12.14: Three favorite words and Greek grammar

[starlady]

christycorr asked about my three favorite words, in any language.

My favorite word in Latin is, and has been since probably the second month I started learning Latin (in, god, 1994), olim. It's a preposition used to introduce stories that means something like "once upon a time." I just have always really liked the sound of it, though thinking about it now, I'm not sure in all my reading I've ever actually encountered it in an actual text. Runner-ups: most of Catullus' vocabulary, and some of the verbs we only know from Pompeiian graffiti.

There are a lot of words I really love in Greek--most of them are nouns, Greek prepositions are not my friend, for reasons we'll get into later--but I think my favorite is still ἡ θάλασσα, thalassa, which means the sea, Homer's wine-dark sea (Homer gets a lot of flack for his color metaphors, but color terms are actually really complicated to translate in general, and the epithet refers to intensity of the color, not the hue itself). It's also the source of the English word thalassocracy, which is a great word in and of itself.

My favorite word in Japanese might be 紫 murasaki, which is the word for purple. It's a noun, which I think is pretty cool--in Japanese some colors are adjectives and some are nouns.

I really love a lot of English words, especially the old weird Anglo-Saxon ones, many of which Twitter has recently been unearthing, such as "dustsceawung," and the one about lying awake in bed at night worrying. Also words like "bumpershoot," which is the best possible word for an umbrella, you must agree. English is pretty cool.

troisroyaumes asked about my favorite aspect of Greek grammar. I should warn you, my opinions on this subject are somewhat unorthodox.

I think the single coolest aspect of classical Attic Greek (which is what they spoke in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, and is the Greek that you will learn at the college level, and is basically the hardest version of Greek to have ever existed in its 3500-odd-year history) is actually one that's so rare that it's never actually taught, just declined in tables in the back of the book for reference: the dual. This is a mode of speech (mostly pronouns, and some verb endings) that two people use when they are extraordinarily close in purpose/intention--it's basically a unified way of saying "we." You mostly see it in drama--the most famous example is probably in The Libation Bearers. Electra and Orestes shift to the dual after they've recognized each other and agreed that Orestes will kill their mother Clytemnaestra for her murder of their father Agamemnon (and Cassandra, but no one cares about her).

Classical Attic Greek is extraordinarily difficult because it's extraordinarily complex, which, although it makes it a pain in the ass to learn, also means that the language is capable of extraordinary precision and subtlety. It's no accident that most philosophers of the ancient world wrote in Greek, because Latin simply doesn't have the structures to express complicated ideas with the same rigor. (You can try, but then you end up like Lucretius, writing an Epicurean epic in dactylic hexameters and causing students of Latin forever after to curse your name and the atoms and the clay mask all at once. I love Lucretius, but De rerum natura is no joke.) Though I shed blood doing flashcards before the exams and beat my head against my books more than once, learning Greek was a really good thing, because I understand grammar much better and also because all other Greek ever is comparatively easy.

My least favorite aspect of Greek grammar is that the old Indo-European instrumental case (which became the ablative in Latin) dropped out a little bit before the Homeric epics were written down (some of the lines preserve old forms including it, as poetry is wont to do), meaning that its functions were absorbed by the genitive, accusative, and dative cases, meaning that it's impossible to commit a stable set of prepositions for each case to memory the way it is in Latin, because they're all all over the place. You don't know what you got til it's gone.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

OE has a dual! One sees it in rather less rarified contexts, but it is rare enough to carry special emphasis. I like it. And OE has a residual instrumentive, as does Old Icelandic, which puts those types of use well over a millennium later than their obsolescence from Greek; most of the Icelandic texts I've read are C13.

ETA Random curiosity--I have seen speculation that "murasaki" is a loan from "murex." Have you thoughts?

[starlady]

Re: OE dual - cool! (And the instrumental dropped out of Greek in roughly C10BCE...so that's more than a millennium. :P)

I have not seen that before, but it would totally make sense! Japan was the end of the Silk Road in the C5-C8, and that could account for it being a noun.

[christycorr]

Ohh, wow, such amazing choices! <3 Olim! Instrumental case! Dual! You have out-geeked my every expectation :D

[starlady]

I'm a big nerd. Equally to the point, I spent so long doing Latin and Greek that I picked up a ton of random stuff along the way. :)

[mrkinch]

Absolutely fascinating!

(I blinked at olim because it's one of the few words I know in Hebrew. It's a nice word; I imagine it has been used by many languages.)

[kaigou]

Is Korean among your (many) languages, too? Because I've always wondered about the use of 'our' in Korean, which sounds like it's parallel to your description of the dual. Most of what I've gotten from the Korean use is context so I could be off, but my impression has been that this 'our' (as in, 'our Jane' or 'our Joe') is used when speaking of someone else, who is not the person you're speaking to. It seems to be implying such a closeness (like parent to child, or very old good friends) that it borders on possessive, but I'm told the english use of 'our' doesn't quite get it.

All I know is that it's used as a signal, too: ie, when a parent says "our" of their child, when speaking to the child's future spouse. By saying it to the boyfriend/girlfriend, the parent is now including/recognizing that 3rd person in the overall intimate (family-level) relationship. It's a very subtle way to say, "okay, fine, I accept that you're one-of-us, now."

I've always been curious about that facet of Korean, since I've never seen similar in the neighboring languages. At least, no one's ever pointed out anything like to me in Japanese, and I can't recall ever stumbling over it in Mandarin.

[thistleingrey]

My own grasp of Korean isn't strong enough to step through your examples, but my initial reaction is that use of "uri" ("wuli" to linguists using Yale romanization) is complicated by historical contingency. By era, to sound less formal about it. It's a taught thing to say "our nation," for example, not something that the language's structure imposes upon the speaker by analogy.

You may find this thread of interest (from bottom to top); most of the posters are scholars of Korean and/or Japanese, though not linguists. (King is.)

[starlady]

That sounds like "waga" in Japanese, which is mostly heard in the anachronistic "wagakuni" ("our country," i.e. Japan) and sometimes does duty as the royal "we." Which is not quite the same as the dual in Greek, because that actually has special verb endings and such.

[thistleingrey]

Perhaps like it in a Venn-overlap way. I would say to you "uri ŏmma" when referring to my mother, more to show that I get on with her well than to intimate that she's yours in any way. I think all but one of my cousins would use "uri" when referring to the nation of Korea if they were speaking to you for some reason; the one who wouldn't is a professor with fairly good English, and she'd remember that you're an English-speaker and use polite-my. [For some reason I gave polite-I a moment ago instead.] "Uri" is both grandiose and humble, which is why people like talking about it. :)

The thing about historical contingency, for me, is something I haven't seen described analytically in adequate ways in a Western language--perhaps it's been done in Korean, but it's slippery no matter where one discusses it. My mother's sense of "uri" differs noticeably from my cousins' senses--they're 3-15 years older than I--and the latter differ again from what shows up within the past ten years' worth of kdrama dialogue. When one was taught in school and whether/how one's been employed in Korea have much to do with "uri" reinforcement, IOW.