Greek Particles (1990)

https://specgram.com/Babel.I.2/07.sriyatha.greek.html

by veqq • 1 year ago

60 38 1 year ago

ggm• 1 year ago

A.k.A hesitation markers, non-lexical vocables, disfluence or nonfluence, filler..

It's entertaining how many different labels uh, well kinda um.. names I guess, er, anyway how many er ways to say these thingamabobs there, er, well are.

Wikipedia posits that even neanderthals might have said Ummm.

readthenotes1• 1 year ago

Don't keep us hanging, what might the Neanderthals have said?

veqq• 1 year ago

A.k.A hesitation markers, non-lexical vocables, disfluence or nonfluence, filler

It's satirical.

verisimi• 1 year ago

Strange article.

Pretty sure the ancient greek translation is wrong in part too.

They say: 'theōrhiā' means 'review', whereas it is obvious to me that it means 'theory'.

arnsholt3• 1 year ago

The Speculative Granmarian is the premier journal of satirical linguistics, so that’s probably intentional. =)

baruz5• 1 year ago

I assume you’re joking, but θεωρίᾱ does mean a “looking at” or “a beholding” or “contemplation” from the verb θεωρέω, “to look at” or “observe.” Aristotle liked to use it for speculation or “theorizing” in the mental sense, but apparently that was due to Pythagoras’s influence.

Checked my Bolchazy-Carducci reprint of Crosby and Schaeffer, and they do indeed immediately gloss θεωρίᾱ as “review.”

stavros• 1 year ago

Yes, "I want to propose a theory" literally means "I want to propose a way of looking at things", or "I want to propose a viewpoint".

Peteragain• 1 year ago

Apparently Tai uses quite a bit of infix (not prefixes, or suffixes, but infixes). In in English we have infixes, but they are all expletives of the Nixon style: "Kings-bloody-cross" (a railway station in Sydney), "absa-f..king-luteley" ...

decimalenough• 1 year ago

Semitic languages like Arabic & Hebrew have triconsonantal roots where the vowels dance around them to change meaning. k-t-b "to write" becomes kataba "he wrote", katib "writer", maktab "office", maktaba "library", istaktaba "had a copy made" etc etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root

sapphicsnail• 1 year ago

I really wish English had something like Greek ge, which is something like a sarcasm/snark marker. Socrates uses it a lot.

arnsholt3• 1 year ago

Oh, but English does have a sarcasm marker! It's just not a word, instead it's typically marked by using non-standard pronunciation like creaky voice or lengthening vowels. The problem is of course that this stuff doesn't have an orthography, thus the use of stuff like /s online.

kgeist• 1 year ago

Is it really a sarcasm marker? I've always thought it's equivalent to že in Slavic languages (both probably from the same PIE *g(h)e), and in those languages, it can be used sarcastically, but its main meaning is 'in fact', 'as for X'. For example in Russian: on že glup = 'he is, in fact, a fool' or 'as for him, he's a fool - didn't you know?' Similarly, dictionaries translate the Greek ge as 'in fact, indeed.' If you mentally replace most instances of Ancient Greek ge with the Slavic že in Greek texts, it all starts making a lot of sense (if you're a speaker of a Slavic language).

P.S. There's also a limiting sense in the dictionary, with the example given:

    Greek: ho de ge (+ participle)
    Russian: tot že (kto)
    English: but the one (who)

baruz5• 1 year ago

Lest anyone take this article at face value, please note that it was published in _Speculative Grammarian_, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”

The range of meanings for the Greek entautha, gar, and de are all well-understood.

arnsholt3• 1 year ago

Classical Greek is well outside my field, but one of the things I love about SpecGram when it deals with things I do know, the jokes also have a kernel of truth to them. And in other classical languages I'm more familiar with, there is (IMO) an argument to be made that the texts should be translated more "orally" than they frequently are. There are probably many reasons for this, but I think one of them is that because they are Classical and Important there's a sense of reverence that makes us want to translate them Seriously(tm).

Of course you're entirely right that Greek particles are not some unfathomable mystery. The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).

dash22• 1 year ago

So what trend in modern linguistics is this guy satirizing? Do they like to pretend that well-known things like entautha and oun are mysteries?

thaumasiotes3• 1 year ago

The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).

The systematic study of Sanskrit also goes back literal millennia. Why would the understanding of the particles differ?

To the degree that we believe we understand the ancient Greek particles better, how do we know that's true? It's a dead language; the corpus is the corpus.

gwd4• 1 year ago

I've been learning Biblical Greek, and that was my impression too: The particles he list don't sound at all like the random "uh" and "ah" that he's translating them into.

That said, I do think there's a point that a lot of things end up getting translated in the wrong "register" and lose some of the meaning. One message John the Baptist sends to Jesus is rendered in my translation, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect another?" But in the Greek there's no "should", and the whole sentence is a lot shorter. To me it has much more of a "get off your but and do something" implication; more like, "Hey, are you the one, or are we looking for someone else?"

Same in another place, where where Jesus says something my translation renders, "Listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you: [About his upcoming death]" The Greek is a bit more colorful: "Take these words of mine and put them into your ears:" Has much more a sense of exasperation.

binary132• 1 year ago

That’s actually pretty funny and interesting.

thaumasiotes3• 1 year ago

The Greek is a bit more colorful: "Take these words of mine and put them into your ears:" Has much more a sense of exasperation.

Maybe. Another possibility (in general) is that that's the idiomatic thing to say in the source language, and it only sounds colorful to non-native speakers.

titanomachy• 1 year ago

“Ei su o erchómenos, e prosdokómen héteron?”. Yeah, definitely simpler. Mostly because Greek can build up such rich nouns, I think: “erchómenos” sounds more like something a real person would say than “one who was to come”.

baruz5• 1 year ago

You probably know this, but ancient Greek does not use auxiliary verbs to the extent that English does, as it uses inflection to encode tense, mode, and aspect information. The prosdokōmen could be interpreted as present indicative (“are we expecting?”), yes, but it could also be subjunctive deliberative, of which Smyth sez:

1805. Deliberative Subjunctive.—The deliberative subjunctive (present or aorist) is used in questions when the speaker asks what he is to do or say (negative μή).
…
N.—The subjunctive question does not refer to a future fact, but to what is, under the present circumstances, advantageous or proper to do or say.

So “should we expect?” or “are we (supposed) to expect?” are valid interpretations of προσδοκῶμεν.

"Take these words of mine…"

As a sibling comment mentions, this is interpreted (eg, Zerwick and Grosvenor on gLuke) as an idiom, but from Aramaic (I don’t know enough about Semitic languages to say) akin to “before your very eyes” in English.

YeGoblynQueenne3• 1 year ago

Satirical intent aside it's true that the way some ancient writers use particles makes it much harder to read and understand their writings, to me at least. To be clear, I'm a native Greek speaker and I can comfortably read back to at least the Koine Greek of the Gospels. But I've tried Xenophon in particular, who's mentioned in the article and I remember it being hard going, to the point I gave up and continued with the modern Greek translation (I had an edition with the ancient and modern text on opposite pages).

I distinctly remember being very confused about the spray of particles interjected between nouns and verbs, and trying to shut out the noise of the particles to be able to parse a sentence. I probably got a headache.

The problem is that, the meaning of "ενταύθα", "ουν", "ον", "γε", "δε", "ην", etc may be well known if you take them as individual words, but when you string them together they're apparently trying to say ... something. And that something is opaque and incomprehensible, like an ancient joke for which you have no context.

epilys• 1 year ago

I agree it depends on the writer and their cultural and educational background. Another example is Thucydides (which as also a native Greek speaker, find funny that anglophones pronounce as Thoo-see-dee-dees, but I digress). Thucydides was considered even in eras closer to him than to as as too abstract/verbose.

Meanwhile Plutarch enriches the laconic myth corpus by reporting that the Lacedaemonians were content with replying to a letter with only the words "About what you wrote: no." Writing style is part of the message.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

Growing up bilingual, I personally always found Greek more verbose than English even in brevity. It's good for avoiding ambiguity and getting your intent across but sometimes bad for colloquial communication.

nonrandomstring• 1 year ago

Editing audio interviews for podcast I sometimes remove lots of "particles" as the author calls them (I just call them "ums and ahs"), TFA poses a question. Do particles have "meaning"? Don't think I ever heard a discussion of that in any linguistics class, but they do have an effect. Working in radio/podcast you get quite a deep feel for speech as more than just words.

I've heard there are effective "de-um" plugins, but I prefer to work with them by hand because they create non-verbal signals, mood, excitement, confidence or lack of confidence about a statement. So often I decide to leave them in. They can signal relations between multiple interviewees, like deference or conversational leadership. Some speakers are impossible to 'de-um' as it's so woven into their speech.

internet_points• 1 year ago

(The article is satire. Particles are an ill-defined class, they may have "meaning" or change the meaning of something, like "up" in "look up!", or they may say something about the speaker's attitude towards the statement or they may be required syntactically e.g. when posing a question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_particle#Modern_me... )

BiteCode_dev• 1 year ago

Unrelated but somewhat funny:

I read someone jokingly proposing we pronunciate "particles" and "molecules" like we do for greek nouns (think "hercules").

And now with these "articles", I'm going to do this in my head for one more day.

Klaster_1• 1 year ago

This is exactly what crossed my mind as I was reading the title. Learning greek makes you perceive so many thing in different light!

YeGoblynQueenne3• 1 year ago

> 4. Hildegarde swallowed, yeah, an entire disk drive.

Well now I must know.

sramsay• 1 year ago

When translating ancient Greek in class, one often slips into a weird translation-ese that would be pretty funny if you didn't know what was going on. You end up saying things like: "The going-into-the-temple men were on the one hand brave and on the other hand afraid."

wduquette• 1 year ago

Well, I'm glad I read these comments rather than trumpeting my new found knowledge of Greek particles to all and sundry. You have my thanks.

Greek Particles (1990)

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