Rome in the News: Italians are smart

From novinite.com, an oddly written piece on Italian achievements in mathematics, astronomy, etc., from antiquity to the present. Ends up impressing the reader with the sheer number of examples, even if they are not tied together in any way -- kind of like a student paper. Pin It

Greece in the News: Ancient Greek men were attractive

via Wikimedia Commons

Bethany Hughes, narrator of documentaries such as Helen of Troy, speaking at the Hay literary festival, opined that Ancient Greek men were every bit as attractive as their statues:

"They loved going to the gym. They would spend about eight hours a day in there. They had slaves, so didn't have to work, and chose to use that leisure time making themselves into extremely ripped examples of manhood."

Good to know. Pin It

Greek and Latin Word Roots

The study of word roots is called etymology, which means "the study of (-logy) true meaning (-etym)." Many English words, especially abstract nouns that end in -ion or -logy, come from Latin. Many scientific terms and a few regular English words come from Greek.

Greek and Latin words for me are like an "inside joke" for language. Someone who is not aware of Latin and Greek may use a word with its modern meaning, but I get to say to myself, "I know what that words started out meaning." We get to be in on the joke.

There are some tendencies. A particularly strong tendency is for concrete Latin words to take on abstract meanings in English. For example, the word obscurus in Latin means "dark," as in the curtain is closed or the sun has gone down. In English, of course, obscure means metaphorically dark, as in hard to understand. It still has a little bit of that concrete meaning when it is used as a verb - e.g. "that tree obscured my view." Pin It

Funny Latin T-Shirt

Now for sale in my Zazzle shop: "Honey Badger don't care" t-shirts, in Latin (Meles mellis non curat).

Styles for men and women are available.

UPDATE: a new version with a different style of picture. Original version is still available.

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Greek Culture: Ancient Greek Science and Art

While I was writing my post on Thales of Miletus earlier this week, it got me thinking about how the Greeks classified intellectual and artistic endeavors. And the short answer to that is: not too strictly. The porous boundaries that existed between science, math, religion and art centered for the Greeks centered around their concept of music. Since music has a spiritual and emotional dimension, but involves mathematical intervals as well, the Greeks believed that all mental endeavors have a rational and a spiritual or non-rational side.

This is reflected in ancient Greek education, where physical education was taken extremely seriously, in part because merely intellectual training would lead to an imbalance between the rational and non-rational. Aristotle's books also indicate what we consider to be extremely flexible ideas about the limits of science and art. Although he is known as a philosopher, a fairly specific job title in our time, his works include literary criticism, biology, physics, linguistics and biography. Pin It

Latin in the News: Medieval Latin as a Second Language

From James Fallows at the Atlantic, a post on why non-native speakers of a language can often understand each other more easily. Medieval Latin is a case in point. As no one's first language, it became far more streamlined than classical Latin, as one of Fallows' readers points out:

Medieval Latin is a much simpler form of Latin than classical, Roman Latin because it was everyone's second language. Over centuries, Irish, Italians, and Norwegians all speaking to one another in the same language simplified and streamlined it, to make it easier for everyone to understand. It was a working language, the language of the church and professional elites everywhere. One aspect of understanding what Renaissance was and why it happened was that Petrarch and others like him noticed how much more complex, sophisticated, and, to their ears, beautiful, the classical Latin of Cicero and Horace was. They then tried to recreate that flowery, rhetorical style in their own day and time, in large part because they thought that the beauty and sophistication of the language also helped it convey beautiful and sophisticated ideas.

Read the whole thing. Pin It

Reading the Greek alphabet

On Tuesday we became familiar with the letters of the Greek alphabet; today we will learn how to move between the Greek alphabet and the English alphabet. This is called transliteration; in Latin it means "moving a letter across." Here are the Greek letters and their English equivalents:

Αα Ββ Γγ Δδ Εε Ζζ Ηη        Θθ   Ιι   Κκ   Λλ Μμ
A    B   G   D   E   Z   (long a/e)  TH   I    K     L    M  

Νν Ξξ Οο Ππ Ρρ Σσ Ττ Υυ Φφ  Χχ    Ψψ  Ωω
N   X   O   P     R   S   T    U   PH  CH   PS(long o)

You will notice that some letters, like the letter c, are missing from this alphabet altogether, and some letters, like θ (ΤΗ), do not exist in the English alphabet. The Greek alphabet is one of the earliest alphabets in existence, and it went on being refined and reorganized as it became the English alphabet. To remind yourself how the letters are pronounced, you may want to review the videos I recommended to you on Tuesday.

For practice working with the alphabet, determine how these words would be written in English: Σωκρατησ
λογοσ
θρονοσ

Answers and the words' meaning are in the comments section.

Next up: simple sentences Pin It

Black Ships by Jo Graham

Black Ships is an historical novel based on the Trojan War, specifically on the events of Vergil's Aeneid. The narrator, Gull, is the offspring of a Trojan captive and Greek soldier. She becomes a priestess of the 'Lady of the Dead' (a pre-classical version of Persephone) after an accident leaves her unable to perform other work. When a war band led by Prince Aeneas arrives on a mission to rescue the captive Trojan women and children, Gull leaves with them and becomes their resident priestess.

Personally, I love historical fiction as a form of escapism, so the slightly slow-moving plot did not bother me. I'm all about enjoying the layers of detail and the recreation of a vanished world.  I enjoyed many elements of the storyline, such as Gull's romance with one of the Trojan captains and the time the group spends in Egypt. (Vergil's character Dido is transformed into an Egyptian princess called Bastaemon.) If you are intrigued by the ancient Greek and Near Eastern world and would like to learn more in an entertaining, engaging way, I would recommend Black Ships. Pin It

Learning the Greek Alphabet

Ancient Greek was the language of the southern Balkan peninsula the area now known as Greece, from approximately 9,000 BC to 600 AD. Like Latin, it uses inflected endings, tags added to the ends of words to tell you the word's "job" in the sentence.

 For background on how ancient languages with inflected endings work, see my "Latin vs. English" series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Today's assignment is to begin learning the alphabet. I am going to send you over to YouTube where there are two slightly corny but effective videos available:

Learn the Greek Alphabet in 10 Minutes

Greek Alphabet Song

BTW, the pronunciation on the second video is fine, in my opinion. The commenters seem to have it mixed up with modern Greek pronunciation, which is considerably different.

χαῖρε ! (Ancient Greek for "goodbye")

Next up: practice with reading and transliteration (moving between one alphabet and the other) Pin It

Greek and Latin in the News: D.S. Carne-Ross and the King James Bible

I happened upon two stories today, both dealing with translating Greek and Latin poetry. Translations are currently bought mainly by students, which leads to a concern for 'accuracy.' I put accuracy in quote marks because, as the author of the first piece argues:

Translators, publishers, and reviewers alike, in making claims for a translator’s accuracy or transparency, have led us to assume that we are “getting,” say, Homer. But we’re not. We’re getting (say) Richmond Lattimore or Robert Fitzgerald or Robert Fagles, Americans writing a book in English, and each writer very different from the others. 

Since we are not getting the actual work, Talbot goes on to say, we might as well make a virtue of this by producing translation that are works of art in their own right. And that no longer seems to happen:

The new expectation that the job of a translator is to adhere to scholarly accuracy, to become invisible to his readers, has stunted the growth of one of our literature’s fruitful boughs.

This seemed, even to a professional classicist like me, a bit of a frivolous complaint. Until, that is, I read this article on the production of the King James Bible (a 17th century translation of the Old and New Testaments undertaken by 50 anonymous clegy) and was reminded of the far-reaching effects of a translation that is beautiful and evocative in itself:

TThe text became the basis for some of the most lyrical English poetry ever written and the subject of endless Bible-as-literature classes on college campuses throughout the English-speaking world. ...

"There are lots of way to understand 'accuracy,"' said Jacqueline Osherow, an English professor who can read the original Hebrew text and teaches a Bible literature class at the University of Utah. "The Hebrew Bible is so poetic and beautiful. If you are rending it in a prosaic manner, you are losing out on a certain essential accuracy -- the poetic."

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Greece in the News: Harold Camping and Thales of Miletus

From the NPR blog, a comparison of Thales of Miletus, the Presocratic philosopher, and Harold Camping, the radio broadcaster known for his predictions of the Apocalypse:

The natural forces Thales considered were part of the world. They were orderly and behaved in consistent and coherent ways that could be understood with careful observation and mindful effort. In this way many, if not all, the events we experience could be predicted – they could be anticipated as exactly as our understanding of the laws allowed.... Harold Camping thought he had access to the same capacities. The 89-year-old retired civil engineer who built a multi-million-dollar Christian media empire to publicize his apocalyptic predictions was wrong. The spectacular failure of his predictions highlights what is right with science and what is wrong with using religion as a gateway to understanding the natural world.

Read the whole thing. I confess to some sympathy with the commenters who argue that its unfair to pin the faults of this individual nut job on all religious people. Pin It

Latin Pronunciation

If you are curious about Latin pronunciation, this seems like a good website to start with. In my experience/opinion, three things are crucial to good Latin pronunciation:

1. C is always pronounced as K.
2. V is always pronounced as W (the Latin alphabet lacks w).
3. Make sure you pronounce *every* syllable, something we don't always do in English. Pin It

Rome in the News: Roman Boat Discovered at Guy's Hospital in London

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The remodel of Guy's Hospital, a teaching hospital in the Southwark area of London, has been halted for the moment by the discovery of timbers from a Roman boat. The hospital is built on the site of a Roman port where food and wine were delivered in ancient times. The type of boat is not yet known, but a shallow-bottomed merchant barge was discovered nearby in 1958.

H/T South London Press, London History Hunters Pin It

Latin vs. English, Part 2: More Noun Cases

Image via Wikimedia Commons

In my previous post on this topic, we discussed the general role of noun cases in reading Latin. Noun cases are the "job" the noun does in the sentence. In English, you know what job the noun is doing based on where the noun occurs in the sentence. In Latin, the noun's job is indicated by an inflected ending. Nouns have a separate inflected ending for each noun case. Latin nouns have five cases, which do (approximately) five basic jobs:

We learned these yesterday:
Nominative (subject)
Agricola facit = The farmer does it.
Accusative (direct object)
Agricolam complectitur = S/he embraces the farmer.

The remaining noun "jobs" are receiving, possessing, and being the instrument of an action:

Dative (the person who receives something, known in grammar as an "indirect object")
Agricolae dat = S/he gives it to the farmer.

Genitive (shows possession)
Agricolae agrum = the farmer's field (The dative and genitive ending for this noun are the same. This is not always the case.)

Ablative (shows the means by which something is done)
Ab agricolā bellum geritur = The war is waged by the farmer.

(The line over the -a indicates that you hold the sound for a longer time when pronouncing it. These are left out of many Latin texts and I will only use them when they are essential for the word's meaning or job.)

Next up: Some simple Latin sentences Pin It

Thor and Greek Mythology

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Although the movie Thor is ultimately based on Norse mythology, the beliefs of pre-Christian peoples living in northern Europe, you may feel that there is a certain amount of resemblance between the Asgardians and the gods of Greek mythology. And you would be right. The ancient Greeks and the pagan Norse shared a common cultural heritage.

Both Ancient Greek and the Norse languages are based on Indo-European, the tongue of a people who invaded/migrated across Europe, India and parts of Asia about 6,000 years ago. This linguistic inheritance was accompanied by a cultural interitance, including a polytheistic religion overseen by a sky god (Zeus/Odin). Both religious systems include trickster figures (Hermes/Loki) and warrior deities (Thor/Athena/Ares).

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Latin vs. English, Part 2: Noun Cases

Image via Wikimedia Commons

In my first post in this series, we discussed Latin's reliance on word endings to organize sentences. English relies on word order, not word endings (for the most part). One of the most important roles of word endings in Latin is the determining of noun cases.

Noun cases are various "jobs" a noun can do. For example, most sentences need a subject (the doer of the action) and a direct object. In Latin, these jobs of the noun are called the nominative (subject) and the accusative (direct object). To be completely sure what job the noun is doing, the reader must look at the inflected ending and nothing else.

agricola
-a = nominative inflected ending, therefore the subject of a verb

agricolam

-am = accusative inflected ending, therefore the direct object of a verb

Next up: the remaining noun cases Pin It

Rome in the News: The Temple Maggiore Choir

From The Jewish Week comes a fascinating story about the Temple Maggiore choir's American debut at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. As the story points out, the Jewish community has been a continuous presence in Rome for more than 2,000 years. The community's musical heritage encompasses influences from Italy, Europe and the Middle East. The Temple Maggiore choir reflects this variegated tradition as well as local customs, such as a distinctly Italian pronunciation of certain Hebrew words. Pin It

My Blogging Namesake: Korinna of Tanagra

Korinna, whose name means "girl," is the best known Greek woman poet after Sappho. She lived in either the 6th or 3nd century BC. There is an old story that she tutored the 6th century poet Pindar, who wrote poems to celebrate victorious athletes. When she afterwards defeated him in a poetic competition, he called her a "sow." But this story may have been invented, since her poetry uses spellings for Greek words that were current in the 3rd century. Her works, which do not survive apart from fragments on papyrus, dealt with local legends and the gods of her native mountains and rivers.

Korinna fragment 655.1-6 (translated by Jane McIntosh Snyder)
Terpsichore (goddess of dancing and singing) [summoned me] to sing
beautiful tales of old
to the Tanagraean girls in their white robes.
And the city rejoiced greatly
in my clear, plaintive voice. Pin It

Latin vs. English, Part 1: Inflected Endings

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Latin words have inflected endings. This is the biggest difference between English and Latin. In English, the order of the words in a sentence tells you what they are doing: the subject of the verb comes first, the verb comes next, the direct object comes last.

Latin words have inflected endings.
subject = Latin words
verb = have
direct object = inflected endings

In Latin, even though there are some tendencies for word order, the only real way to tell what a word is doing in the sentence is to look at its inflected ending, the 1-4 letters that come after the word's stem.

agricola, "farmer"
agricol- stem
-a inflected ending (this ending is used when "farmer" is the subject of the verb).

Next Up: Noun Cases

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