sauvage noble

French ‘noble savage’—An Austronesian’s Adventures in Altertumswissenschaft and Indogermanistik

June 28, 2005

LSA 1.2

Before I do my homework ...

Inquit
A high concentration of (contextually) funny phrases:

On Sanskrit verb conjugation: “There are many ways to make a present in Sanskrit. Indian grammarians identify ten classes. You can make that more, depending on how you want to cut up the pie.” [Emphasis mine: unintended pun on PIE = Proto-Indo-European.]

On noting the time remaining and the remaining daughters to survey: “Let’s stick to Tocharian B. That’s enough to hold you for today.” [Vel sim.]

On ä [= ə] in Tocharian transliteration/transcription: “A useful German loanword, Fremdvokal.”

On the *optative as the source of the Tocharian B imperfect in kärsanoy ‘knew-3sg.’, and the connection of modality and iterativity, as in English would: “If that were true, I would go to the movies immediately to see Batman Begins.” [Followed by an example involving would as an auxiliary for an imperfect indicative and Star Wars being seen iteratively.]

On the r in the Classical Armenian imperfect gtanēr ‘found-3sg.’: “This r here doesn’t cry out ‘I am the Indo-European imperfect ending!’”

On the conservatism of Baltic in phonology and nominal morphology but innovation in verbal morphology: “The verb is where Baltic let go.” [The third person isn’t overtly distinguished for person and number, e.g. vẽda ‘he/she/it/they-du./they-pl. led’.]

When asked about why the survey of the daughter language’s verbal architectures was framed as:

  • PIE *present > present
  • *imperfect > innovated imperfect-like tense
  • *aorist > aorist-like tense (also < *perfect etc. or innovated)

i.e., as degeneration of a rich proto-system, vs. as augmentation of a less rich proto-system: “I don’t want to say something like Latin passed through a stage like Germanic. Then they thought, ‘O god, we need an imperfect!’”

The things I learned or tried to learn ...
Only one class today: the PIE verb. Overview of available comprehensive treatments of the verb: no such thing. Useful collections of data in LIV2 (Rix’s German school only), Sihler (outdated, follows Cowgill), inter alia. The three stem-types forming the bases of the five PIE “tenses”; scale of verbal-morphological conservatism (high to low)/innovation (low to high): Greek and Indo-Iranian >> Italic, Celtic, Slavic, Tocharian, Armenian >> Germanic, Baltic, Anatolian.

Devoirs
We’ve been given the choice between a three-page paper or an easy one-page take-home exam. Yay!

Now, for Historical Phonology, we’re supposed to e-mail questions on the day’s lecture before the following day’s. I couldn’t really come up with anything, except in connection with something that’s not sitting right with me. It seems, in my incomplete understanding, that Stratal Optimality Theory wants to extend recessive verbal accentuation rules to other word-types in Greek. This requires positing a class of deaccented stems. So, /περί-πλό-ου/ → περίπλου, *περιπλόυ ‘sailing around-gen.’, /χαριεντ/ → χάριεν, *χαρίεν ‘with pleasure’; /δύσ-δάμαρτ/ → δύσδαμαρ, *δυσδάμαρ ‘ill-wedded’; /οἰνό-γάλακτ/ → οἰνόγαλα, *οἰνογάλα ‘wine-milk’; /ἄμφω-ὀδόντ/ → ἄμφωδον, *ἀμφῶδον ‘with teeth on both [jaws]’. I have no objection to a deaccented stem-class, which I first saw proposed for Russian. But the examples were funny: χάριεν “as Adv., was written proparox. ... in Att., acc. to Hdn. Gr. 1.350 ... but no example is quoted; neut. as Adj. is proparox. acc. to Suid.” (s.v. χαρίεις, LSJ); I remember compounds having accentuation patterns depending on type, e.g. bahuvrīhis are accented a certain way (details not within mental or manual reach), so the removal of the two lexical pitches and assignment of a new regular pitch strikes as strange. But, then again, Greek is my left hand.

Historical linguistics today
Which made me think of the basic nature of the divide between, e.g. Indo-Europeanists and “historical” OT’ists. Traditional historical linguistics is concerned with getting the description down, establishing the data, i.e. answering the question “what were the changes?”, and post-generative historical linguistics is concerned with accounting for “how and why were the changes?”. The former can be impressionistic regarding “how and why”, and the latter can play fast and loose with the “what”. I’m looking forward to Prof. Melchert’s Collitz lecture. (It’s striking to see how sparse the traditional classes are vs. the post-generative ones, that there’re more of us attending their classes than the other way around, at least based on my schedule and who I recognize.)

Alibi
A hearty welcome-back to Chris of ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti!

I look forward to reading the new Sappho, West’s Greek for which can be had apud William Blathers [PDF] and Glaukôpido[n] [HTML] (via rogueclassicism).

[UPDATE: File under Alibi, some overzeal from “Poem by ancient Greek lesbian published”, Gay.com (Tuesday, June 28, 2005, 6:42 p.m. [via PlanetOut]):

[...]

But so far Sappho has had few pieces published, thanks in part to religious reluctance to protect her work through the ages.

Speaking to the Reuters news agency, Oxford University’s Martin West said the poet was known for enjoying sexual relationships with other women.

[...]

“They seem to have had some sort of society in which they could be in each other’s company quite a lot, rather cut off from men,” he said. “But they were clearly able to have plenty of fun.”

Coming from the island of Lesbos, Sappho is credited with bringing a new subject matter to Greek poetry, and is often seen as the female equivalent of Socrates or Homer.

(Emphases mine.) Oh, where to begin! Uh, what’s this thing about “religious reluctance”? Actually, if you can read Greek, the fragments of Sappho’s poetry have been available for quite a while. If indeed “religious reluctance”, the same goes for any randy Greek and Latin poetry. And, besides, it’s the nature of the media bearing the poetess’s work that has prevented her publication (termed as if she were still productive!). I do believe this may be the first and only time Prof. West is quoted in Gay.com. As far as classroom experiences go, there are very few things on the same order of notability as sexual innuendo in discussions of literature with a senior British Classicist! Now, I love Sappho and all, but I wouldn’t quite equate her with Socrates (sc. Plato, whose work I have lasting dislike for and avoid, along with any other philosophical prose) and Homer! 11:14 p.m. EDT, 28 June 2005.]

[UPDATE: Cf. Maeveenroute’s second day, esp. for cool quotes. 12:52 a.m. EDT, 29 June 2005.]

Grrr ... that Armenian form was causing some Blogger error. When I hit “Publish Post”, the post was getting truncated at the long-e. Seems fine now, but ....

3:00 PM
references

16 comments:

  posted at 3:51 PM :

Gosh, I am jealous. The classes sound fascinating.

My crisis right now is to decide if I want to attend the giant Historical Lingustics conference that'll be in Madison next month (which I am calling, based on the program, the festival of grammaticalization). Since I'm not presenting, I'd have to drop some cash and take a week off work.

by Wm Annis

  posted at 3:58 PM :

Cool! If you were in the area, you could just crash some or all of it, I’m sure. Though a week off work is an issue. (There’s an awful lot of Germanic, in addition to the IE.)

by caelestis

  posted at 4:03 PM :

Oh, I see Claire Bowern of Anggarrgoon is presenting. Perhaps we can settle for attending vicariously, if she blogs extensively about the conference.

by caelestis

  posted at 4:17 PM :

Somehow I knew I'd be seeing a few of those quotes again. ;-) The Fremdvokal thing actually made me a bit nostalgic... Jay made quite a [comic] fuss over the word/concept in class last semester.

Regarding the traditional vs. post-gen historical split, kind of a pity, isn't it? One of my favorite hobby horses to beat on (to borrow Melchert's mixed metaphor from yesterday) is how much the historical & theoretical sides can learn from one another. Can't we all just get along...?

by Bridget

  posted at 4:43 PM :

Hehe. Yeah, I was trying my darndest to get every word down. :P

It is quite a pity. And the nature of the fields prevents any one scholar to be master of everything, so we do have to depend on one another.

by caelestis

  posted at 3:02 AM :

Oh, Thanks, a thousand times Thanks for the link to the original version of the Sappho poem.

I do prefer to think that she had loads of fun (she and her disciples), on their sunny island.

When I took Advanced Ancient Greek in high school, we did a long module on the earlier poets. It included at least half a dozen of them (Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Archilochos ... -- sorry for the approximate Latinization, I'm trying to find out what form is used in English), but no Sappho. I asked my teacher and he said that the fragments we have were to fragmentary, but with the sort of shrug that led me to believe this wasn't the entire truth.

Anyway, I never became a Classics scholar (not any kind of scholar at the moment -- how I envy you), so I never followed up, except for buying the Loeb bilingual edition. (I discovered early that Greek or Latin bilingual editions with English as the second language are much easier to read than those that translate into my native German. Damn 19th century Altphilologen and their tortured language.)

by chris

  posted at 7:11 AM :

Regarding the PIE verb: if Sihler is outdated, how should I feel about Fortson's textbook?

by Wm Annis

  posted at 9:15 AM :

Hmm ... maybe there is something about the assertion regarding “religious reluctance” Hehe, Altphilologen! Well, I must always fight the temptation to regard my allegedly enviable self as mere pretend-scholar.

(Transcription of Greek names into English can be Latin-y, e.g. Archilochus, Herodotus, etc. or Greek-y, e.g. Arkhilokhos, Herodotos, etc. It’s more often a mix: famous authors more Latin-y, others Greek-y. Then there’s the case of Simonides vs. Seimonides, to distinguish the two poets with homographic names in Greek.)

The thing about Sihler is, at least for serious work, given the Cowgillian approach and lack of any references, not more useful than as a collection of the data. Fortson is a very different book, but I feel it is the best English-language introduction to the study.

by caelestis

  posted at 12:57 PM :

The Greek example that you criticize is based on my "Accent, syllable structure, and morphology in Ancient Greek" (2003), downloadable from:

http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/
Papers/opacity2.pdf

I hope you'll find the article more convincing than my brief presentation in class.

by kiparsky

  posted at 1:20 PM :

Thank you, Prof. Kiparsky! I look forward to reading more. (Oh, I hope I didn’t offend or annoy, which was not my intention!)

by caelestis

  posted at 11:18 AM :

outdated, follows Cowgill

Hey, I studied with Cowgill -- nobody knew more IE than that man!

(Why, yes, that was 30 years ago, but that doesn't make it outdated, does it? Does it??)

As a staunch (if lapsed) IE-ist, I have to say a thousand times better to have solid facts with insufficient theory than brilliant theory with undependable facts.

by language

  posted at 12:16 PM :

Hehe. I should clarify: Cowgillianism does not necessarily imply outdatedness. But, indeed, in the last 30 years, analyses have changed, especially regarding the verb. In contrast, Cowgill/Mayrhofer’s remains the best comprehensive treatment of IE segmental phonology.

And I second your emotion.

by caelestis

  posted at 8:38 PM :

When I took Advanced Ancient Greek in high school, we did a long module on the earlier poets. It included at least half a dozen of them (Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Archilochos ... -- sorry for the approximate Latinization, I'm trying to find out what form is used in English), but no Sappho. I asked my teacher and he said that the fragments we have were to fragmentary, but with the sort of shrug that led me to believe this wasn't the entire truth.

My high school teacher, a woman, made sure I read several Greek passages either about or by women - the story of Nausicaa was another. Sappho is one of the few Greek poets whose name I remember. I also remember my teacher explaining the various meanings of κολπος - the lap, bosom, fold of your clothes, womb, etc. a truly feminine word.

by Suzanne E. McCarthy

  posted at 8:44 PM :

I forgot to indicate that I was quoting Chris. I hope that is obvious. I am not quite sure why my Greek and Latin studies were so uncensored. I know my teacher was quite religious but she seemed to enjoy the naughty bits.

by Suzanne E. McCarthy

  posted at 8:51 PM :

Thanks, Suzanne. (Yes, I was wondering why [in the e-mail notification of the comment] the first paragraph was familiar.) You’re quite lucky to have been taught by the teacher who taught you!

(I myself took Spanish in high school. Didn’t get to Latin until 1st year in college, then Greek in 2nd year. I didn’t get to read Sappho until my graduate survey of early Greek literature.)

by caelestis

  posted at 10:41 PM :

If my coauthor and I are not still writing our paper(s) I promise to blog live and extensively at ICHL. You could see if the organisers will do live streaming!

I also became all misty eyed and nostalgic over Fremdvokal. In Yolngu matha it's called buthuruway (ear-having). It's worth making a fuss over ;)

by Claire

Post a Comment

front page ⏎