στήτη, a post-Homeric ghost word

I posted in November about Leo Allatius, who coined a new word in the Greek literary corpus through a misreading of Pindar—or rather, perpetuating a mediaeval misreading of Pindar. But with the transmission of Classical literature as haphazard as it was, Allatius was not the only writer to have come up with such creative misreadings.

In the sixth verse of the Iliad, Homer introduces the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon over Briseis:

ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.
from the time when first they parted in strife,
Atreus' son, king of men, and brilliant Achilles

διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε literally means "the two of them stood apart contending". But διαστήτην is a strange verb for those who post-date Homer: it is too archaic to be understood readily.

The verb is archaic enough to lack an augment—the prefix that obligatorily indicates past tense in Classical Greek: where Homer used δια-στήτην /dia-stɛ́ːtɛːn/, later Greek would expect δι-ε-στήτην /di-e-stɛ́ːtɛːn/. Later on still—by the end of Classical Greek—the dual number of the verb fell out of use; Greek by then would expect not the dual διεστήτην, but the plural διέστησαν.

So διαστήτην did not look familiar to speakers to later Greek as a verb. What it did look like, though, was a feminine accusative noun, since -ην is the first declension ending for that case. Since spaces were not normally marked between words in Ancient writing, it would be easy for ΔΙΑΣΤΗΤΗΝΕΡΙΣΑΝΤΕ to be read as διὰ στήτην ἐρίσαντε, "contending for an X".

Reading διαστήτην as διὰ στήτην means that you have unearthed a brand new noun in Homer, and now you need to come up with a meaning for it. It's not the first time readers of Homer were faced with such a challenge, and the way out was provided, as it often was, by context. Achilles and Agamemnon were contending for Briseis; since Briseis was a woman, and στήτην seems to be a feminine noun, it follows that Homer has the noun στήτη, meaning "woman".

Some Homerically clueless poet later on, in the same mindset as Allatius, followed along with this misconstrual of Homer: he used στήτη as a noun in his verse, to mean "woman". In fact he went a step further than Allatius: Allatius cited πεδαφρόνων just as he read it in his Pindar; but this poet was pretending to write in Doric, so he switched dialects in the inflection, and came up with the genitive στήτας, not στήτης.

To make things even worse, another poet, within the next century, used this ghost word στήτας again, in a poem clearly derived from the first poet's conceit. ("Of the writer nothing is known; he was obviously acquainted with the [first poem]".) Both poets were pedants, more concerned with crafting poesie concrete than using words anyone had heard of. Clearly Homeric learning had fallen unpardonably far.

The poets in question are Theocritus (in his poem shaped like a Pipe) and Dosiadas (in his poem shaped like an Altar). In the 3rd century BC. You can see their handiwork at theoi.com, reproducing the 1912 Loeb edition and translation.

In the 3rd century BC, of course, Homeric scholarship was just getting started: Aristophanes of Byzantium might have worked in Alexandria at the same time as Theocritus. And we can be smug about misreadings like διὰ στήτην now, but five centuries after the Iliad was written, scholars had to start somewhere trying to make sense of Homer's antiquated Greek. Those scholars' attempt to make sense of Homer led them to invent Western grammar. So we should cut Theocritus and Dosiadas some slack.

Here are the phantoms of στήτη in action:

LSJ, στήτα:

στήτα, ἁ, pseudo-Doric, = γυνή [woman], Theoc.Syrinx 14, Dosiad.Ara 1. (The form arose from a false reading of Il.1.6, διὰ στήτην ἐρίσαντε having quarrelled about a woman, cf. Eust.21.43, Sch.D.T. p.11 H.)

Dosiadas, Altar, 1

Εἱμάρσενός με στήτας
πόσις, μέροψ δίσαβος,
τεῦξ’
I am the work of the husband of a mannish-mantled quean, of a twice-young mortal

Note that in the 1912 Loeb, writing to a more literate audience, J M Edmonds could afford to translate obscure Greek into obscure English: quean, "1. a disreputable woman; specifically: prostitute; 2. chiefly Scottish: woman; especially: one that is young or unmarried".

Theocritus, Syrinx, 13-20:

ψυχὰν ᾇ, βροτοβάμων,
στήτας οἶστρε Σαέττας,
κλωποπάτωρ, ἀπάτωρ,
with which heartily well pleased, thou clay-treading gadfly of the Lydian quean [i.e. Omphale], at once thief-begotten and none-begotted

Scholia in Theocritum, Syrinx 14:

Without the scholia to Theocritus, we'd be even more lost than Theocritus was before Homer:

στήτας οἶστρε Σαέττας: τουτέστιν ὁ οἶστρον ἐμβαλὼν τῇ Λυδῇ γυναικί. φασὶ γάρ, ὅτι ἡ Ὀμφάλη ἡ Λυδὴ οἶστρον εἶχε περὶ τὸν Πᾶνα πολύν. τὸ δὲ στήτη ἡ γυνή, Σαέττης δὲ τῆς Λυδῆς.
That is, the gadfly poking the Lydian woman. For he is saying that Omphale, the Lydian, had a great gadfly (= sexual excitement) about Pan. And στήτη means "woman", while Σαέττη means "Lydian woman".

I think this is our only source form knowing what a Saetta was. It's not our only source for knowing what a στήτη is:

Scholia on Homer, Scholia Recentiora [more recent scholia] by Theodore Meletiniotes (codex Genevensis gr. 44), I 6:

[διαστήτην] διὰ τὴν στήτην, διὰ τὴν γυναῖκα.
διαστήτην: for the στήτην, for the woman.

Hesychius

στήτα· γυνή
στήτα: woman

Though Hesychius does Contain Multitudes:

Hesychius:

στήτην· ἔστησαν, δυϊκῶς
στήτην: "they stood", in the dual

Some scholars, at least, had worked out what had gone wrong—fully and astutely (Melampous or Diomedes' grammatical commentary), or almost but not quite (Eustathius of Thessalonica):

Eustathius of Thessalonica, Commentary on the Iliad, Vol. 1 p. 35 (van der Valk):

Ἰστέον δὲ [...] ὅτι περιέργως τινὲς ἐπιβαλόντες Θεοκρίτου στήτην τὴν γυναῖκα εἰπόντος γράφουσιν ἐνταῦθα «διὰ στήτην ἐρίσαντο», ἵνα λέγῃ ὁ ποιητής, ὡς διὰ γυναῖκα ἤρισαν. ὁ δὲ τούτοις προσέχων εἴη ἂν φιλόκαινος.
Note that oddly enough, some authorities, imposing Theocritus' στήτη "woman" here, read this as διὰ στήτην ἐρίσαντο, so that the Poet ends up saying that they "contended for a woman". To pay attention to such readings would be an infatuation with novelty.

Commentary on Dionysius Thrax's Art of Grammar, by Melampous or Diomedes, p. 11 (Hilgard, Grammatici Graeci vol. 1.3)

Ἕως ἐνταῦθά ἐστιν ὁ ὅρος τῆς γραμματικῆς. Εἴπωμεν οὖν αὐτόν· «γνῶσις τῶν παρὰ <τοῖς> τὰ ἔμμετρα καὶ ἄμετρα γράψασιν ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πλεῖστον εὑρισκομένων». Διὰ τί δὲ εἶπεν «ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πλεῖστον»; Ἐπειδή τινες λέξεις ἅπαξ που ἢ δὶς εἰρημέναι εἰσίν, ἃς οὐ πᾶσα ἀνάγκη εἰδέναι τὸν γραμματικόν, οἷον οἱ γρῖφοι. Τί δέ εἰσιν οἱ γρῖφοι; Τὰ ζητήματα τὰ δεινά· [...]
ἢ ὡς ἐν τῷ βωμῷ τοῦ Δοσιάδου ἡ γυνὴ εἴρηται στήτη, ἐπειδή τινες τὸ παρ’ Ὁμήρῳ διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε οὕτως ἐξηγήσαντο, διά τινα γυναῖκα. Σύριγξ δὲ καὶ βωμὸς ποιήματά τινά ἐστιν ἐμμέτρῳ τῷ σχήματι καὶ τῇ διατυπώσει τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν ἔχοντα. Τὰ οὖν τοιαῦτα ζητήματα εἰ μὲν ἐπίσταται ὁ γραμματικός, ἐπαινετέος ἐστίν, εἰ δὲ μή γε, οὐκ ἔστι μέμψεως ἄξιος.
This much is the definition of grammar. Let us add: "the knowledge of most things written in verse and prose". Why "most"? Because there are some words which have been used just once or twice, which it is not essential for the grammarian to know, such as riddles. And what are riddles? Difficult questions [...]
Or, as in Dosiadas' Altar, where στήτη is used for "woman", because some people interpreted Homer's διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε as referring to a certain woman. And the Pipe and the Altar are poems in verse form and named for their appearance. Now if a grammarian knows about such matters, he is to be praised; but if not, he does not merit condemnation.

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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.)

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Chronicle of Hippolytus

This has not been one of the major reasons for my latest blog detox, but I've become involved in a translation project, which has cost me a few evenings and will cost me a few yet.

Tom Schmidt has worked on a translation of Hippolytus' Chronicle—a text I'd already noticed in my TLG work because of its morass of unknown proper names. I've helped Tom revise the translation, and he has just posted the second edition on his blog. There will be a third edition sometime over the next couple of months, which will deal with why I was interested in the text in the first place. And somewhere in there, there will be Cool Google Earth tricks.

Let me take things from the start.

Hippolytus' Chronicle was written in 235 AD. Chronicles as we know them are informal bits of history, assembled around the scaffolding of reigns of kings, and plot synopses of the narrative from Genesis up to the Roman Empire. Hippolytus provides some of that scaffolding, from the Biblical side, as one of the first Christian forays into writing history: lists of high priests, judges, the begats of Adam and Abraham, and the list of the 70 peoples dispersed at Babel (with some post-Genesis interpretations of who those peoples had ended up as).

The list is garbled from the Septuagint in places: in fact the second redaction of the chronicle, written a century later, corrects some of the garblings. But the chronicle (in its slightly corrected variant) was enormously influential: its lists turn up at the beginning of tens of chronicles, in Greek, Latin, and Armenian. In fact these later copies help us reconstruct the original text, since the surviving text closest to Hippolytus' original, the Madrid manuscript, still has gaps in it.

The Madrid manuscript also includes a text absent from all other versions: a mariner's guide to sailing the coast of North Africa, and a (possibly distinct) guide to Syria, Asia Minor, Cyprus, and Crete. This text is known as the Stadiasmus or Periplus Maris Magni: "The Measurement In Stades, Or Circumnavigation Of The Great Sea, videlicet, The Mediterranean."

The Periplus is not attributed to Hippolytus, and indeed it may not even have been Hippolytus himself who included it in the chronicle text. But someone saw its huge list of place names, and thought it would fit right in with Hippolytus' begats and lists of peoples. It was published by Müller in 1855, before Hippolytus' Chronicle proper, but the text is still included in Helm's 1955 edition.

As you can see from our rendering (or the Latin or Greek in Müller's edition), the Periplus lavishes attention on every little nook of the African coastline: its approach to Asia Minor is more summary, which is why Helm thinks it conflates two separate itineraries. But as the discussion in the Barrington Atlas explains, its excruciating detail is not because sailing North Africa was a pleasure cruise. The route had huge commercial importance, and Egypt was still the breadbasket of the empire; but the coast was sparsely populated, dangerous, and parched. That's why the Periplus spends so much attention on where to find water. And why mariners had to know the tertiary (III) meaning of the adjective πλατύς: πλατὺ ὕδωρ was not "broad water", but "brackish".

Hippolytus' Chronicle attracted my attention in my TLG work, because I'm ever on the lookout for unfamiliar proper names, and the Chronicle has them aplenty, between every single port in North Africa, and the twisted tribal names of the Caucasus or Libya. (Hippolytus' Taramantes are the Garamantes, for example: tau looks a lot like a gamma.) So I was eager to help out with working the names out, with reference to the secondary literature: the Barrington Atlas, Smith's much older (but freely online) Geographical Dictionary, and Müller's edition—which was much bolder than Helm in meddling with the Periplus' placenames, to match Ptolemy and Strabo.

The version we've just put up has not done that work yet: in fact you can tell where I left off footnoting. It's a big job, with several sources to check, and we didn't want to hold off making it available until it was perfect. That's not the way publishing works on the Intertubes, after all: early feedback is good, and all that. We will go back over the place names in the next month or so.

The major task in doing that will be to reconcile the placenames of the Periplus with the persistent identifiers of the Pleiades project, drawn from the Barrington Atlas, which is how we'll find the canonical form of the place names. (More on those identifiers here and here.) That way—to reconcile my day job with my other vocations—we can harness URIs to draw references from classical texts into the Semantic Web, and the other goodies that the Web now makes possible. Such as plotting the Periplus onto Google Earth. (Cf. the geocoded Bible on Openbible.info.)

But that's for the next month or so; the place names are still left buggy for now, but any and all feedback is welcome. Please leave comments over at Tom's blog if you do have feedback.

Philological Reliability: Literary Texts

It's safe to come out now, folks, I'm no longer debating the etymology of Greek four-letter words. But two points that came up in that debate—the reliability of a vernacular phrase in Tzetzes, and the unrelated search for the earliest attestation of the -opoulos suffix, bring up a philological point, about dating linguistic changes through manuscript evidence. This is old hat to philologists, but philologists, alas, are thin on the ground these days.

In fact (to get my polemic on), when I was still in a linguistics department, I threw at the head of the department (an Australianist—oddly enough for a department in Australia) the old dictum from George Hatzidakis: Πᾶς μὴ φιλολογῶν, ο­ὐ γλωσσολογεῖ. "If you're not doing philology, you're not doing linguistics." "... Maybe not your kind of linguistics", he blinked.

But of course, a lot more linguists have to do philology than admit to it (or actually do it). If you understand philology properly. It's not about poring over old manuscripts: philology is understanding the social and historical context of the texts you're working on. Which means factoring the cultural in to your linguistic analysis: language is an instrument of culture, and the choices people make in what to say and how to say it are driven by their culture. To a significant extent, they *are* their culture. And that holds as much for Australian Aboriginal languages as for Early Modern Greek—if not more.

But to the dating of linguistic changes.

For historical evidence, we rely in the first instance on written texts, and only secondarily on reconstruction and comparison between modern languages. And there are two types of written text before the printing press: literary, and documentary.

Literary texts got copied time and again—which is why they survived: LOCKSS, Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. That means we're unlikely to have the autograph, the original author's manuscript—certainly out of the question for Greek antiquity, where the wax tablets and papyri did not survive millenia of Greek dirt. Nor for that matter before the 10th century: as book technology advanced, copies in the old technology were thrown out wholesale—so once lowercase was invented, the older uppercase codexes were discarded.

As I commented over at Roger Pearse's, some leaves from the uppercase autograph of the Life of St Andrew the Fool have accidentally survived—thrown out, and recycled as a book binding. That helps us work out that it was a 10th century text, pretending to be from the 6th century.

Without the autograph, we rely on the fidelity of copyists, our knowledge of the original language, and philological acumen to work out what the original said. With Ancient Greek, our evidence is not perfect, but we're not that badly off. The scribes were typically conscientious. We know Ancient Greek better than the scribes did, so we can often tell if they are wandering off linguistically. We typically have multiple copies of the text, so we can triangulate between them. And as I'll say below, we have other texts to fill out our knowledge of the ancient language.

We're not always there: we suspect for instance that the text of Herodotus we have has been hypercorrected, because it has plurals like τουτέων that look Ionic, but linguistic theory says shouldn't be there (Kühner–Blass 111): some time between 450 BC and 1000 AD, a scribe thought he knew better than the text he was copying, and all subsequent copies of Herodotus reflect his intervention. (The inflection is even more pervasive in the artificial Ionic of Roman-era medical authors.) But that kind of problem with mangled grammar is not debilitating for Ancient Greek.

Things are quite different for Early Modern Greek (and from what I gather, other mediaeval vernaculars). Again, we don't have autographs until well into the Renaissance. But scribes did not revere the language of the original, like they did Ancient Greek: Early Modern Greek had no prestige, and scribes' approach to the verses was influenced by their approach to folk song: liable to adjustment on the fly. So the wording of our multiple copies varies a lot more than we're used to from classical text, in ways where it's not obvious what the original had, if anything. Editors more often have to drop the meticulous stemmatic reconstruction of the text, and go with selectio (gut instinct), or even codex optimus (follow just one manuscript).

It gets worse. Towards the end of the age of scribes, we can see scribes systematically modernising the language of the texts they were copying; that's what the 1625 manuscript of the 14th century Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds did for example. Scribes could also do the opposite: make the language of their text more archaic and proper. The Digenes Akrites romance must have originated in 11th vernacular ballads, but our earliest manuscript, the 13th century Grottaferrata, is in learnèd Greek. The 15th century Escorial manuscript is in the vernacular people were hankering for, but it's unlikely to be a direct reproduction of the 11th century ballads.

So if you have two variants of a passage, one more learnèd and one more vernacular, you can't always tell which reading is original—and use that to date the change back to when the text was originally written. Classical philology has a handy rule of lectio difficilior: if one reading is interesting and the other is boring, go with the interesting reading. That rule is predicated on the ancient author being a literary genius, and the scribe being a drudge: a drudge will simplify a text in copying it, and will not exercise ingenuity. With the Early Modern corpus though, the scribe is not necessarily less of a genius than the author, and feels more entitled to show us that he is.

An example comes from the very title of the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds. The word "entertaining" is given in two forms in the manuscripts: παιδιόφραστος "entertainment-phrased" is the Paris manuscript, the other four have πεζόφραστος, "prosaically-phrased" (i.e. vernacular). "Entertainment-phrased" is an interesting coinage; "prosaically-phrased" is—well, prosaic. So following lectio difficilior, editors of the text have accepted the reading Entertaining Tale, rather than Vernacular Tale.

Just as George Baloglou and I were going to press with our translation of the Entertaining Tale, i came across a paper by Hans Eideneier, arguing that the Paris manuscript routinely tinkered with the text, making it more archaic or pretentious. To Eideneier's mind, this was another such instance: the scribe thought "prosaically-phrased" was prosaic too, and tarted it up to the similar-sounding "entertainment-phrased". Scribes simply would not do that with Homer; but they had no such compunction with vernacular texts. And if they routinely did so, then lectio difficilior does not count as much in reconstructing the original text.

[Eideneier, H. 2002. Η «πεζῇ φράσει» Διήγησις των τετραπόδων ζώων. In Λόγια και Δημώδης Γραμματεία του Ελληνικού Μεσαίωνα: Αφιέρωμα στον Εύδοξο Θ. Τσολάκη. Πρακτικά Θʹ Επιστημονικής Συνάντησης (11-13 Μαΐου 2000). Thessalonica: Aristotle University. 269-277.]

This all amounts to needing a degree of scepticism about dating linguistic changes from literary texts. We can often work out the date a text was originally written in; and if a preponderance of surviving copies confirm the linguistic feature we're looking at, we can date the feature back then. But if we have only one copy, or if there is a dispute between the manuscripts, the only date we can have real confidence in is the date that the ink on the manuscript dried. For Early Modern Greek, that date is almost always the 14th or 15th century, rather than the 12th.

In fact, of the three Early Modern Greek literary texts dated to the 12th century, at least two are philologically problematic. Spaneas' Polonius-like moralising made it hugely popular; that means lots of copies, with lots of variation, and no obvious reconstruction of a single original text. The Ptochoprodromos cycle clearly was written in the late 12th century; but again, it was popular enough and copied enough that we can't always be sure the manuscripts' language is faithful to the original.

The third such text is Michael Glycas' Prison Verses, written in 1158/9 (and edited by Evdoxos Tsolakis, whose Festschrift featured Eideneier's paper above). In this case, we've been uncharacteristically lucky. We have a date for the poem, because we know what campaign the emperor was on when Glycas was petitioning him (unsuccessfully) for pardon. We have a 13th century manuscript of the text (and we know it used to be in another 13th century manuscript), which is completely unlike other vernacular texts. We have an eponymous author writing in the vernacular, and someone who otherwise wrote in the learnèd dialect; we'll need to wait two centuries for Stephen Sachlikes for the next such eponymous text.

It's the combination of all this that has enshrined the work as the first known Modern Greek text. (A second Glycas poem, written a few years later, presents vernacular proverbs more systematically, and I presume is what TAK was referring to in comments. To my embarrassment, I was not familiar with this work at all.)

This is slightly too good to be true, and if you look at the text, it's not as strongly vernacular as Ptochoprodromos: the substrate is learnèd, with some smatterings of vernacular, especially when proverbial wisdom is brought up. There is a continuum of vernacularness which the polemic fuelled by Greek diglossia skips over: John Camaterus, also from the 12th century, is even less vernacular than the Prison Verses, but still has a few shibboleths. (When Modern Greek liteature begins is a vexed question, and Martin Hinterberger has a lucid overview.)

Still, Glycas has one of the earliest attestations of the Early Modern use of subjunctive να to indicate future tense (supplanted a couple of centuries later by θέλω να "want to" > θα). This excerpt, where an Early Modern να is followed by an Ancient future tense (να συμπαθήσῃ, ῥύσεται), illustrates how macaronic the poem gets. I italicise the clearly vernacular words:

Καὶ στὰς ὁ τάλας ἄφωνος καὶ πεπηγὼς ὡς λίθος
καὶ γεγονὼς περίδακρυς ἔδοξα παρακοῦσαι,
ὥσπερ τινὸς ἐγγίσαντος καὶ πρὸς ἐμὲ λαλοῦντος:
«Ἐδά, Μιχάλη ταπεινέ, φέρε τὸν λογισμόν σου·
ὅσα καὶ ἂν εἶδες ἄφες τα, τοῦτα παιγνίδια οὐκ ἔνι,
φόβητρα δὲ καὶ βάσανα καὶ στοναχαὶ καὶ πένθη,
ἀσυμπαθεῖς ἐξετασταὶ καὶ φοβεραὶ κολάσεις·
τῷ βασιλεῖ σου πρόσδραμε, λέγε τὰ πταίσματά σου·
ὁ βασιλεὺς φιλάνθρωπος καὶ νὰ σὲ συμπαθήσῃ.
Ἐκύκλωσάν σε σήμερον ὠδῖνες τοῦ θανάτου;
Ἐπικαλοῦ τὸν Κύριον κἀκεῖνος ῥύσεταί σε.
I, poor man, standing voiceless, fixed like rock,
becoming full of tears—thought I o'erheard
someone approach and speak to me, as 'twere:
"Now then, poor Mike, put on your thinking cap.
Quit everything you've seen: this ain't no game,
but terrors, torment, moaning, and laments,
unfeeling inquisitions, fearsome penance.
Approach thine emperor, admit your faults:
the kindly emperor's gonna pardon you.
Have pangs of death encircled thee today?
Call thou upon the Lord, and He shall save thee. (Prison Verses, 515-525)

We have some evidence of Early Modern Greek before the 14th century from other literary traditions, but not a lot. The Judaeo-Greek Jonah of 1263 is a word-for-word translation; and the bits of Greek in Rumi and Sultan Walad are hard to read, and probably second-language Greek. We have the occasional vernacular proverb or song mentioned in an otherwise learnèd text, such as the proverb in the Continuators of Scylitzes which is slightly earlier evidence of the να future, the imperial acclamations, or the "Go well my hawk" song in the Alexiad. We'd like to retain that evidence, through lectio difficilior: the vernacular is so out of place that the scribe is unlikely to have tampered with it, especially since they were back to "treat text with respect" mode in their copying. Yet that's an assumption, not a proof.

There are, luckily, other kinds of texts we can use as evidence: the documentary kind. They don't yield as copious evidence as the vernacular literary texts do: the literary texts are only macaronically vernacular, whereas the documentary kind are usually vernacular only by lapse—in which we're rather less lucky than Hellenistic Greek, with its abundance of Koine correspondence. Those texts, I look at next post.
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Etymologies and attestation of μουνί

(See also μουνί vs. monín; μούτζα, μουνί and Tzetzes.)

OK, let's draw this talk of μουνίν to some sort of close. I'll present the first attestations of the word, as given in Trapp's and Kriaras' dictionary; and then I'll reproduce Moutsos' presentation of the various proposed etymologies, with a few of my comments.

The attestations are given with date of authorship, followed by date of earliest manuscript. The manuscript date matters because, as you'll have already seen from TAK's comments in previous threads, you can't trust mediaeval scribes not to interfere with the language of what they're copying.

John Tzetzes, Theogony (12th century/ca. 1400)

οὐκ αἰσχύνεσαι, αὐθέντριά μου, νὰ γαμῇ τὸ μουνίν σου παπᾶς;
Aren't you ashamed, my lady, to have a priest fuck your cunt?

The reading is preserved only in one manuscript, ca. 1400 ("turn of 14th century"). There is a possibility that the manuscript scribe has introduced this, pejorating whatever Tzetzes originally had written. The other manuscript preserving the passage, from the 15th century, clearly saw something worth censoring in the original, to have left the second half of the verse out. But given that it also censored the previous verse, mentioning a priest as lover, we can't be sure what it censored was a translation like "fuck your cunt", or something closer to the Proto-Ossetian's "have a love affair".

Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds 467 (ca. 1364/15th century)

διὰ νὰ σηκώνῃς τὴν οὐράν, νὰ δείχνῃς τὸ μουνίν σου
(Sheep to Goat): You're here to lift your tail and show your cunt off!

The translation is due to one George Baloglou and one Nick Nicholas.

Miklosich & Müller, Acta et Diplomata Graeca Medii Aevi, Vol. II p. 53: Church synod condemnation of Constantine Cabasilas (24 August, 1383)

τέταρτον· ὅτι ἐβάπτιζε ποτὲ παιδίον, ἵστατο δὲ ἐκεῖσε καὶ γυνή· ἔχρισεν οὖν τὸ βρέφος τῷ ἀγίῳ μύρῳ, εἷτα λέγει πρὸς τὴν γυναῖκα· φέρε μοι τὸ μουνίν σου ἐνταῦθα, ἵνα χρίσω αὐτὸ, καὶ οὐ συγκάπτῃ
Fourthly: that he was christening a child once, and there was a woman standing there too; so he anointed the infant with holy myrrh, and then said to the woman, "bring me your cunt here, for me to anoint it; it won't swallow it up."

I don't quite understand what exactly συγκάπτῃ means here, and I'm not sure I want to. Yes, he was excommunicated. Legal processes, such as this, are usually boring, but at times can give invaluable linguistic evidence. Even though in this case the grammar has clearly been antiquated, the vocabulary has not.

Mass of the Beardless Man (ca. 1500/1515~1519) (Β 165, Α 499)

γραίας πορδὴ μαστίχα σου, γαδάρας μουνὶ πουγγί σου
an old woman's fart is your mastic, a donkey's cunt is your purse

The Mass is a relentlessly scatological parody; as the previous quote shows, not all churchmen were saintly, then any more than now. It was printed in 1553, but the two manuscript versions are if anything even filthier—as is shown here.

Mass of the Beardless Man (ca. 1500/1515~1519) (Α 375)

Μαγαρίζομέν σε, κὺρ Φασούλη σπανέ, καὶ ὑβρίζω τὴν ὡραίαν πατσάδαν σου ὡς ἀντίτυπον γαδάρας <τὸ> μουνίν.
We pollute thee, Sir Bean Beardless, and I curse thy pretty beard as a copy of a donkey's cunt.

Glossae Graecobarbarae (end of 15th century/1614) [cited in Meursius]

τῆς γυναικὸς τὸ αἰδοῖον, ὅπερ καλοῦσι μουνὴν.
The woman's pudendum, which they call μουνί.

The Glossae Graecobarbarae have survived only in citations by the lexicographers Meursius and DuCange; they've been claimed to originate in Cyprus, at the end of the 15th century. (Beaudouin, Mondry 1884. Dialecte chypriote. pp. 109-131 cites the glosses and compares them to Modern Cypriot.)

Stefano de Sabio, Corona Pretiosa (1527) [cited in Meursius]

μουνὴ. Cunnus. αἰδοῖον γυναικὸς.
μουνί. Cunt. "(Ancient Greek) woman's pudendum."

The Corona Pretiosa was published by Stefano de Sabio in 1527, with a reprint in 1543; it's a glossary that translates Modern Greek into Latin, Ancient Greek and (apparently) Italian. I'd like to register my astonishment that this is the first time I've heard of it. I'd also like to register my astonishment that nowadays I can *expect* a 1527 book to be digitised and online. It isn't, but all the other lexica are.

Johannes Meursius: Glossarium Graeco-barbarum (1614)

Μουνή. Membrum muliebre. [cites definitions from Corona Pretiosa and Glossae Graecobarbarae]
Μουνί: Female member.

Little gripe to Kriaras' dictionary: if they're going to cite words as being cited in Meursius, DuCange, Vlachos and Somavera, they really should also have mentioned De Sabio and the Glossae: they push the date back a lot.

Alessio da Somavera (Alexis de Sommevoire), Tesoro della lingua greca-volgare ed italiana (1709)

Μοῦνα, ἡ. μαϊμοῦ μὲ τῆν οὐράν, ἡ. (ζῶον) Mona, gatto fariano. (animale) // Μουνάρα, ἡ. Natura granda di donna. // Μουνί. βλ. Σάρκα. // ἡ Σάρκα. Le parti vergognose, honestamente parlando.
Μοῦνα, ἡ. Monkey with a tail (animal). // Μουνάρα, ἡ. Large feminine organ. // Μουνί. See Σάρκα "flesh". // Σάρκα. The embarrassing parts, to speak bluntly.

Somavera is more hesitant than previous lexicographers, but he does note the augmentative μουνάρα. He also shows that the Venetian monna "monkey", which I mentioned confused matters in Venetian, had also entered Greek at the time.

Now to the etymologies. None of them are straightforward phonologically: there is no obvious Ancient word starting in /mon/ or /mun/, which could account for it.

A friend of mine said he always assumed it was derived from μόνος "only, unique" (as in mono- in English), because there's only one of them. That's in contrast to testicles, presumably, but it doesn't exactly distinguish vaginas from penises though.

No, I'm not going further with that proposal.

Faced with this difficulty, Hatzidakis arrived at the ingenious (too ingenious) parallel of /evnuxos/ "eunuch" > /munuxos/. Each of the steps posited for that transition has precedent in Greek:

• eunúkʰos
  
• evˈnuxos, through regular phonetic change
  
• *ˈvnuxos, through aphaeresis
  
• ˈmnuxos, through assimilation
  
• muˈnuxos, through epenthesis

This allowed people to look for etymologies of μουνίν in something like *βνίν. I admit to some residual scepticism; as I said, the epenthetic /u/ in /munuxos/ could be copying the latter /u/, which wouldn't apply to /vnin/; and neither /mn/ nor /vn/ is always broken up in Greek: /mnimori/ "memorial stone", /keravnos/ "thunder". So if we could find a less awkward etymology for μουνίν, we'd use it.

Like, say, Venetian mona, as I had at first leapt at. But as I've argued, the evidence from Italiot Greek is that the Venetian word probably does have a Greek origin after all, so it doesn't help get rid of the problem.

So, let's see who Moutsous reports has had a go. I've already mentioned the later etymologies:

DuCange (1688): βουνή, from βουνός "hill, mound". As in mons Veneris

Moutsos cites Psichari and Rohlfs as rejecting it, and there's no good reason for /vun/ to go to /mun/.

Koraes (1835): μύλλον "lip"; cf. μυλλός "cake shaped like a vagina" (Athenaeus 14.647a), and μυλλάς "prostitute".

μυλλός and μυλλάς are derived from μύλλω "to fuck"; μύλλον apparently is unrelated, and there's no obvious reason for /myl/ to go to /mun/, either.

Hatzidakis (1892): εὐνή > *εὐνίον "bed" > *βνίν.

It seems a bit stretched, although I did point out the parallel in Modern Greek with carriola "cradle with wheels" > καριόλα "bed" > "whore". Hatzidakis knew it was stretched too, and didn't want to rule out mona

Filintas (1934): μνοῦς "down" > *μνίον

Moutsos dismisses this; the proposal "drew no attention as being entirely hypothetical". I'm not as sure: the form is semantically possible, and phononologically less indirect: we need only posit *mnin and not *vnin. The word did stick around long enough to show up in the Graeco-Latin glossaries as a gloss of pluma "feather", both as μνοῦς and as the vernacular diminutive μνούδιον.

Moutsos' proposal is that this is a nominalised infinitive of βινεῖν "to fuck". We have several such fossil infintives in Modern Greek: φαγεῖν "to eat" > φαγί > φαΐ "food", πιεῖν "to drink" > πιεί "drink" (dialectal); φιλεῖν "to love" > φιλί "kiss". Moutsos adds γαμήσειν "to get married > to fuck" > γαμήσι "fucking", parallel to λύσειν "to untie" > λύσι "untying" (dialectal); that I'm not as convinced of.

• On a scale of more to less phonological plausibility—intermediate steps postulated: we have (1) μνοῦς > *μνίον (2 steps); (2) βινεῖν (3 steps); (3) εὐνή > *εὐνίον (4 steps).
  
• On a scale of more to less semantic plausibility, we have (1) βινεῖν; (2) μνοῦς > *μνίον; (3) εὐνή > *εὐνίον.
  
• On a scale of morphological plausibility, we have (1) βινεῖν; (2) μνοῦς > *μνίον; (3) εὐνή > *εὐνίον. βινεῖν uses a nominalised infinitive, which is attested as a process, but rare. The dimunitives μνίον and εὐνίον are both unattested, and -ίον did stop being a productive suffix sometime in Early Middle Greek. At least μνούδιον shows the word stuck around in the vernacular for a while (the Graeco-Latin glossaries admit colloquial words); I see no evidence that εὐνή made it to the Koine.

On balance, all three have problems, but "bed" has the most problems; and I guess "fuck" has the least (though not by as much as Moutsos thinks).

The other evidence that Moutsos gives is:

• βινέω seems to have survived into Proto-Pontic: βιντώ "to be in a rut" (> βινητιῶ), βίντος "gadfly".
  
• Circumstantial influence of a nominalised τὸ βινεῖν in Alexis, cited in Plutarch:
  

  τὰς ἡδονὰς δεῖ συλλέγειν τὸν σώφρονα.
  τρεῖς δ’ εἰσὶν αἵ γε τὴν δύναμιν κεκτημέναι
  τὴν ὡς ἀληθῶς συντελοῦσαν τῷ βίῳ,
  τὸ φαγεῖν τὸ πιεῖν τὸ τῆς Ἀφροδίτης τυγχάνειν·
  τὰ δ’ ἄλλα προσθήκας ἅπαντα χρὴ καλεῖν
  The wise man knows what of all things is best,
  Whilst choosing pleasure he slights all the rest.
  He thinks life’s joys complete in these three sorts,
  To drink and eat, and follow wanton sports;
  And what besides seems to pretend to pleasure,
  If it betide him, counts it over measure (Alexis fr. 271 Kock; Plutarch: Moralia 21e)

  
  Bless those old-school translators for using verse. Damn clever: "to be lucky with Venus" (Ἀφροδίτης τυγχάνειν) as a euphemism for βινεῖν, which happens to rhyme with φαγεῖν and πιεῖν "to eat and drink"—two infinitives that happen to have survived as nouns in Modern Greek. I don't think this is overwhelming evidence that τὸ βινεῖν was a commonplace colloquial expression, let alone an expression that turned into "cunt"; but it's cute anyway.
  
• μουνίν and associated compounds are common in Early Modern Greek. True, but they're mostly in the Mass of the Beardless Man (μουνιοτζακάτος, καβουριομουνομέτωπος, σκατόμουνος), which is reasonably late, and doesn't prove anything about etymology.

Moutsos also derives Italiot munno (and Erice Sicilian monnu) from *μοῦνος, explained as an augmentative of μουνί attested in Modern Greek. The augmentative I know is the one Somavera recorded, μουνάρα; but slang.gr confirms the existence of μούνος, adding the improvised proverb κάλλιο μούνος και στο χέρι παρά κώλος και καρτέρι, "A bush in the hand is worth two arses in the bush". I think.) Now, it's true that switching genders can act as an augmentative, although that's because diminutives old and new are neuter, so this can be viewed as a back-formation. But a masculine could also be just an archaism.

To explain: Ancient masculine ποῦς, ποδός "foot" survives in Modern Greek through the diminutive neuter πόδιον > πόδι. The masculine πόδας is also found, and is how ποῦς, ποδός would have developed on its own (switching third to first declension). πόδας is normally interpreted as an augmentative: if people remember that a masculine was bigger than a neuter, and the neuter is now the normal term, then the masculine must be an augmentative of the neuter.

But πόδας is (I think!) the normal Cretan term for "foot", which suggests its an independent survival, unaffected by πόδιον. And that's a problem with munno. μουνίν looks, at first glance, like a diminutive of *μοῦνος. We know of no Ancient noun like μοῦνος. (We do have the Ionic μοῦνος "only, unique", corresponding to μόνος in the rest of Greek; but we've already rejected that track.) It's because we don't have an Ancient *μοῦνος that we've ended up looking at *vnin forms.

But Bova is evidence that there was a *μοῦνος form at some stage after all. And Moutsos' proposal has no room for a *μοῦνος. (Neither does Hatzidakis'; Filintas' does only with accent shift.) Bova could be doing the same gender-switch as Modern Greek, forming a local augmentative. But it really does look more like an original unattested Ancient form, of which μουνίν is the derived form.

But until someone comes up with an Ancient form that can explain *μοῦνος, Moutsos' βινεῖν is the best proposal on the table. Not overwhelmingly good or unproblematic; but that's the thing with etymology. And scholarship. Sometimes, we only have weak hypotheses. As the great Greek humourist (and amateur student of mythology) Nikos Tsiforos once put it, "Scholars argue when they don't know what's going on. When they do know what's going on, they just say '1 + 1 = 2', and they're done."
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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

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.)
...Read more

TLG updates

The TLG has just released a new update to its corpus. As of tonight, the automatic recognition of lemmata in the TLG which I've been working on has just reached 95% of all wordforms. With these two milestones, I'll be posting a few things about the current corpus; I've already put up some Wordles, as you will have seen.

First, about the new texts.

• Early Modern Greek is well represented in the update. Readers of this blog will have noticed as much, because I've spent some time dealing with the peculiarities of those texts. Romances are the genre that attracts the most scholarly interest—they make the most sense as literature to contemporary readers. Accordingly, this update includes redaction α of Livistros and Rodamni as recently published by Panagiotis Agapitos of U Cyprus (who also writes Byzantine detective novels); the War of Troy (on which I've already posted); and the four redactions of the Tale of Belisarius.
  
• Jumping forward a couple of centuries, the update also includes Cretan Renaissance drama: George Chortatzes' tragedy Erophile, and the intermedios from Erophile, retelling Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.
  1595 isn't the latest date of TLG texts; the Chapbook of Alexander the Great (h/t Diver of Sinks) was published in 1750, and while the collections of monastic documents are normally late Byzantine and Ottoman, one collection goes up to 1968. But Chortatzes is the first representative of Cretan dialect, and I was quite happy to tweak the lemmatiser to accomodate it.
  I'll pause to note something which shouldn't be an oddity, but is. Chortatzes writes his stage directions in the same Cretan dialect as his dialogue. Of course he would; our stage directions are in the same language as the rest of the text. But now that there is a Standard Greek, and Cretan isn't it, that comes across as quizzical. If anyone now writes drama in dialect (not Cretan, but possibly Pontic, and certainly Cypriot), the metalanguage of the drama is going to be Standard Greek.
  That's because the metalanguage is the dramatist's own voice; and while hillbilly dialect might be good enough for the dramatists' characters, it will not do for their own directions. I'd imagine it's the same for other Dachsprache languages (language variants under the "roof" of a prestige language), like say German or Italian dialect.
  
• A few texts are recent re-editions. Moeris' Atticist dictionary has been updated. By telling us which colloquial forms not to use, Moeris and the other Atticists (Phrynichus is the main one) tell us a lot about what their colloquial language actually looked like.
  There is also a new edition of Cyril of Alexandria's Paschal Letters, and Eudocia's Homeric Centos. The centos are rearrangements of verses from an old poem, to tell a new story—in this case, Homer rearranged into an account of the Passion of Christ. This sounds like a very postmodern thing to do. But then again, there's nothing new in postmodernism, apart from its bankruptcy of an intellectual programme, as it magpies any flotsam that gets it out of having to tell a story.
  Not that you need to hear about my cultural conservatism.
  
• The TLG also has an updated edition of the fragments of John of Antioch. There has been a controversy about whether the fragments attributed to John belong to one or two authors (there are two different linguistic registers in what we have); as a result, we're in the odd situation by Classical standards of having two new editions of the author, within three years, from the same publisher: Roberto 2005 and Mariev 2008. (The Bryn Mawr Classical Review gives context in its review of Mariev.) The TLG has gone with Roberto, which considers both registers to belong to the same author; that has the added advantage of not throwing half the fragments out of the corpus.
  
• In gathering up bits left out from Middle Byzantine authors, the update also includes Michael Psellus' commentary on Aristotle's Physics, and Constantine Manasses' Moral Poem.
  
• Finally, the update includes the irascible John Tzetzes' retelling of the Theogony.
  We already have the original Theogony from Hesiod; so Tzetzes' retelling might have some interest for cultural history, but is not telling us much we don't already know. Tzetzes' retelling has attracted attention for different reasons. Tzetzes was Georgian on his mother's side; and he sees fit to show off his command of foreign languages, in the epilogue to his poem. That makes his Theogony the earliest attestation of Ossetian. (And in his loose Greek translation, as linked, it may well be one of the first attestations of Greek μουνίν: er, "pudendum muliebre".)

...Read more

The 23 to 29 Apolloniuses of Classical Literature

I'm parking this posting here for lack of somewhere else to park it. (It's not strictly language-related, but I'm realising philology posts are probably better pitched here than in The Other Place.)

In my day-job capacity, I'm posting on the fluidity of identity in repositories—how, particularly if you're relying on computer deduplication of identity, there will always be some tentativeness about who is identified as the same person. Repositories have to deal with that tentativeness, rather than hardcoding identity. This is an issue Wikipedia often comes up against, having to split off one article subject from another.

And I was reminded of the morass of Apolloniuses in Classical literature, particularly among medical authors. There are no less than potentially 13 medical authors we know of called Apollonius, according to the TLG Canon of Greek Authors and Works (3rd ed.). Potentially 13, potentially just 9; f.i.q. "possibly the same person as", appears several times in the listing:

• 0680 Apollonius of Memphis, iii BC, cited in Galen
  
• 0741 Apollonius f.i.q. Apollonius of Memphis, iii BC?, cited in Aëtius
  
• 0660 Apollonius of Citium, i BC
  
• 0792 Apollonius of Pergamum, I AD?, cited in Oribasius
  
• 0739 Apollonius f.i.q. Apollonius of Citium or Apollonius of Pergamum, i BC/I AD?, cited in Alexander of Tralles
  
• 0789 Claudius Apollonius, I AD, cited in Galen
  
• 0747 Apollonius Archistrator, f.i.q. Claudius Apollonius, I AD?, cited in Galen
  
• 0782 Apollonius of Tarsus, before II AD, cited in Galen
  
• 0810 Apollonius &
• Alcimion, I AD, cited in Galen
  
• 0790 Apollonius Mys, i BC
  
• ?? Apollonius Opsis
  
• 0817 Apollonius Organicus, f.i.q. Apollonius Opsis, i BC?, cited in Galen
  
• 0791 Apollonius Ther, f.i.q. Apollonius Opsis, i BC?, cited in Oribasius

(Note: links are to the Catalan Wikipedia.)

Our problem in working out who is who is that almost all of them are cited in passing in other medical authors, so we have very little to go on. The Online TLG Canon only represents works published under a distinct author's name, even if only as Testimonia. So it only refers to two of them, Of Citium and Mys. The other 11 authors also have Testimonia, in Galen and Oribasius and Alexander of Tralles and Aëtius, but they haven't been published independently.

So the 2009 Online Canon has more limited coverage of types of author than the 1990 Print Canon (though a longer time range). The Print Canon includes all ancient authors we know about. The Online Canon only includes those authors with texts represented in the corpus, and that is determined by an editor publishing text under that author's name. So if an Apollonius has been cited in Galen, and an editor publishes that citation as a Fragment of Apollonius, Apollonius will have an entry in the Online Canon, and will link to the published text in the corpus. If we only have secondary source material on the Apollonius from Galen, and an editor publishes that material as Testimonia on Apollonius, the Online Canon will still have an entry, because the point of the author entry is to navigate the corpus.

If OTOH an editor has never combed Galen for Apollonius, the Print Canon will still mention the Apollonius as cited in Galen (as a cross-reference), but the Online Canon will not have an entry for him, because it doesn't have a discrete text for him. That places the Online Canon notion of authors at the mercy of their editorial history; but the Online Canon is documenting edited texts.

The 9–13 medical Apolloniuses in the TLG Canon are joined there by 16 other Apolloniuses in Ancient literature:

• 1167 Apollonius (Biographer), wrote a Life of Aeschines
  
• 0394 Apollonius (Comic)
  
• 1404 Apollonius (Grammarian)
  
• 1170 Apollonius of Aphrodisia, historian
  
• 1169 Apollonius of Athens, another historian
  
• 2283 Apollonius, yet another historian
  
• ?? Apollonius (a mathematician), f.i.q. Apollonius of Tyana, putative author of the Apocalypse of Adam
  
• 0569 Apollonius (Paradoxographer)
  
• 0550 Apollonius of Perga, mathematician
  
• 0619 Apollonius of Tyana, philosopher
  
• 1171 Apollonius of Ephesus, theologian
  
• 1168 Apollonius the Sophist, author of Homeric Lexicon
  
• 4259 Apollonius Cronus, philosopher
  
• 0082 Apollonius Dyscolus, grammarian
  
• 2491 Apollonius Molon, historian
  
• 0001 Apollonius of Rhodes, Epic poet

The English Wikipedia knows of 16 non-medical Apolloniuses (but five of them are not in the list above), and no less than 21 physicians called Apollonius, since they're not restricted to medical authors. And Wikipedia is just as aware of the f.i.q. issue. The German Wikipedia's list has 24 Apolloniuses, and they don't seem to overlap completely with the English list. The Catalan Wikipedia's list wins, with 18 medical and 39 non-medical Apolloniuses. And its list is even less clean.

Even adding in places of birth, nicknames, and the genres they wrote in, there is difficulty in differentiating these Apolloniuses. If we had enough metadata on them, after all, instead of passing mentions in Galen, we wouldn't be seeing all those f.i.q. For 0741 Apollonius and 0739 Apollonius, we're reduced to distinguishing them by who else they might be confused with. And the medical Apolloniuses may all be obscure (only Of Citium gets his own English Wikipedia page); but the other Apolloniuses include a major Late Epic poet (0001), the founder of Western grammar (0082), a major figure in Roman religious history (0619), a primary source in Homeric scholarship (1168), and an important contributor to the development of 3D geometry (0550). If it wasn't for places of birth and nicknames, we would not know who we were talking about.

Things are slightly better now with the invention of surnames, and recording years of birth in the Library of Congress record. But only slightly: confusion is certainly still possible. There is now a profusion of identities that people write under in cyberspace; if anything, that's now making things even worse. But that's a topic for my day-job blog...
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