needs to have been no longer applied in the vernacular, so that speakers trying to apply it to Ancient Greek could go astray: the vernacular would need to have used /ek/ before vowels as well as consonants (if indeed /ek/ survived at all), for writers to get the /ek ~ eks/ rule wrong in Ancient Greek.

As it turns out, ἐκ as a preposition did survive, in at least some dialects of Greek, as αχ or οχ, before both vowels and consonants. That does suggest that the alternation between /ek/ and /eks/ broke down in some locations, but not that it had globally broken down: most dialects of Greek don't have a reflex of /ek/ at all. The prefix /ek-/ has also survived in the vernacular, again without the alternation of /ek/ and /eks/. But in the vernacular, it's /eks-/, not /ek-/, which is in universal use.

Now that's an odd development: speakers should have a devil of a time trying to pronounce compounds like /eks-vrakono/ "to strip naked, to un-pants" or /eks-xtenizo/ "to tussle hair, to uncomb"; so how did /eks/ end up taking over?

Here's how: with verbs, Modern Greek has always preferred the aorist stem to the present, as the more regular formation. Unlike the present stem, the aorist stem ends in only a few, predictable consonants—mostly /s/. So the present was usually remodelled to line up with the aorist, with a few simple rules. (That's where the Modern language got the idea that as many present stems as possible should end in /n/.)

The beginning of the aorist is regular too: the indicative aorist always began with an augment, which means it always began with a vowel. So while the present tense alternated between /eks-/ and /ek-/, the aorist indicative reliably used /eks-/: ἐκβάλλω :: ἐξέβαλον, ἐκβάλλετε :: ἐξεβάλατε, ἐξαγανακτῶ :: ἐξηγανάκτησα, /ek-bállɔː/ :: /eks-ébalon/, /ek-bállete/ :: /eks-ebálate/, /eks-aganaktɔ̂ː/ :: /eks-ɛːɡanáktɛːsa/.

In Modern Greek, unstressed initial /e/ was dropped; that made unstressed augments optional. So ἐκτένιζα /ekténiza/ "I combed" became χτένιζα /ˈxteniza/, and /eks-ekténiza/ could be metanalysed as /eks-eˈxteniza/ > /ekse-ˈxteniza/. The initial unstressed /e/ of the prefix /eks-/ was also dropped; so the prefix became /kse-/. With its /-e-/ no longer considered an augment, the /kse-/ prefix could be applied to the present as well as the aorist: ξεχτένιζα /kse-ˈxteniza/ "I uncombed", ξεχτενίζω /kse-xteˈnizo/ "I uncomb".

The prefix applies to nominalisations as well as verbs; so learnèd εκκίνηση "starting point" has the vernacular counterpart ξεκίνημα "beginning". The ancient meaning of "movement out of" is retained with older compounds, such as ξεκινώ < ἐκκινέω "to move out from = to set off, to begin". In productive use, though, it usually means undoing an action—like we saw with "uncomb" and "unpants". The prefix even applies to nouns, though in a more ad hoc way; there is an old rebetiko song called Ο Ξεμάγκας, "the un-mangas, someone who has rejected being a mangas". (In particular, giving up on hashish and bouzouki music.)

(You'd think I was looking for excuses to include YouTube videos in linguistics posts, or something...)

So, because /eks-/ survived in the vernacular as /kse-/, we don't have strong evidence that /eks-/ was strange to the vernacular as a prefix, and that speakers would be going vernacular by using /ek/ before a vowel. On the other hand, while /eks-/ survived precisely because it preceded a vowel, it's not like Ancient Greek offered any counterexamples with /ek/ preceding a vowel. So there would be little reason for writers to think that /ek/ before a vowel was a more proper way of writing—i.e. a plausible hypercorrection.

The /ek ~ eks/ alternation may have been on the way out; but any instances of /ek/ before a vowel in Byzantine writing, I conclude, would be infrequent; and they would more likely be thinkos, than harbringers of vernacular influence.

So, I did a search among unrecognised words in the TLG corpus, substituting /eks/ for /ek/. It's a first cut; if Trapp's Lexicon has already registered such compounds with /ek/ before a vowel, such a search would not find them. Nonetheless, while I just predicted that there wouldn't be many instances of /ek/ before a vowel, I was surprised to have found exactly one such instance.

That one instance is from the pen of Leo Choerosphactes. We have already bumped into Leo in this blog, as the target of the rage of Constantine of Rhodes, which resulted in the longest adjectives of Byzantine Greek.

Choerosphactes' instance is from a letter to Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria, with whom Leo was conducting diplomatic negotiations—sometimes from a Bulgarian prison cell. It is a short letter, but it could have been a lot shorter. Apparently, Simeon had sent Leo a letter, in which Simeon wrote an untruth which Leo found more telling than the prosaic truth. In other words, Simeon wrote a joke; and Leo reacts with all the awkward wordiness of someone puzzled at the invention of humour. Or lying.

G. Kolias. 1939. Léon Choerosphactès, magistre, proconsul et patrice; biographie—correspondance (texte et traduction). Texte und Forschungen zur Byzantinisch-Neugriechischen Philologie 31: 77–129. Letter 12.
Τοῦ αὐτοῦ, Συμεὼν ἄρχοντι Βουλγαρίας.
Θαῤῥεῖς πρὸς ἀλήθειαν, ἀρχόντων ὁ ἀληθέστατος, θαῤῥεῖς πρὸς τὰ λίαν ἐπαινετά· θέλεις δὲ καὶ τὸ σὸν οὐχὶ ἐν ἴσῳ τοῦ τῶν ἄλλων πιστεύεσθαι, ναί, καὶ τὴν δοκοῦσαν κατὰ παιδιὰν ἄρνησιν, ὁμοίαν εἶναί τε καὶ νομίζεσθαι τῆς ἑτέρων ἀληθοῦς κατανεύσεως. Δείκνυται οὖν ἡ ἐπιστολὴ ἀληθεύουσα πράγματι, κἂν δοκῇ τῷ γράμματι ψεύδεσθαι, ἵν’ ᾖ ὑπὲρ τὴν τῶν ἄλλων ὑποπτευομένην ἀλήθειαν ἡ σὴ σοφῶς ὑποπαίζουσα καὶ κωμικευομένη ψευδομυθία. Καὶ τοῦτο θαυμαστόν, καὶ τοῦτο γέμον φιλανθρωπίας, ἵνα, εἰ δοκῶν ψεύδεσθαι ἀληθεύεις, ἐκαληθεύοντός σου τίς ἔσται ὁ πιστεῦσαι δυνάμενος, ὡς ψεύσῃ πώποτε; Ὢ ψεύδους ἐγγραμμάτου, ἀληθείας ἐμπράκτου γέμοντος! Οὕτω δοκῶν ψεύδεσθαι ἀληθεύεις, καὶ ἀληθεύων οὐκ εἰς ψεῦδος αὖθις ἀποκλίνεις. Ἔῤῥωσο.

By the same, to Simeon Lord of Bulgaria.
You have the courage for truthfulness, most truthful of lords; you have the courage for matters most praiseworthy. And you want your writings not to be believed equally to others'; yea, nor do you want your denial, seemingly in jest, to be just like others' truthful assertions, or even to be thought as such. So your letter is shown to be truthful in reality, even though it seems to be lying literally. Thus your sagely playful and antic telling of lies surpasses others' supposed truthfulness. And this is a marvel, and a thing full of humanity: if you tell the truth while seeming to lie, then who can believe you would ever be lying, if you should stray from the truth literally tell the truth? Oh what a literate lie, full of truth in practice! Thus do you tell the truth when seeming to lie, and you do not deviate back into lies when telling the truth. Farewell.

The verb ἐκαληθεύω should be ἐξαληθεύω; but no such verb has been attested in Greek. If the rule about /eks/ was ever going to be violated, it would be in a verb such as ἐξαληθεύω, which was newly coined by the author. Any writer of Greek would have imbibed hundreds of verbs prefixed with /eks-/, from both the Classical language and his own vernacular; he'd be unlikely to get the prefix wrong on a verb he was already familiar with. Coining a new verb, he would momentarily been thrown into unfamiliar territory. And unfamiliar territory is where thinkos are likelier to happen.

The verb ἐξαληθεύω is not attested; but ἐξαληθίζομαι is. LSJ cites it from the Etymologicum Magnum, compiled a couple of centuries after Choerosphactes; but the Etymologicum is citing Photius, a generation older than Choerosphactes:

Διαπορεύεται δὲ τά τε ἄλλως περὶ θεῶν τοῖς Ἕλλησι μυθολογούμενα καὶ εἴ πού τι καὶ πρὸς ἱστορίαν ἐξαληθίζεται.
And he goes through all the other myths about the Gods told by the Greeks, and whatever is "out-truth-ised" in history. (Bibliotheca, Codex 239 p. 319a)

The difference between the -εύω and -ίζω suffixes is slight: having the condition or activity of X, vs. doing the action of X. ἐξαληθίζομαι, by that token, should mean something like "to act 'out from' about truth". In a compound, /ek/ has the following meanings:

Out, from, off, away (cp. ἐξελαύνειν drive out and away); often with an implication of fulfilment, completion, thoroughness, resolution (ἐκπέρθειν sack utterly, ἐκδιδάσκειν teach thoroughly)

So "to act about truth thoroughly", which makes more sense than "to act 'out from' about truth". What sort of actions can you carry out with truth? Telling it; so ἐξαληθίζομαι should mean "to tell the truth thoroughly". And LSJ's gloss of ἐξαληθίζομαι is indeed, "to be truly recorded".

ἐξαληθεύω in turn should mean something like "to have a condition 'out from' about truth", or "to do an activity 'out from' about truth". What condition or activity is associated with truth? Again, telling it. In fact, ἀληθίζω is glossed in LSJ as ἀληθεύω (scroll to the end, Perseus' LSJ has conflated ἀληθίζω with ἀληθής), and ἀληθεύω is glossed as "to speak truth". ἀληθίζω and ἀληθεύω are synonyms. ἐξαληθίζομαι and ἐξαληθεύω should also have been synonyms: Choerosphactes' verb should have meant the same as Photius'.

[EDIT: The following paragraph is incorrect—see comment #1]

From the context, clearly it doesn't. Choerosphactes has gone back to the literal meaning of /ek/, "out from, away": his ἐξαληθεύω is "to do an activity of being away from the truth", i.e. "straying from the truth". It's not the sense that occurred to Photius. And in fact, that too shows that Leo was in unfamiliar territory, when he coined the verb: he didn't use the most obvious sense of /ek/ in context, but the most literal. It was literal enough to make him forget to modify the prefix /ek/, and to leave it, ill-fitting, as ἐκαληθεύω. ...Read more

Ghost words revived in Allatius

The canon (patchwork though it is) of Greek lexica that I described a while back has a fair representation of German scholarship: Lust Eynikel & Hauspie, Bauer Danker Ardnt Gingrich, Trapp.

The oddity is that German scholarship wasn't represented there for the Classical period. Yes, LSJ is a major work, and DGE is more comprehensive still (if only I would live to see it completed). But it's odd that the Germans didn't corner the market in Ancient Greek lexicography in the 19th century, when they ruled Classical philology.

As it turns out, Wilhelm Pape's Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache (revised by Max Sengebusch in 1880) is competitive with LSJ, with 99,000 headwords against LSJ's 116,000. Given that LSJ, published in 1940, covers an additional 60 years worth of papyri and inscriptions, Pape's dictionary has nothing to be ashamed of.

I've recently had occasional to compare it against the other lexica of Greek: I keep trying to fill in gaps in lexical coverage hither and thither—for reasons that should be obvious to the regular readership I've been neglecting. Of those 99k, 545 lemmata are absent from the other lexica, but still turn up in the TLG corpus. That's a lot of lemmata, given that dictionaries have been making a point of filling in each other's gaps (Trapp in particular).

There are a few reasons for Pape's 545 not to have been recorded anywhere else. Pape has not picked up the allergy to Late Antiquity that LSJ did. This allergy has meant that pagan late antiquity is the least well covered period in Greek lexicography. As more inscriptions and papyri turned up, LSJ displaced late entries with the newly found earlier entries. With these late entries attributed to no author more specific than "Eccl." or "Byz.", LSJ wasn't desperate to hold on to them, to begin with.

Pape has the same dismissive "Byz." attribution for its late entries; but it has not undergone the same kind of cull—to the benefit of the Greek Anthology and Oribasius.

And, to my surprise, of the scholiasts. The scholiasts are something of a discomfort to lexicographers. Scholiasts provide their own definitions of Classical words, so Classical lexicographers care about the words the scholiasts use. But scholiasts explain Classical words to post-Classical audiences, by using decidedly post-Classical vocabulary. Which means that documenting the scholiasts puts Classicists in the Mediaeval Greek business. (Not always wisely, as seen with LSJ's mishandling of στοίχημα "wager".)

There is a smaller group of lemmata in Pape which the other lexica overlook for different reasons—and which by rights should not be turning up in a Classical corpus at all. The text of the Classical canon is described by lexicographers following standard editions; but the manuscripts they work from had a lot more variability than the lexicographers now need to account for. Our modern edition of Pindar has established that Pythian Ode 8.74 reads

πολλοῖς σοφὸς δοκεῖ πεδ’ ἀφρόνων

to many he seems wise among fools

So we are not interested that in some mediaeval manuscripts, the last two words πεδ’ ἀφρόνων "with the non-prudent" were run together as πεδαφρόνων "of the after-prudent"—or, as Pape has it:

πεδά-φρων, ον formerly appeared in Pind. P. 8.74, and was explained as Aeolic for μετάφρων, someone who is wise later, after the deed; Böckh writes it as πέδ' ἀφρόνων.

Once Böckh settled that πεδάφρων did not exist in Pindar, πεδάφρων ceases to be of interest for Classicists.

But the people who read those mediaeval manuscripts thought πεδάφρων existed. The scholia are commentaries on mediaeval versions of the Classical texts, and reflect the mediaeval understandings of those texts. If the scholia describe these misreadings, they perpetuate them, even after we have cleaned up the source text (to our best judgement). So our Thucydides 8.91.3 now reads

ἦν δέ τι καὶ τοιοῦτον ἀπὸ τῶν τὴν κατηγορίαν ἐχόντων, καὶ οὐ πάνυ διαβολὴ μόνον τοῦ λόγου

This was no mere slander, there being really some such plan entertained by the accused.

Somewhere along the line διαβολὴ μόνον "mere slander" was metanalysed as διαβόλιμον ὄν "being liable to slander". The scholiast accordingly tries in the margin to make sense of the word they saw in the main text. Our main text is emended, but the margin still counts as text in the Greek corpus:

διαβόλιμον ὄν: ἤτοι καὶ οὐκ ἔχοντος τοῦ λόγου διαβολὴν (?), οὐδαμῆ εἶχεν ὁ λόγος διαβόλως (?)
being liable to slander: namely, not having slander in speech (?); the speech was in no way slanderous (?)

(You can thank Karl Hude, who edited the scholia, for the incredulous question marks.) Thomas Magister also recorded the word in his "Selection of Attic nouns and verbs"—although he was reluctant to go so far as to commend it:

Διαβόλιμον Θουκυδίδης λέγει τὸ διαβεβλημένον· καὶ οὐ πάνυ διαβόλιμον ὂν ἀπὸ τῶν Μεγάρων τὴν Σαλαμῖνα παραπλεῖν. σὺ δὲ διαβεβλημένον λέγε.
liable to slander is what Thucydides calls something slandered. "Without it being liable to slander that they should sail by from Megara to Salamis". But you should say "slandered".

You should also not trust Thomas' reading of Thucydides; the sailing from Megara to Salamis is from Thucydides 8.94.1, a few pages on, and the mission talked about as διαβόλιμον was heading to Eetonia near Piraeus.

The mediaeval manuscripts were not just read by the Byzantine scholiasts and lexicographers, though. The manuscripts—and the scholia and lexica explaining them—were how the Byzantines learned the Classical language, on which they modelled their own literary language. That means that διαβόλιμον is of interest in the study of later Greek. Sure, it's a ghost word, like dord, and it was never part of any spoken form of Greek.

But if the text of Pindar that Byzantine writers read said πεδάφρων, then writers would assume it to be real enough: no less real than μετάφρων, which they could have coined in their own, Atticist learnèd Greek. No less real, for that matter, than embiggen.

The main reason these ghost words were taken up was that the ghost words did make sense on their own: they could be analysed according to the rules of Greek compounding. If you know how Classical Greek works, you already know that διαβόλιμον really does mean "liable to calumny", because -ιμος is a real suffix (cf. ἀγώγιμος "carriable"); and once you know that πέδα is Aeolic for μετά, you know that πεδάφρων must somehow mean "after-mined" (cf. ἔκφρων "out of one's mind"). The misreading of διαβολὴ μόνον or πεδ’ ἀφρόνων is not alien to spoken language after all; it's the same metanalysis that gives us adder or newt—or helipad or pollute. So it may look like Byzantine Greek writers were asking for this kind of bogosity, by slavishly relying on flawed manuscripts for their models; but what they came up with was not that different to what spoken language has done elsewhere.

And so it is no surprise that πεδάφρων shows up in the TLG too, even if it is not in the TLG's Pindar. It turns up in someone who has read Pindar in those corrupted manuscripts, and is happy to show his reading off. But this is not a scholiast or lexicographer. This time, it's a reader who is producing literature of his own: Leo Allatius, in his poem Hellas, written in the 17th century. (A couple of centuries before Böckh.)

My Ancient Greek isn't as good as I might make it seem, and Allatius' run-on syntax doesn't make it easier; but this is how I think he uses πεδάφρων—in the same genitive πεδαφρόνων as in the pre-Böckh Pindar.

ΕΛΛΑΣ γάρ εἰμι, τέκνον, ΕΛΛΑΣ, ἧς κλέος
ἄσβεστον ἔργοις τιμίοις πεπραγμένον,
διελθὸν ἔπτη πρός τε γαῖαν, καὶ διὰ
πόντου πέρασσε νυκτός, ἠδ’ ἠοῦς λάχος,
ἠδ’ εἴ τι ποῦ ἐστι λαιά, κἀπιδέξια
συμφραδμόνεσσι τηλόθεν γ’ ᾠκισμένον,
πεδαφρόνων γὰρ οὐδὲ μικρόν μοι μέλει,
ὃ ΓΑΛΛΙΚΟΙΣ στήθεσφι τοῦδ’ ἄχρις χρόνου
ἄφθαρτον ἐμπεφυκὸς ἀγλαΐζεται. (vv. 196–204)
For I am Hellas, child, Hellas, whose inextinguishable
glory, carried out in honourable deeds,
is past, has crouched down to the ground, and has
passed through the sea of the night: this is the doom of the dawn;
but it is also what is there in a place, that is dwelled in
left and right by counsellors from afar,
(for I do not care the slightest for those wise after the fact):
a thing which is splendid in Gallic breasts
growing incorruptible to this day.

Pindar is not the only Classical author whose fractured words turn up in both Allatius and Pape. ναυβάτης "ship-walker" turns up in several Classical sources—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon). The most obscure source is Lycophron:

καὶ τὰς Ἐρεμβῶν ναυβάταις ἠχθημένας προβλῆτας ἀκτάς (vv. 827–828)
and the jutting shores of the Erembi, abhorred by mariners

The TLG's edition of Lycophron dates from 1964; Pape in 1880 records ναυάτης as Lycophron's reading, and also has it as a variant reading in Euripides, IT 1380. Our Lycophron and Euripides have now been cleaned up to read ναυβάτης; Allatius' had not, so that his poem has the first appearance of ναυάτης in the TLG corpus:

Ἀργοῖς ἐρετμοῖς πόντος, εἰ καὶ μαίνεται,
κλύδωνί τ’ οἰχθείς, ψάμμον ἐκβράζει βυθοῖς,
βύκτας ἀέλλας ἡμερώσας ναυάτης,
οἰηΐοις τε νηὸς ἰθύνας δρόμον,
πρὸς ὅρμον ἔλσεν ἀσκηθὴς σόον σκάφος. (vv. 233–237)
Though the sea rages, and throws up sand from the depths,
departing with slow oars and through the billow,
the mariner calms the blustering whirlwind,
and straightens his course with the ship's rudder,
to shelter the vessel unscathed in its anchorage.

(If you go searching the TLG for ναυατ-, btw, ignore Ναυάται in Germanus I, Narratio de haeresibus et synodis ad Anthimum diaconum 48. His Nauatae predate Allatius by eight centuries, but they are Novatianists, a sect, as you would expect in an anti-heretical text.)

The misreading of ναυβάτης as ναυάτης is unsurprising: they sound the same in Modern Greek, [naˈvatis]. Unlike πεδάφρων or διαβόλιμον, ναυάτης doesn't mean anything on its own in Greek. It was taken up because it still looks like another real word of Greek, ναύτης "shipper = sailor", which has survived into the Modern language. Copyists simplified ναυβάτης into ναυάτης, and then figured that Euripides was just using ναύτης with an extra α in the middle. The Ancients did strange this like that, after all, didn't they?

(The Baroque did strange things too, just in a different way.)

Outside the lexicographers and scholiasts, there aren't many instances of such rejected readings turning up in literary Greek. ἠπίαμα "cure", as defined in Pape, is a metanalysis of Herodotus 3.130 ἤπια μετὰ τὰ ἰσχυρὰ προσάγων "supplying both mild and strong (medicine)"; the misquote turns up in Constantine Porphyrogenitus De virtutis et vitiis II p. 11, and Suda, delta 442; but that doesn't count as new usage. The run-in εὐ ναιόμενος "well-dwelling" of Iliad 14.255, which Pape allows as a single verb, turns up as a distinct verb not just in commentators, but also in Galen (Kühn 18b p. 763). But that's it. (I thought I saw an instance in Gregory of Nazianzen's aping of Homer, but I can't find it.)

That may mean that Allatius' Greek is more derivative than his forebears; I have my doubts, given how Byzantine literary culture worked. Since I did not track down words already defined in Lampe and Trapp, it's likelier that any earlier such repurposings had already been dealt with there.

… And so I return to blogging. Missed it. ...Read more

TLG Updates, May 2010

The TLG has just released the latest updates to its text collection. This is what has been added, from the oldest to the most recent texts, with Early Modern Greek texts separate:

Philodemus (i BC): On Anger (ed. Indelli, 1988)

Philodemus is a Hellenistic philosopher, who we know about mainly thanks to Mt Vesuvius, carbonising Pompeii and Herculaneum and everyone in it—as well as a library full of papyri. Papyri that have made it to our day in the optimal conditions of Egypt are still more bitty and fragmentary than we'd like; and carbonised papyri are not preserved in optimal condition. Their preservation is especially suboptimal because they were first discovered and read under 18th century technology rather than 21st century—which meant scalpels rather than X-rays, and the leaves of papyrus turning to dust as they were being copied out.
There is an ongoing project to reedit Philodemus, including the papyri that were copied back then (and for which the 18th century copies are sometimes better witnesses than the modern-day remnant), and the papyri that couldn't be (and that modern technology can now get to). The major texts recently published have been On Piety and On Poems. This text, On Anger, presents a papyrus in a poorer state: something like 7,000 words' worth, some of which are even legible.

Hesychius Illustrius (vi AD): Life of Aristotle (Vita Menagiana) (ed. Düring, 1957)

Hesychius of Miletus was an historian much of whose work was lost, though his biographical dictionary has substantially contributed to the Suda. The Life of Aristotle first published by Gilles Ménage in 1663 is anonymous; Düring associated it with Hesychius.

Constantine Manasses (xii AD): Hodoiporikon (Guidebook) (ed. Horna, 1904)

An account of the historian's mission to Jerusalem and back, pursuing diplomacy through marriage between Byzantium and the crusader states. For more on the text, see Aerts, W.J. 2003. A Byzantine Traveller to one of the Crusader States. In Ciggaar, K.N. & Teule, H.G.B. (eds), East and West in the Crusader States. Peeters. 165–222.

Constantine Harmenopulus (xiv AD): Hexabiblos (ed. Heimbach, 1851)

Harmenopulus (or Armenopoulos) wrote the Hexabiblos (The Six Volumes), which was the final major compendium of Byzantine Law, which itself was a continuation of Roman Law—as witnessed by the undigested Latin expressions that pervaded it. (Yes, even more so than in English-language law.) As the final major compendium, it was much more accessible than its forebears, and has served as a starting point for many historians since. It also served as a foundation of Ottoman law—and of the civil code in the Modern Greek State until 1946.

Anonymous works on Church Music (xiv–xvi AD): Anonymous questions and answers on the interval signs (Ἀκρίβεια) (ed. Schartau, 1998)

This is a treatise on Byzantine musical notation (a topic I have already written an 11 MB PDF on), and the notation it talks about is recognisably the notation used now. The treatise includes examples of the notation as used; but like other early treatises, it isn't really a Teach Yourself manual. To this day textbooks defer on the subtler inflections of Byzantine music to the instruction of your local cantor.

Andronicus Callistus (xv AD): Monody on Unfortunate Constantinople (ed. Pertusi, 1976)

"Yet all this is gone, and now, alas, the queen has become a slave. O, how can one narrate her suffering? It was daytime, but darkness and gloom for the City, and sudden war flowed into the City from land and brine; and the Impious One throws projectiles against the walls with machines, and it falls to the ground in many places, and he rushes against the City bearing a heavy hand."

George of Trebizond (xv AD): Letter to Mehmed II on the Christian faith (ed. Pertusi, 1976)

"For these reasons have I dared write to Your Majesty concerning your eternal and wondrous glory. And you, most golden emir, do receive these letters gladly, which I have written in a simpler tongue, so that they may be more easily translated by your people into the sunlike and most bright dialect of the Turks, whose sweet-sounding and succinct words, whose boldness and virility of pronunciation is attested by all who have tasted it. For I believe that this speech translated may be of some benefit."
The circumstances of the letter are discussed in Monfasani's 1976 biography of George—with an ingenious explanation of the millenarian thinking that made George attempt to make a Christian of Mehmed (the "Impious One" of Andronicus Callistus).

Belthandros and Chrysantza (xiv AD?) (ed. Egea, 1998)

This vernacular romance (aka Velthandros and Chrysantza) has the distinction of being the only example of its kind to have its own English Wikipedia page (for now).

Libistros and Rhodamne (xiv AD?): Vatican manuscript redaction (ed. Lendari, 2007)

This is the second of three surviving redactions of this romance (and we know that there were other copies which have disappeared). Redaction α, representing most surviving manuscripts, was included in the preceding update.

Father Synadinos (xvii AD): Chronicle of Serres (ed. Odorico, 1996)

This is an important text—although I obtained it too late to use for my thesis, and therefore to get properly familiar with it. It is a vernacular chronicle of a provincial Macedonian town, and is one of the few extensive pieces of vernacular we have from the mainland at all for that time. It is also an important early witness of the dialect of Greek Macedonia. In fact the blog I've linked to—though emphatically on the Hellenic side of the fence—notes that the surnames in the Chronicle are all Greek, yet in recent history Synadinos' native village had become Slavic-speaking, so populations had kept moving during the Ottoman Empire.
The chronicle has another reason for mattering to me: the linguistic commentary to Odorico's edition was written by the late Tassos Karanastassis.

Laments on the Fall of Constantinople (xv, xix AD) (eds Pertusi, 1976; Lampros, 1908; Zoras, 1955)

The final collection in this update is of anonymous vernacular laments written about the Fall of Constantinople, taken from an edition by Pertusi; it is supplemented by two vernacular laments published by other scholars.
The laments were written within the timeframe of 1453; but the end of Rhomania kept casting a shadow over the Christians who identified with it, and it remained a topic of folk song. These folk songs were important in the nation-building of Modern Greece (as Herzfeld has analysed in Ours Once More), and every Greek schoolchild has read the song:

Σημαίνει ὁ Θιός, σημαίνει ἡ γής, σημαίνουν τὰ ἐπουράνια,
God strikes, the Earth strikes, and the Heavens strike.
Hagia Sophia strikes, the great cathedral,
with two and sixty bells, four hundred prayer blocks.

The better-read will also know the laments that were recorded in Pontic folk song:

Μὴ κλαίς, μὴ κλαίς, ἅϊ Γιάννε μου, καὶ δερνοκοπισκᾶσαι.
Ἡ Ρωμανία ’πέρασεν, ἡ Ρωμανία ’πάρθεν.
Ἡ Ρωμανία κι ἂν ’πέρασεν, ἀνθεῖ καὶ φέρει κι ἄλλο
Cry not, St John, and beat your breast not so.
Rhomania's time has passed; Rhomania's fallen.
Rhomania's passed; it buds, and bears a new one.

Τὴν Πόλην ὅνταν ὥριζεν ὁ Ἕλλην Κωσταντῖνον,
εἶχε πορτάρους δίκλωπους, ἀφέντους φοβετσάρους,
εἶχεν ἀφέντην σερασκέρ’ τὸν μέγαν Ἰωάννην.
When Constantine the Hellene ruled the City,
his lords were scared, his gatekeepers were two-faced,
and John the Mighty was his general.

Ὁ ἥλιον πάει ’ς σὴν μάνναν ἀτ’ μαυρομελανιασμένον.
Φέρει καὶ τραπεζώνει ἀτον γάλαν καὶ παξιμάτιν,
ὁ πρόσωπος ἀτ’ ’κὶ γελᾷ, ἀπολογιὰν ’κ’ ἐδῶκεν.
The Sun goes to his mother, black and blue.
She brings him milk and serves him rusks to dine on.
His face won't smile, and he gives no reply.

It turns out that Pertusi has included a selection of these folk songs in his collection. Which means the TLG now includes Pontic. (And I have to worry about morphologically analysing it.)

...Read more

What are the longest words of Greek?

Everyone knows (or should know) about the longest word of Greek ever—the word that broke the title bar of Wikipedia, Aristophanes' fantastical dish of 17 ingredients at the end of the Ecclesiazusae, that lopado-temacho-thing:

λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιολιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοπιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών (172 chars)

Ah. It breaks blogspot too. :-)

λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιο­λιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτο­πιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών (172 chars)

Have you ever wondered what the next longest words of Greek are? No? Well, you'll find out anyway. With the necessary provisos as usual:

• I'm basing this on the word forms in the current TLG, and the lexica I have access to—LSJ, LSJ Supplement, Lampe, Trapp, Kriaras.
  
• This doesn't prove much of anything, since the point is that Greek compounding is agglutinative and productive, so you can keep stringing words up. We're just happening to go through the long words turning up in Ancient and Mediaeval Greek literature.
  
• Do not even think of coming away with the impression that Greek literature makes the longest words in the world—although few if any seem to get anywhere near Aristophanes' monster. The Guinness Book of Records did unearth a word in the Varadambika Parinaya by Tirumalamba in Sanskrit adding up to 428 letters in Roman transliteration. I can't find it (I think this is the Google Books snippet); which is a shame, I wanted to break Blogspot some more...
  
• For other languages, have a Facebook thread and a Wikipedia laundry list.
  
• I'm sure there's plenty of compounding happening in Modern Greek; I cited in the Quadrupeds (p. 150) the Hellas-L coinage πολυμαθουφοχριστιανοπεοκρουστόπαιδο "polymath UFO Christian penis-stroking lad" (35 chars), which maker poster Constantine Thomas coiner of the sixth longest real Greek word I know of. That… doesn't prove that much either.

What it shows is, there was a Byzantine fad for long compounds, in a couple of genres, though possibly ultimately indebted to Aristophanes; and Aristophanes himself went there more than once.

I'm going to count down the top 40-odd words in length I can find, down to a length of 29 characters, and I'll give their dictionary definitions (where available) and who has used them.

The longest words in English, long enough to be cheating, are protein names. The longest words in Greek outside of Aristophanes, long enough to be cheating, are fractions. They're so boring, dictionaries don't bother to list them at all. So I'm putting them separately:

1. τριακοντατρισμυριοστοχιλιοστοεπτακοσιοστοεβδομηκοστόεκτα (56 chars), "1/331776", Scholia on Diophantus, 135
   
2. μυριοστοεπτακισχιλιοστοπεντακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστόπεμπτα (54 chars), Trapp: "1/17545", Nicholas Artabasdos "Rhabdas", Letters 34.
   
3. μυριοστοτετρακισχιλιοστοεξακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστόπρωτα (52 chars), Trapp: "1/14641", Scholia on Diophantus, 128
   
4. τρισκαιδεκακισμυριοστοτριακοσιοστοεικοστοπρώτων (47 chars), τρισκαιδεκακισμυριοστοτριακοσιοστοεικοστόπρωτα (46 chars), "1/130321", Scholia on Diophantus, 130
   
5. τετρακισμυριοστοχιλιοστοεξακοσιοστοεξκαιδέκατον (47 chars), "1/41616", Isaac Argyrus, Περὶ εὑρέσεως τῶν τετραγωνικῶν πλευρῶν τῶν μὴ ῥητῶν τετραγώνων ἀριθμῶν, p. 23
   
6. τετρακισμυριοστοτετρακισχιλιοστοοκτακοσιοστόν (45 chars), "1/44800", John Pediasimus (aka John Galenus), Geometry p. 19
   
7. τρισχιλιοστοδιακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστοέννατον (42 chars), "1/3249", Scholia on Diophantus 140
   
8. δισμυριοστοδισχιλιοστοτετρακοσιοστόν (36 chars), "1/22400", John Pediasimus, Geometry p. 19
   
9. ὀκτακισχιλιοστοεκατοστοεικοστόγδοον (35 chars), "1/8128", Pseudo-David & Pseudo-Elias, Lectures on Porphyry's isagoge, praxis 8 p. 3
   
10. ἐννεακαιεικοσικαιεπτακοσιοπλασιάκις (35 chars), LSJ: "seven-hundred-and-twenty-nine times", Plato, Republic 587e.
    
11. τετταρακοντακαιπεντακισχιλιοστόν (32 chars), LSJ: "forty-five thousandth" (or: 1/5040), Plato, Laws 877d
    
12. τετρακισχιλιοστοεξηκοστοτέταρτον (32 chars), "1/4064", Pseudo-David & Pseudo-Elias, Lectures on Porphyry's isagoge, praxis 8 p. 3
    
13. ἐπιτετρακοσιοστοκαιτεσσαρακοστῷ (31 chars), "ratio of 441:440", George Pachymeres, Quadrivium 2.45
    
14. χιλιοκτακοσιογδοηκονταπλασίονα (30 chars), LSJ: "eighteen hundred and eighty times as great", Theon of Smyrna De utilitate mathematicae p. 197, citing Hipparchus
    
15. τετρακισχιλιοστοενενηκοστόεκτα (30 chars), "1/4096", Scholia on Diophantus 138
    
16. διακοσιοστοτεσσαρακοστοτρίτοις (30 chars), Trapp: "1/243", Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, Vol. 2 p. 180

And now, the "real" words. Words not (yet) in the TLG are asterisked.

1. κεραυνομεγακλονοζηνπερατοκοσμολαμπροβελοπλουτοδότα (50 chars), (Luis Muñoz Delgado, Léxico de Magia y Religiòn en los Papiros Mágicos Griegos, 2001) "making great noise with a thunderclap, bounded by the sky, shining rays in the cosmos, and giver of wealth", Magical Papyri 12. The magical papyri have even longer strings of nonsense characters, but this really does count as a word. It's worth taking it apart:
   
   • κεραυνο "thunder"
   • μεγα "big"
   • κλονο "turmoil"
   • ζην "Zeus"
   • περατο "boundary"
   • κοσμο "cosmos"
   • λαμπρο "shining"
   • βελο "ray"
   • πλουτο "wealth"
   • δότα "giver"
   It's positively Sanskrit...
   
2. *ἀκτινοχρυσοφαιδροβροντολαμπροφεγγοφωτοστόλιστος (47 chars), Trapp: "dressed in golden-shining, thundering and incandescent clothes", Codices graeci Chisiani e Borgiani (ed. P. Franchi de' Cavalieri), 124; Bibliotheca Coisliana (ed. Montfaucon), 59. What astonishes me is that someone chose to use this word a second time…
   
   • ἀκτινο "ray"
   • χρυσο "gold"
   • φαιδρο "beaming"
   • βροντο "thunder"
   • λαμπρο "bright"
   • φεγγο "shining"
   • φωτο "light"
   • στόλιστος "dressed"
3. *Ἡρακλειανοκυροσεργιοπυρροπαυλοπετρῖται (38 chars), Trapp: "followers of Heracleus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter", Scripta saeculi VII vitam Maximi Confessoris illustrantia (ed. P. Allen & B. Neil) 223,378. (Hey, I know them! And the "Heracleus" is in brackets, so some scribe may have decided five leaders were already enough.)
   
4. *παναξιοκτηνοπτηναστροφωστηροκοσμοποιία (38 chars), Trapp: "quite worthy creation of animals, birds, stars, celestial bodies and the world", Dioscorus of Aphrodito (ed. Fournier), 40,6
   
5. ὀρθροφοιτοσυκοφαντοδικοταλαιπώρων (33 chars), LSJ: "early-prowling base-informing sad-litigious plaguy", Aristophanes Wasps 505. Misquoted by Suda (omicron 581, epsilon iota 68) as ὀρθοφοιτοσυκοφαντοδικοταλαιπώρων (32 chars), "upright-prowling..."
   
6. ἀστραποβροντοχαλαζορειθροδαμάστου (33 chars), Lampe: "overcome by lightning, thunder, hail, and flood", Basil of Caesarea, Letters 365
   
7. στρογγυλοφιλοσοφογραμματογράφου (31 chars), (not yet in a dictionary) "writer of round philosophical letters", Theodore II Ducas Lascaris, 218 Letters, 128.
   
8. σπερμαγοραιολεκιθολαχανοπώλιδες (31 chars), LSJ: "green-grocery-market-woman", Aristophanes Lysistrata 457
   
9. *πανυπερπρωτοπανσεβαστοϋπέρτατος (31 chars), Trapp: "above all else and first of all, most highly honoured", Gregory hegumen of Oxia 225,126.
   
10. Βρυσωνοθρασυμαχειοληψικερμάτων (30 chars), LSJ: "taking coin like Bryso and Thrasymachus", Ephippus of Athens fr. 14 Kock, cited in Athenaeus 11.120
    
11. ἀκτινολαμπροφεγγοφωτοστόλιστος (30 chars), Trapp: "sparkling with shining light beams", Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopoleos, May 9 section 2
    
12. τοξαισελαιοξανθεπιπαγκαπύρωτος (30 chars), "bow-???-oil-blond-on-all-airdried" (ref. to a kind of cake), Philoxenus of Cythera fr. e, cited in Athenaeus 14.50; the edition of Philoxenus by Page marks the word as corrupt
    
13. κομπορηματοχρηματομετεωροφέναξ (30 chars), Trapp: "boasting cheat puffed up with words and treasures", John Tzetzes, Letters 4 p. 6
    
14. *πανσεβαστοκοσμοποθοπροσκύνητος (30 chars), Trapp: "highly honored and welcomed by the world with longing", Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Graecorum (ed. Beniševič), I 332
    
15. ἀκτιστοσυμπλαστουργοσύνθρονον (29 chars), Lampe: "uncreated fellow worker sharing the throne", Gregory Pardus, Exegesis in canonem iambicum de festo die Spiritus Sancti, 25; ἀκτιστοσυμπλαστουργοσύνθρονε (28 chars), Vita of Nicephorus the Doctor 22.
    
16. σκοροδοπανδοκευτριαρτοπώλιδες (29 chars), LSJ: "garlic-bread-selling hostess", Aristophanes Lysistrata 458
    
17. λογαριαστοπνευματικοοικονόμος (29 chars), Trapp: "invoice controller and religious manager", John Apocaucus, Letters (ed. Bees) 60

Special separate mention goes to Constantine of Rhodes, who wrote a couple of pages of train-carriage–length epithets; I have cited an excerpt elsewhere:

1. *πρεσβευτοκερδοσυγχυτοσπονδοφθόρος (33 chars), Trapp: "who interferes with the profits of intermediaries and destroys contracts", Constantine of Rhodes (ed. Matranga), 625,25.
   
2. *πλαστιγγοζυγοκαμπανοσφαιρωστάτης (32 chars), Trapp: "one who sets the round weight on the steelyard balance with the gold bearing scales and balance beam", ibid. 624,8.
   
3. *βαρβιτοναβλοπλινθοκυμβαλοκτύπος (31 chars), Trapp: "playing the barbiton, the nabla, the plinthos (hydraulic organ?), and the cymbals", ibid. 625,21.
   
4. *Ἑλληνοθρησοχριστοβλασφημότροπος (31 chars), Trapp: "a character who worshiped the pagan and sinned against Christ", ibid. 624,15.
   
5. *κασαλβοπορνομαχλοπρωκτεπεμβάτης (31 chars), Trapp: "one who mounts the arses of whores, prostitutes and courtesans", ibid. 624,11.
   
6. *λακτεντοχοιροκριοβουτραγοσφάγος (31 chars), Trapp: "butcher of piglets, pigs, sheep, cattle, and goats", ibid. 624,7.
   
7. *ὀλεθριοβιβλοφαλσογραμματοφθόρος (31 chars), Trapp: "ruinous counterfitter of books and destroyer of writing", ibid., 624,12.
   
8. *λαρυγγογλασκοξεστοχανδοεκπότης (30 chars), Trapp: "one who gulps down bottles and glasses with an open throat", ibid. 624,10.
   
9. *κορνουτοπαρθενοτριβοψυχοφθόρος (30 chars), Trapp: "horned abuser of virgins and destroyer of souls",ibid. 624,10.
   
10. *ἀλλαντοχορδοκοιλιεντεροπλύτης (29 chars), Trapp: "washer of entrails [sausage, intestines, bellies, entrails]", ibid., 624,5.
    
11. *κλεπτοτυμβονυκτεροσκοτεργάτης (29 chars), Trapp: "one who operates in the dark of night as a grave robber", ibid. 626,25.
    
12. *μοιχοπαιδοδουλοσκανδαλεργάτης (29 chars), Trapp: "one who arouses a scandal through lewdness with underage slaves", ibid. 625,24.

...Read more

Tzetzes' Theogony, continued

I have picked up Hunger's edition of the epilogue to Tzetzes' Theogony, so I can now fill in some of the questions left open in my previous post, and correct some misunderstandings I had, In a separate post, I'll speculate further on the etymology of μουνί. I've changed my mind on it, btw.

But first, to Tzetzes.

We know of five manuscripts of the text

• V₁: Vindobonensis phil.gr. 321 (second half of 13th century)
  
• C: Casanatensis gr. 306 (1413)
  
• P: Vaticanus Palatinus gr. 424 (16th century)
  
• B: Vaticanus Barberinus gr. 30 (15th century)
  
• V: Vindobonensis phil.gr. 118 (turn of 14th century)

and most of them give up about the epilogue completely. Here is the translation of the epilogue Language Hat cites from Alexander Kazhdan's Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. I've tweaked the translation where appropriate, and added the reconstructed Proto-Ossetic:

[V₁ already gave up copying 45 verses ago: We left out the entire epilogue, because it just went on too long]
One finds me Scythian among Scythians, Latin among Latins,
And among any other tribe a member of that folk.
[P stops copying]
When I embrace a Scythian I accost him in such a way:
"Good day, my lady, good day, my lord:
Salamalek alti, salamalek altugep."
And also to Persians I speak in Persian:
"Good day, my brother, how are you? Where are you from [Missing in C], my friend?
Asan khais kuruparza khaneazar kharandasi?"
To a Latin I speak in the Latin language:
"Welcome, my lord, welcome, my brother:
Bene venesti, domine, bene venesti, frater.
Wherefrom are you, from which theme [province] do you come?
Unde es et de quale provincia venesti?
How have you come, brother, to this city?
Quomodo, frater, venesti in istan civitatem?
[C stops copying: And there were many other verses of sundry dialects, but I omitted them as useless. We're down to V and B]
On foot, on horse, by sea? Do you wish to stay?
Pezos, caballarius, per mare? Vis morare?"
To Alans I say in their tongue:
"Good day, my lord, my archontissa, where are you from?
Tapankhas mesfili khsina korthi kanda," and so on.
(dæ ban xʷærz, mæ sfili, (æ)xsinjæ kurθi kændæ)
If an Alan lady has a priest as a boyfriend, she will hear such words: [verse only in V]
"Aren't you ashamed, my lady, to have a priest fuck your cunt? [missing in B, only given in V]
(οὐκ αἰσχύνεσαι, αὐθέντριά μου, νὰ γαμῇ τὸ μουνίν σου παπᾶς;)
To farnetz kintzi mesfili kaitz fua saunge."
(du farnitz, kintzæ mæ sfili, kajci fæ wa sawgin?)
[Literally: "Aren't you ashamed, my lady, to have a love affair with the priest?"]
Arabs, since they are Arabs, I address in Arabic:
"Where do you dwell, where are you from, my lady? My lord, good day to you.
Alentamor menende siti mule sepakha."
And also I welcome the Ros according to their habits:
"Be healthy, brother, sister, good day to you.
Sdra[ste], brate, sestritza," and I say "dobra deni."
To Jews I say in a proper manner in Hebrew:
"You blind house devoted to magic, you mouth, a chasm engulfing flies,
memakomene beth fagi beelzebul timaie,
You stony Jew, the Lord has come, lightning be upon your head.
Eber ergam, maran atha, bezek unto your khothar."
So I talk with all of them in a proper and befitting way;
I know the skill of the best management."

The language names aren't what they seem:

• I recognised ἀλτή as Turkic, confirmed that altı is Turkish for "lady", and so assumed "Scythian" was Turkish. It was a bit odd that the Turks were being placed in Scythia—modern Ukraine and Kazakhstan; but maybe Tzetzes was thinking of some Turkic tribe up north.
  In fact he was: Hunger's manuscript has the interlinear gloss Cuman at "when I embrace a Scythian". And Cuman was indeed a Turkic language.
  
• With the "Persians", I committed a thinko. I noticed that "friend" in Persian, kharandasi, looked like Turkish kardaş "brother, friend". I also know that by the 14th century, classicising Byzantine historians referred to the Turks as Persians, referring back to the Achaemenids. But surely, I thought, Tzetzes would have actually been familiar with Persians, being part-Georgian. (More on that later.) So he wouldn't have made that Chalcocondylian conflation. As for kardaş, I dunno, maybe it is a Turkish loan from Persian.
  Not so. Hunger's manuscript also glosses "Persian" as "Turkish". I'm not game to suggest a (Seljuk) Turkish rendering of ἀσὰν χαῒς κουρούπαρζα χαντάζαρ χαραντάση; I may get lucky and have a passing commenter do so.
  
• Latin is Latin. Tzetzes' dates are ca. 1110-1180; certainly not too late for Latin to have been spoken by scholars, at least.
  
• Alanic is Proto-Ossetian. Ironically, Alanic *is* a Scythian language, the Scythians and Alans being Iranic peoples.
  
• I also wouldn't object to hearing the wisdom of the crowds on the Arabic.
  
• The Ros are the Rus', i.e. Russia. The manuscript actually reads sdra, but Hunger consulted a Slavicist who said it was unattested, and Hunger assumed the ste dropped out as a haplology. Tzetzes, perversely (but unsurprisingly) put the foreign language fragments in the same metre as the rest of the poem; and there is indeed a missing syllable there.
  Hunger finds the orthography δόβρα δένη interesting, because the words still end in full vowels (dobra deni, cf. Modern Russian dobryj denj).
  
• The Jews get Tzetzes' anti-Semitism in Hebrew, although the Jews of Byzantium certainly spoke Greek as their everyday language. But admitting that would be admitting they were not space aliens who didn't belong in Byzantium; and Tzetzes couldn't do that. Tzetzes' use of Latin also suggests that his language command was of the debate hall, rather than the marketplace—learnèd Hebrew, rather than spoken Judaeo-Greek. Language Hat's comment thread has some information on Tzetzes' Hebrew.

The Greek interest in the epilogue is on its use of μουνί, and that use is surprising, because it's not what the Proto-Ossetian says. That's not the only thing strange about the Greek translations, though: they are in red ink in the manuscript, and don't fit the metre like the foreign originals do. Moreover, "fuck your cunt" look a bit over-colloquial to us—although the rest of the translation is consistent with Tzetzes' Koine (πόθεν εἶσαι καὶ ἀπὸ ποίου θέματος ἦλθες;), and the correlation of vulgar with colloquial we make can be anachronistic.

• As Modern Greek readers will have noticed, "that he fucks" is γαμῇ, not γαμᾷ: the original verb is γαμέω, and while the vernacular was already conflating -αω and -εω conjugations by then (something that had started in the Koine), Tzetzes knew that the original verb is γαμέω—and he'd want you to know that he knew it.

Still, it's a reasonable question to ask: can we be sure the translations are from Tzetzes himself? Hunger agrees with Moravcsik that we can, because Tzetzes was pedantic enough to gloss everything in sight. That's not a compelling reason in my book: if he was that pedantic, why aren't the glosses in metre? The fact that glosses show up in all four manuscripts is more convincing to me.

In particular, whoever wrote the translation "fuck your cunt" in V knew enough Proto-Ossetian to render its meaning misleadingly. Tzetzes did; I'm less certain a random scribe would, especially when most scribes ran away as fast as they could from this Berlitz job application.

Only two scribes persevered with it, and it's interesting what B left out: not just the νὰ γαμῇ τὸ μουνίν σου παπᾶς, but any reference to the lady shacking up with a priest at all. It wasn't just the four-letter words that offended the scribe of the Barberinus, but the social faux pas.

It's an odd thing to do, though, translate "to have a love affair" as "to fuck your cunt". Nikos Sarantakos asked me whether this is some indication of Georgian–Ossetian enmity being a thousand years old.

Let's go to Wikipedia University. Tzetzes *was* Georgian and not Ossetian, right?

• John Tzetzes: "was Georgian on his mother's side. In his works, Tzetzes states that his grandmother was a relative of the Georgian Bagratid princess Maria of Alania who came to Constantinople with her and later became the second wife of the sebastos Constantine, megas droungarios and nephew of the patriarch Michael I Cerularius. [Garland, Lynda (2006), Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience, 800-1200, pp. 95-6. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 075465737X.]"
  
• ("Of Alania", meaning "Ossetian". Crap.)
  
• Maria of Alania: "was a daughter of the Georgian king Bagrat IV of the Bagrationi (1027–1072) and spouse of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas and later also Nikephoros III Botaneiates. She is frequently known as Maria of Alania in apparent confusion with her mother Borena of Alania, the second wife of Bagrat of Georgia."
  
• Borena of Alania: "was a sister of the Alan king Durgulel "the Great", and the Queen consort of Georgia, as the second wife of Bagrat IV (r. 1027-1072). [...] This was just one of the several intermarriages between the medieval Georgian Bagratids and their natural allies, the royal house of Alania."

Phew. So Borena was Alan, but her daughter was born in Georgia, and her daughter's granddaughter was related to Tzetzes. So we're probably safe.

Of course, instead of Wikipedia University, we could just turn to what Tzetzes himself says. In his Chiliades, Tzetzes dedicates a chapter to the proposition

ΟΤΙ Ο ΤΖΕΤΖΗΣ ΚΑΤΑ ΜΗΤΕΡΑ ΙΒΗΡΤΩι ΓΕΝΕΙ, ΚΑΤΑ ΔΕ ΠΑΤΕΡΑ ΚΑΘΑΡΩΣ ΕΛΛΑΔΟΣ ΓΟΝΗΣ
THAT TZETZTES IS OF IBERIAN (= Georgian) STOCK ON HIS MOTHER'S SIDE, AND OF PURE GREEK DESCENT ON HIS FATHER'S (Chiliades 5.17)

It's worth going on, because it offers a hint as to Tzetzes dissing the Ossetians:

(5.591) Τῆς Τζέτζου μητρομήτορος ἡ Ἀβασγὶς ἡ μήτηρ
σὺν τῇ δεσποίνῃ Μαριάμ, τῇ Ἀβασγίσσῃ λέγω,
ἣν οἱ πολλοὶ Ἀλάνισσαν φασὶν οὐκ ἀκριβοῦντες,
ἦλθεν εἰς μεγαλόπολιν ὡς συγγενὴς καθ’ αἷμα,
Tzetzes' mother's mother's Abkhazian (Ἀβασγὶς) mother,
together with Lady Mariam—I mean, the Abkhazian (Ἀβασγίσσῃ),
whom most people incorrectly call the Alan (Ἀλάνισσαν),
came to the Great City [Constantinople] as her blood relative
[--- snip two generations ---]
(5.612) Τούτου θυγάτηρ σὺν δυσὶν ἑτέραις θυγατράσιν
τὴν κλῆσιν Εὐδοκία μέν, μήτηρ δ’ αὐτοῦ τοῦ Τζέτζου.
Ἔγνως κατὰ μητέρα μὲν Ἴβηρα τοῦτον ὄντα·
πατὴρ δὲ τούτου Μιχαὴλ ὃς καὶ παιδεύει τοῦτον
ἐν λόγοις καὶ τοῖς πράγμασιν ὡς τὸν υἱὸν ὁ Κάτων.
She was this man's daughter, together with two other daughters;
she was Eudocia by name, and mother of this Tzetzes.
So now you know that he is Iberian (Georgian) from his mother.
And his father was Michael, who taught him
in words and deed like Cato taught his son.
[--- snip ---]

• We pause here for the Modern Greek readers to stop guffawing at Ἀλάνισσα, which meant "Alan" in Byzantine Greek, and means "tramp" in Modern Greek.

Ossetians, Georgians, and now Abkhazians? What is this, a Russia-NATO impasse? But yes, Georgia had that diversity of peoples back then too. Abkhazia was part of the Kingdom of Georgia at the time, and not yet a separate principality, and Wikipedia at least says the Abkhazian nobility of the time spoke Georgian. So even if Tzetzes' great-grandmother was Abkhazian, she would have spoken Georgian—and would not necessarily have felt affinity with the Alans.

Tzetzes names Maria of Alania as Mariam, which is the Georgian form. But was Maria Alan, Abkhaz, Georgian, or what? Rather than Wikipedia University, we can refer to the roman-emperors.org article on Maria written by Lynda Garland, who actually is a Byzantine historian (and who's cited by Wikipedia U): as far as I can tell, the Georgian monarchy was described by both Georgians and Byzantines as "of the Ap'xaz/Abasgia", but the Bagratid heartland was further south than Abkhazia, and the name doesn't mean the Abkhaz were running things.

But just before Tzetzes confuses us further with the Abkhazians, he says why:

(5.585) Ἡ τοῦ δὲ μητρόμητωρ μὲν Τζέτζου τοῦ Ἰωάννου
τοῦ ἱστοριογράφου τε καὶ συγγραφέως πόσων,
μητρὸς ἧν Μασσαγέτιδος, ἤγουν ἐξ Ἀβασγίδος.
Ἴβηρες δὲ καὶ Ἀβασγοὶ καὶ Ἀλανοὶ ἓν γένος·
οἱ Ἴβηρες πρωτεύοντες, οἱ Ἀβασγοὶ δευτέραν,
οἱ Ἀλανοί δ’ ἐσχήκασι τάξιν τριῶν ὑστέραν.
Tzetzes, John, historian, and author
of so many works: his mother's mother's
mother was a Massageta, namely from Abkhazia.
The Iberians [Georgians] and the Abkhazians and the Alans are one race;
the Iberians hold the first rank; the Abkhaz the second;
and the Alans hold the third and last rank.

Do ignore the Massagetae: an Iranic people in Herodotus, which gave Tzetzes a classical pedigree to hang on to the Abkhaz. Ammianus Marcellinus hanged the label onto the Alans, and Procopius of Caesaria picked the Huns; so the label doesn't mean much.

The Alans were allies of the Georgians, which is why Borena and Maria married into Georgian royalty. Tzetzes could say they were "the same" in some sense; shortly after his death, the Alan prince married the queen of Georgia, which effectively merged the countries for a couple of decades, until they both were conquered by the Mongols.

But the Alans were not the same country yet while Tzetzes lived: they were a neighbouring country, while the Abkhaz were a province of Georgia, and their nobility was assimilated. The Abkhaz were sort of Georgian; the Alans were not, and Tzetzes is eager to put them at the bottom of the heap.

He's also adamant to point out that Maria was not "of Alania"—and true enough, it's her mother that was. We know her as Maria of Alania because most Byzantine historians called her that; and they called her that, as Garland explains, because they didn't give a toss what nowheresville principality she came from. Psellus, for instance, would just as soon not mention where she came from at all. ("Maria may have been a Georgian princess, but in fact her homeland and royal parentage cut little ice with the Byzantines as a whole.")

So Psellus, as Garland mentions, casually disses the Alan Kingdom:

(The emperor) fell in love with a girl, as I have mentioned above, who was a hostage with us from Alania. That kingdom was not particularly distinguished in itself, nor had it any great prestige.
ἐρᾷ τινος μείρακος, ὥς μοι καὶ ἄνω που τοῦ λόγου λέλεκται, ἐξ Ἀλανίας ὁμηρευούσης ἡμῖν· βασιλεία δὲ αὐτὴ οὐ πάνυ σεμνὴ, οὐδὲ ἀξίωμα ἔχουσα. (Chronographia 6.151)

But Psellus wasn't any more respectful to Georgians. As far as he was concerned, "all you Caucasians look alike".

Tzetzes cared though. Yes, he said "we're all the same race (γένος)". But if they were all the same race, the Alans wouldn't have had the last rank. And Tzetzes was enough of a walking rancour machine, that I wouldn't put the uncomplimentary mistranslation "fuck your cunt" past him. ...Read more

Comparison, TLG BC and AD: log-likelihood

Helma Dik left a comment on my post on comparing TLG AD and BC through Wordle, suggesting I use Dunning's Log-Likelihood measure of differential word frequencies in corpora, as Wordled by Martin Mueller. That lets you work out what the real shifts in frequency are, rather than trying to eyeball them through the aggregate word counts.

Here for instance is his comparison of the Iliad to the Odyssey—which words are more frequent in the one, or the other:


I looked up Ted Dunning's paper, failed to understand it :-( , and used instead the walkthrough of the computation on the user manual of the Wordhoard corpus software package.

And this is the more statistically sound Wordle comparison. Words more frequent BC are in red, words more frequent AD are in black. I'm leaving in stop words this time, and not cleaning up the ambiguity, because this says some interesting things about the changes in Greek grammar between Classical and Late Greek. Do click:


Here's my impressionistic notes, that haven't already been covered in the previous post (where I was working through rankings):

• Both corpora talk about θεός God, but the big jump, of course, is Χριστός Christ. The second biggest jump is in ἅγιος holy, displacing ἱερός. (Was ἱερός too pagan-sounding?)
  
• But the biggest discrepancy between BC and AD Greek is the avoidance of δέ but, on the other hand, followed by avoidance of μέν on the one hand. That tells you that AD Greek used different sentence structures, such as a lot more ἀλλά but. Tucked away, there's also more καί and (i.e. more coordinating constructions) and a lot less τε and (a very archaic phrase-second construction).
  
• There are a lot more ἤγουν and τουτέστι that is, and a lot less ἐάν if and ἄρα therefore; I'm tempted to think that says something about changing rhetoric in the genres popular in the respective periods—less logic, more exemplification. It's foolhardy, but not impossible.
  
• There is a lot more τίς who? being reported, and that's an error in ambiguity, but it's an illuminating error. τοῦ in Attic (though not Late Greek) is ambiguous between "whose?", and the genitive definite article. And there are a lot more definite articles in Late Greek, as you can see by the black ὁ. (My friend Io Manolessou actually wrote her PhD on that shift; nice to see it visually confirmed.)
  
• There's also more ἵνα in order to, which suggests Late Greek was already moving towards more subjunctive constructions rather than participles and infinitives, even before Early Modern Greek made the switch completely.
  
• Clearly less ὦ Ο!—A very Classical way of addressing people.
  
• Some of the odder looking words more prevalent in BC Greek are there because there are a lot more geometric texts in the BC corpus: Ἄβ is actually mistakenly picking up the line ΑΒ, and you can also see in smaller print ΑΒΓ, ΒΔ, ΓΔ, ΕΖ, ΞΖ.

Hm. Yes, that was somewhat more illuminating. Thanks, Helma!
...Read more

μούτζα, μουνί and Tzetzes

I thank my esteemed commenters on the last post, and have a post-length response to them, concerning:

• The Complaint of the Anonymous Naupliot
  
• The Byzantinicity of the Greek insulting gesture of the moutza
  
• The controversy over the etymology of μουνί "cunt"
  
• The curious editorial fate of Tzetzes' Theogony

... Ah yes. There is a Language Advisory on this post.

The Complaint of the Anonymous Naupliot

Nauplion: Ever onward. You should add this one:
http://angiolello.net/Anonymous.html

The Complaint of the Anonymous Naupliot is not currently in the pipeline to my knowledge, but it's a fascinating text, and I commend to everyone else your post on it.

The Byzantinicity of the Greek insulting gesture of the moutza

Peter: If I'm not mistaken, the μούντζα gesture, not the name itself, goes all the way back to classical times: Greek Sicily.

Hadn't heard that. Everything's possible, but does the source make it clear it's the same gesture?

The Greek insulting gesture of the moutza, involving the spread palm directed at the target (or at oneself, in a Greek equivalent of the facepalm), is traditionally derived as cognate to μουτζούρα "smudge", and referring to pillorying criminals by smearing ash (or worse) on them.

I did find a blog saying someone's written the gesture is Ancient and represents the rays of Helios, which is uh, yeah. The blogger doubts the gesture is Byzantine, because if it was, wouldn't it be attested outside Greece. Well,

1. who said the gesture was use throughout the Empire,
2. who said every part of the (increasingly shrinking) empire has had cultural continuity to this day—especially with the massive population movements since the Goths first came for a visit,
3. who said the gesture isn't used outside Greece? Oh, you mean Nigeria wasn't part of the Byzantine Empire? Damn...

(I have to wonder though: has anyone checked in Albania? Or, given Pierre's comment, the Roma?—these phenomena don't come to a halt at borders finalised in 1912, after all.)

The blogger also disputes that the moutza originated in pillorying, because the Dodecanesian "moutzes and ash on you" is a major curse, and pillorying was meted out for minor infractions.

• It wasn't limited to minor infractions, as this extensive excerpt from Koukoules' encyclopaedia of Byzantine realia shows: it included adultery, theft, and rebellion; and it could be combined with blinding.
• She's underestimating the potency of shame culture.
• If the moutza combined with ash isn't about pillorying, I can't see what else it's about.

The controversy over the etymology of μουνί "cunt"

Pierre: In reference to your last remark, is μουνίν related to the gypsy gesture, the μούντζα? I have always believed with Colin Edmonson that it probably is. (The gesture has power. There is a wonderful story of Eugene Vanderpool, exasperated by a pestilential taxi driver while trying to give an introduction to the "white tower" on the Elusis road. He finally gave the driver all ten, and the taxi ran , not fatally, into a power pole.)

I'd have thought, as much as anything, the taxi driver was astonished that the Frank knew the local gestures: not just the moutza, but the double moutza, at that.

Relate μουνίν to moutza? I don't see it: I don't know where the /dz/ would come from, and the semantics doesn't fit either.

I've seen an obscure Hesychian lemma proposed for μουνί "cunt" (was it Korais?), and Venetian. The etymologies I'm finding in the dictionaries are far-fetched enough to show why scholars have been confused. Not that they're wrong necessarily, they're just not obvious.

Triantafyllidis dictionary: Ancient εὐνή "bed, wedding bed" > Hellenistic diminutive *εὐνίον > Mediaeval *βνίον > *μνίον (cf. εὐνοῦχος > μουνοῦχος "eunuch, gelding", ἐλαύνω > λάμνω "arrive") > *μουνίον (cf. *μνοῦχος > μουνοῦχος)

Hm. I mean, the developments proposed all could have actually happened in Greek: /evnion/ as a diminutive, /vnion/ with deletion of initial vowel, /mnion/ with assimilation, /munion/ with epenthesis. But /mnuxos/ > /munuxos/ is surely repeating the /u/ already there for its epenthesis, and the only mn- word I know survived into the modern vernacular, μνημόρι "memorial stone", didn't go to *μουνιμόρι. (Although given what μουνί means, it couldn't.) I'm not sure /u/ is a regular epenthetic vowel in Greek, but to be honest I can't think of epenthetic vowels in Greek right now.

The semantics seems stretched too. The word εὐνή seems to have been poetic, particularly in any marital connotation; I'd be very surprised if it survived alongside κοίτη. Modern Greek does admittedly use καριόλα "orig. wooden bed" (Italian carriola) to mean "whore": it's a straightforward metonymy, although the carriola was originally a cradle.

(So the Greek dictionary tells me; carriola in Italian now seems to mean "wheelbarrow"... Oh, I see, it was both: "The characteristics of a carriola were that it was a small bed and that it had wheels; this made it easy for a servant or young person to push it under the great bed occupied by the owner of the bedchamber". Thornton, Peter. 1991 The Italian Renaissance interior, 1400-1600. H.N. Abrams. p. 153.)

But the further claimed step of *εὐνίον from "bed" to "cunt"... well, I dunno, anything's possible.

The Triantafyllidis institute isn't convinced by its derivation from "wedding bed" either, because they suggest another derivation:

Ancient μνοῦς "soft feather, down" > Hellenistic diminutive *μνίον > Mediaeval *μουνίον (as in the previous hypothesis) > Mediaeval μουνίν

At least that's slightly more plausible semantically than "little bed", although the attested dimunutive (in the Latin-Greek glossaries) is μνούδιον—and, um, "fine, soft down, as on young birds"? Oooo-kay...

But then, it's all blown skyhigh by the third option:

(But also cf. Venetian mona, same meaning)

As long as we can get a Romance etymology for mona, we can dispense with the epenthetic acrobatics... Except that Tzetzes is a bit early for Venetian loanwords.

Looking at Andriotis' Etymological Dictionary, it turns out all three proposals are pedigree. The "bed" derivation is from Georgios Hatzidakis, the founder of Modern Greek linguistics (though not infallible). The "down" is from Menos Filintas, a good etymologist who hasn't gotten enough attention (although you'll see him very often in Andriotis.)

The Venetian etymology? Gustav Meyer. The contemporary of Hatzidakis who performed an even more valuable service. Thanks to Hatzidakis, we know the rules which derived Modern Greek words from Ancient. Thanks to Meyer, we know that there are words in Modern Greek from other languages. :-) (Meyer did the pioneering work in identifying Albanian, Aromanian and Venetian loanwords in Greek.)

If Tzetzes is early enough to disprove Venetian influence (not a given), and if the Hunger manuscript is preserving Modern Greek as written from Tzetzes, and not the scribe's ad lib on an earlier, cleaner, and more accurate rendering of the Ossetian (which is also not a given)... then I'll go with "down" over "little bed".

Babiniotis' dictionary has another couple of guesses:

• "*μνίον derived from Ancient βινεῖν 'to fuck'". There are other instances of ancient infinitives turned into modern nouns—φαγεῖν "to eat" > φαΐ "food", φιλεῖν "to love" > φιλί "kiss". And the verb did stick around until the Magical Papyri and Philogelos—the latter dated 4th century AD. But unlike the mn- guesses, there's no obvious reason for /vinin/ to go to /vnin/ > /munin/.
  
• "mona may be derived from Greek βυνῶ "to fill" (cf. βυζαίνω), in which case it would be a Rückwanderer [loanword reborrowed into source language]". That "Rückwanderer" (αντιδάνειο) is not an innocent comment: it's vengeance against Meyer. And ultimately it's not that important: if the word came into the language that way, then as far as everyone was concerned, it was Venetian.
  I'd defer to an Italianist on the plausibility of the derivation, but while βυνέω ~ βύω has useful semantics ("to stuff, to plug"), the βυνέω variant occurs only once in Greek literature, in Aristophanes Peace 645, in a decidedly non-sexual context: "sealed their lips with gold". It looks like a pretty far-fetched way to account for a Venetian vulgarity to me—far-fetched enough I'm happy to blame an Italian scholar who doesn't actually know Ancient Greek. If we're going to look for Venetian etymologies that way, βινεῖν is far likelier than βυνεῖν.
  
• Babiniotis' dictionary also repeats Hatzidakis' and Filintas' derivations; my memory of Hesychius as an etymology must be his entry μνοιόν "soft", used here to support *μνίον "soft down". God alone knows what Hesychius was referring to with μνοιόν, but I haven't changed my mind: Venetian (ultimate origin unknown) is the most plausible etymology, then "down", then maybe "to fuck".

OK, that's enough four-letter words for one post.

The curious editorial fate of Tzetzes' Theogony

Nikos Sarantakos: Curiously, the TLG text of Theogony does not contain the Ossetian verses -the showing off is cut (abruptly?) after the Latin verses, with a note that "there were many more verses in various dialects but I omitted them as useless"

Yes; I had to do some digging to work out what happened.

• Tzetzes wrote an epilogue to the Theogony, showing off his command of exotic languages.
  
• One scribe got as far as Scythian (Turkish), Persian and Latin, before deciding "screw this, I'm copying a lineage of Gods here, I don't care about Tzetzes' job application to Berlitz". And left the note Nikos cited.
  
• That scribe's copy is what Bekker published in 1840.
  
• Other scribes had the same reaction: "We have left the entire epilogue unwritten because it just went on too long (διὰ τὴν πολυλογίαν)"
  
• Fortunately for Caucasian linguistics, Herbert Hunger discovered another copy of the Theogony, with the epilogue intact. He published the epilogue in: Hunger, H. 1953. Zum Epilog der Theogonie des Johannes Tzetzes. Byzantinische. Zeitschrift 46, 302-7
  
• Thanks to Ronald Kim for putting a googleable draft of his paper online, to allow me to discover this. The final paper is Kim, R. 2003. "On the Historical Phonology of Ossetic: The Origin of the Oblique Case Suffix." Journal of the American Oriental Society 123: 43-72. The online draft is Kim, R. 1999. "The origin of the Pre-Ossetic oblique case suffix and its implications". U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 6.1.

I'll pick up the Hunger edition when I'm next in the library (it's passé in most circles to physically walk to consult a journal article, but Melbourne University has no motivation to fork out for a subscription of the electronic version). But this is how the epilogue starts, before the scribe fell asleep:

And you'll find me a Scythian to the Scythians, a Latin to the Latins,
and to all other nations, as if I'm of the same race.
And embracing a Scythian, I shall address him thus:
[Good day to you, my mistress; good day to you, my lord]
salá malék altí salá malék
And Persians, I shall address in Persian thus:
[Good day to you, my brother; where are you going? Where are you from, friend?]
asaŋxáis karúparza. xatázar xarantási
And A Latin I shall address in the Latin tongue:
[Welcome, my lord, welcome, brother]
véne venésti, ðómine; véne venésti, fráter.
kómoðo, fráter, venésti in ístan tsivitátem?
[And there were many other verses of sundry dialects, but I omitted them as useless.]

Language Hat has a translation of the entire epilogue up. Which is hardly a surprise. (The "Scythian" is slightly different in that version.)
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