wm blathers

Scholiastae Changing

2012-01-16T19:23:00.000-06:00

As I posted about almost two years ago, the experiment in using a wiki to collaboratively annotate ancient texts was a flop. So, I'll be taking that down at the end of April of this year. In the meantime, I've been converting the better texts into the same format I use for Aoidoi.org. The results are somewhat more attractive than a web page, at least. I've managed to automate some of the conversion from Wiki (and my own Wiki annotation module) to LaTeX, but it still takes a certain amount of hand-holding.

Don't put data in to XML format unless you know you already have a way to extract it in a format you consider agreeable.

In any case, the better Wiki prose texts will end up on the new Scholiastae front page, and the few poems will go to Aoidoi.

Transatlantic Style: Classical Greek and Classical Nahuatl

2011-08-14T14:37:00.007-05:00

I've taken a bit of a break from working up texts for Aoidoi.org for a while, instead working on some fun prose reading more for practice than anything. Lucian is fun, and the True Story edition by Nimis and Hayes is a nicely portable version. I've also recently started to study Classical Nahuatl, now that a more approachable textbook has finally come out, a translation and adaptation of Launey's standard Introduction, produced by a classicist no less, Christopher Mackay. There are a few other textbooks available in English for Classical Nahuatl, but they are pretty unsatisfactory, for reasons too tedious to go into here.

Apparently, Nahuatl poetry can be as opaque and obscure as Pindar, but I'm not really ready to step into that. Instead, I have been trying my hand at a few of Aesop's fables, which got a linguistic and cultural translation into Nahuatl (see Google Books, A. Peñafiel and the ms. transcription from Amoxcalli.org.mx). Keeping notes on my work with these has forced me to learn a few new LaTeX packages, so I now have a good setup to do Aoidoi-style notes on prose, something that has eluded me for years. I think I may migrate some of my prose work from Scholiastae to this format, which is just nicer to read and to edit.

To classicists (amateur or professional) who want to learn an interesting literary language with a entirely different tradition, I highly recommend Classical Nahuatl now that better learning materials are available for it. The morphology is not as complex, but in some ways studying it reminds me of studying Classical Greek. In particular, that vague anxiety and sinking feeling one gets upon learning yet another particle and when seeing yet another novel chain of particles.

In my brief Nahuatl studies so far, I have noticed a few turns of phrase which have close parallels in Classical Greek, or Indo-European, stylistics. There have in the past been unfortunate attempts to relate Nahuatl to Indo-European — I will leave that to you to hunt down in Google Books. I just thought these parallel developments were interesting.

Throughout the Mesoamerican cultural zone, the merism is a major stylistic device. They can be more metaphorical, and is usually called difrasismo in this context. Some are fairly obvious, and others are more obscure —

in xochitl in cuicatl the flower, the song : poetry
in cuitlapilli in ahtlapalli the tail, the wing : the common folk
yohualli ehecatl night, wind : invisible, or intangible

The first parallel to Indo-European habits is the difrasismo in axcaitl in tlatquitl which together are a general term for "property." The parallel comes in in tlatquitl which is derived from the verb itqui, which means to carry something. This doesn't perfectly match any mersim in IE literature, but it does match a stylistic preoccupation with movable vs. immovable wealth, Avest. pasu.vīra "cattle (and) men", Umbr. ueiro pequo "men and cattle." English goods and chattels almost gets there, since chattels includes the notion of movable property.

Finally, there's the difrasismo I recently ran into, which reminded me of Michael Gilleland's list of asyndetic, privative adjectives. Now, asyndeton is quite common in Nahuatl, and certainly in difrasismo, so this isn't particularly marked stylistically. But the double negative struck me in in ahcualli in ahyectli, "immorality." The ah- element (here, "h" is the glottal stop) is the negative, and has been attached to cualli "a good thing" (in the sense of fitness for a purpose or pleasant) and yectli "a pure thing."

Now if only I could find a collection of difrasismos. Current dictionaries tend not to focus on these.

Random Thoughts on the iPad

2010-04-16T15:58:00.004-05:00

I find it is easier to justify ridiculous purchases when it's close to my birthday. Not quite two weeks ago I got myself an iPad. Since I've had some time with the thing, I thought I'd make a few random comments, in no particular order or relatedness.

First, I don't travel in teen or even tween circles, so it has been some time since I got called names relating to my sexual orientation. Yet mentioning that I had got myself an iPad leaves some complete strangers with the urge to call me things — online, at least, where being a flaming jerk is some sign of conviction. It's very odd. There's a lot of bruhaha about restrictions on the iPod, but I don't really have anything to add to it. Howard Stearns had more interesting things to say about the matter already, and better than I could. Besides, I've lived all my professional life neck-deep in the Unix and free software world and I've always managed to live happily in mixed environments — open tools on closed OSes, open OSes running closed tools — whatever can be made to work reliably without going over-cost is fine by me. If I really want to program an iPad directly, I can always fire up jsforth.

I personally cannot stand laptops — this is a quirk, I realize. They're too big to be really convenient, and too small to be comfortable to use for very long. That the iPad doesn't try to be a laptop is actually a plus for me. I've had an iPod Touch for quite a while, and while one can visit web pages, read documents, compose email or post to web forums from it, it's really not very nice. On the iPad, this is all much more pleasant. The device was made for casual browsing at a coffee shop, and I've adjusted to the freaky keyboard fairly quickly.

I've been waiting for something like an iPad running something like the GoodReader app for more than 15 years. While I may be a professional computer geek by day, when not at work I turn into the Dilettante Philologist. I do use some of my computer skills for my dead language work of course, but my computing needs are very different when I'm on the Philologist setting. I've transferred a large stash of journal articles, old books, Helmut van Thiel's magnificent editions of the D scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey, PDFs of my own notes on Greek work to the iPad. Now when I'm waiting at the dentist's office I can once again try to comprehend Matic 's paper, Topic, focus, and discourse structure: Ancient Greek Word Order; or Dale's classic three papers on the metrical units of Greek lyric verse. The iPad may be a bit heavy for a mobile device, but it weighs considerably less than the print edition of the unabridged LSJ, which I have at my fingertips in the Lexiphanes application. I can only hope someone will write an application to interact with the Perseus corpus.

On a whim, I downloaded Charlie Stross' Iron Sunrise into the iBook application. I'm about three-quarters through the book. I'm a big lover of the traditional book format even for casual reading, but I have to say reading on the iPad has been very comfortable. The amusement value the over-wrought page-turning animation passed quickly enough, and I can read for hours at a stretch without the thing distracting me from the novel. The only small complaint I have is about some of the typesetting. For chapter and major section starts Iron Sunrise was probably typeset with a few words in small caps, but that font didn't make the transition to the iBooks app. The first three words are in slightly large all lowercase. More careful editing would fix this.

All said, I love this device, mostly because I know I can travel a lot lighter in the future (I used to have to be content with the Middle Liddell, heavy enough in carry-on). For me, the iPad is mostly a way to interact with text — lots and lots of text. Thanks to some development time with the iPad Touch and the iPhone, the iPad is awfully good at that. It'll be interesting to see what the next five years bring to the entire industry around devices like this.

Scholiastae.org: not entirely a success

2010-04-13T11:59:00.004-05:00

It's been a bit more than a year since I announced my scholiastic Wiki, Scholiastae.org. In that time by far the majority of text and annotations published to the site have been my own. When I started the project I had hoped other people would use the site to make notes on texts, but except for a few random drive-by notes (no more than a few comments), this has not happened. I'm not sure exactly why this is, given the enthusiasm for the idea when I first made the announcement, but I have a few guesses.

First, while a Wiki can be made to work for what are basically margin scribbles, it's not an entirely natural fit. Here's the last line of Catullus 48 marked up —


sit nostrae <sch lemma="seges segetis" grammar="f.">seges:: crop, grain field.;;</sch>
<sch lemma="osculātiō ōnis" grammar="f.">osculationis:: kissing.;;</sch>. //

That's sort of messy, though it gets the job done. Other people have been able to use the system without too much difficulty, though sometimes with rather different style habits than I favor.

There are probably other ways to handle text annotations like this that are a lot more natural for people who are classically inclined but don't have my background in computer programming, publishing, etc. But I'm not sure that would result in more people adding to the site, which leads to the second thing I believe has kept submissions slow — annotating a text well is a huge pain in the ass. Some people even mentioned this when I made the Scholiastae announcement. The technology isn't the hard part. The research, the double checking, the hunting down citations, the worrying about what really needs comment and what does not — all these things are a much bigger commitment. Even a simple 10 line poem by Mimnermus for Aoidoi will take me a week or two, which includes checking up on different versions of the text, as well as dealing with comments from the small group of people I can send out early drafts to (who probably deserve some sort of award). Someone has to be very committed to a text to mark it up formally and carefully in any medium at all, much less on a Wiki run by someone you've never met.

My first thought on putting up Scholiastae.org was that I'd give it a year or so, and if no one was interested enough to publish on it, I'd just close it down. But I still find it useful as a dumping ground for my own purposes. It's the best place for me to keep notes on prose works, but I've found it a nice place for smaller poems, too, like things from The Greek Anthology or the fragments of Pindar. Besides, I can hope someone else will find it interesting enough to add comments to eventually.

ὀτοτοῖ, ὀτοτοῖ

2010-03-08T12:45:00.001-06:00

Why oh why is this book so expensive? And this one?

Learning Greek through Greek

2009-10-01T19:22:00.002-05:00

If you ever want to watch an amateur classicist go up in flames and start channelling Cicero at his most denunciatory and his least fair-minded, start up a conversation about the quality of Greek and Latin textbooks. A very few books may get positive comment, but for the most part these books aren't friendly to the autodidact. It's one reason why Textkit's forum is always going to be popular. While there are books I warn people away from, for the most part I don't usually get too agitated about textbooks. For the self-teacher, it is far more important to stick with one than it is to succumb to the temptation to churn through a dozen books hoping to find one that makes the middle perfect of consonant stem verbs easy to learn.

That said, I'm going to complain about Greek textbooks now. Well, make a slightly cranky observation.

When I was in high school, by the time I got to the second year of French and German, the textbooks we used were introducing some grammatical material in the language being taught, along with obvious things like calling chapters chapitres and describing the requirements of homework auf Deutsch. Even the mechanics of day-to-day classroom work were turned into another opportunity to use the languages which, in theory, the classes were supposed to impart. I have seen a few Latin textbooks which do use Latin for more than just the exercises. The only book I've run across doing this in Greek was published in Spain in 1856 (Google Books), and that's clearly an advanced book.

So, it seems to me that by the time you start learning about -μι verbs you should be seeing Greek not only in the terrifying new construction the lesson presents, in the idiotic practice sentences and in whatever adapted passage of literature that lesson has, but also as the chapter headings, in the notes explaining tricky parts of that adapted passage, etc. On the other hand, I've recently been working on a page for Scholiastae.org which describes ancient Greek grammatical vocabulary, Greek Grammar in Greek, intended for people who don't want to drop to English in the Greek- and Latin-only sub-forum. There's a lot of Greek grammatical vocabulary. The beginner to Greek already has to learn to cope with strange incantations like "aorist middle optative" in their native language. Are the benefits of seeing more Greek worth the cost of learning the substantial technical vocabulary when lots of more basic vocabulary also needs to be learned? Since no one is forced to learn Greek any more, I'm inclined to see value in laying on Greek as thickly as possible for those few who do decide to take it up.

The Tablet of Cebes, or, A Gap in my Education

2009-08-22T14:05:00.003-05:00

Recently a Textkit study group has formed to read the Discourses of Epictetus. Naturally I slurped up the text into Scholiastae, and one scholiastic activity I've been involved in is creating a list of the most common Stoic terms and idioms used in Epictetus. A few weeks ago, in the course of my hunting down references, I discovered that Keith Seddon (“The Stoic who Never Sleeps”) in 2005 came out with a translation of Epictetus' Enchiridion. In addition to the Enchiridion, however, the book contains a translation of the Tablet of Cebes — a work I had never heard of until that point.

It turns out the Tablet was once frequently paired with the Enchiridion, with Theophrastus' Characters often rounding out the collection. The Tablet is a brief, 1st century dialog introducing Plato's puzzling doctrine of pre-existence, and the value of philosophy in general (it is invariably compared to Pilgrim's Progress in English references).

It is astonishing to me that the Tablet has no showing in any of the many introductory and intermediate Greek textbooks I have seen in my life. The work, along with its usual company, was once quite popular, both in Greek and in translation — into Latin, of course, but also into European vernaculars and even Arabic. It seems well suited to beginners in Greek. The language is not too trickified; it is short and could be read entirely in even a quarter-system school schedule; it introduces philosophy, a subject which doubtless draws more people to Greek in the first place than does Xenophon; one can even bring in discussion about Hellenistic and Imperial intellectual trends — how many philosophical dialogs start with ekphrasis?

The Wondrous Textual Powers of the Internet give us several reading options.

Drosihn's 1871 Teubner seems to still be the standard critical edition, but I'll gladly hear correction about that. It is available on Google Books, a copy of which is also at Archive.org.

C.S. Jerram of Oxford has a 1878 school-boy edition with extensive notes, including many useful to those with wobbly Greek. Again available via Google Books, with a copy of the Google scan at Archive.org.

Richard Parsons brought some Yankee ingenuity (well, Ohio Wesleyan ingenuity) to Cebes, producing a 1897 edition with less copious notes. It does, however, have a brief vocabulary at the end, which makes his book prime bus-to-work reading material. There are several indifferently produced off-prints on the market now, but if you don't love your printer too much, there are again both Google Books and independent Archive.org editions.

There is a 1997 Bryn Mawr Greek commentary by T.M. Banchich, about which I can find little information.

A project at the Université catholique de Louvain has text versions (in Greek and French). I am as yet uncertain, given the editorial markings, of the provenance of their text. And I do wish they had a clear statement of copyright for this very tasty pot pourri.

Finally, Archive.org houses a rather florid 1910 English translation — to say nothing of the typesetting — The Greek Pilgrim's progress; generally known as The picture.

Well, that's one way to curate

2009-07-13T16:42:00.003-05:00

One thing I was concerned about after the death of Bill Harris was that his magnificent web site would silently disappear some day. I was happy to see this notice today:

Bill truly enjoyed sharing with all of you, and he greatly appreciated the contact he had with so many of you from around the world, especially in his latter years. We invite you to continue using and enjoying his web site. Bill Harris' web site will be maintained on the Internet permanently as part of the digital archives of Middlebury College.

I'm certainly not going to complain about this... but I still wonder what a librarian would think about this approach. "Just leave it there" may not be the best way to go in the long (permanent) run. I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to these questions yet.

Numquam what?!

2009-06-09T17:30:00.005-05:00

I have this problem that no matter what it is, any text that passes before my eyeballs gets read, often at a barely conscious level. I can't stop it. I assume many literate people have the same problem. Today I was on campus, and while waiting for the bus and admiring the splendid, ah, charlie-foxtrot that is University Ave. during this construction season, my brain forced me to do a double-take... "numquam tickle?!"

I took a closer look at the book bag: Draco Dormiens Numquam Titillandus, "a sleeping dragon is never to be, um, tickled?" Finally the rest of my brain kicked in, and I realized I was looking at Harry Potter-ware. A college-age male — and not a freshman, I'd guess — was sporting a Hogwarts book bag. He's the right age for it, I suppose. I haven't yet decided if I want this to be an ironic gesture on his part or not.

A little googling tells me was displaying Gryffindor colors, in case anyone was curious.

What other Chariot? A Textual Crux in Mimnermus 12

2009-06-07T11:23:00.003-05:00

I recently received email asking me about a textual decision in the Aoidoi.org version of Mimnermus 12 (open that in a new window to follow along). They wanted to know why I kept the paradosis reading ἐπέβη ἑτέρων in line 11 when nearly everyone else accepted Schneidewin's emmendatation ἐπεβήσεθ’ ἑῶν. It turns out nearly everyone else does not include M.L. West. I use his Iambi et Elegi Graeci for sanity checking and a reasonably current apparatus. West's apparatus does include some emmendations, but not Schneidewin's ἐπεβήσεθ’ ἑῶν, which I got from Campbell's 1967 Greek Lyric Poetry for the Aoidoi apparatus. I decided to do a little more digging.

First, for Schneidewin. In his 1838 Delectus poesis Graecorum elegiacae, iambicae, melicae (pp.16-17) he declines to include this emmendation attributed to him. So, either he saved this speculation for a later edition or published it in some paper I haven't been able to find.

Next, of course, comes Bergk. In his 1866 Teubner Poetae lyrici Graeci (p. 412) quite a lot gets said —

V.11 ἑτέρων VL, ἑτερέων BP, conieci σφετέρων vel προτέρων, Schneidewin ἱερῶν vel πτερινῶν vel ἐπεβήσεθ’ ἑῶν, Ahrens στερεῶν vel ἐπεβήσετ’ ἄρ’ ὧν.

Well. Except Ahrens' ludicrous στερεῶν, these emmendations are strikingly banal. But what problem are they trying to fix?

My email correspondent and his colleague were concerned about the sense of ἑτέρων. Helios, sleeping the night away, has been born along by the waves in a golden, winged bed made by Hephaestus. When he arrives in the land of the Ethiopians, "where his swift chariot and horses stay," he gets on his other (ἑτέρων) chariot. The question is, what other chariot? Where's the other one? Some of the emmendations seem to be inspired by this same discomfort — σφετέρων, ἑῶν, ἱερῶν, κτλ. One of Bergk's emmendations, προτέρον, seems more concerned with the hiatus, since "his earlier chariot" doesn't remove that extra chariot from the picture. Hiatus for a long vowel in princeps position is sanctioned by both Homer and other elegiasts, but without more information it's hard for me to know for sure what motivated Bergk here.

When I first read this line, I had a passage from Hesiod's Theogony in my mind, 746-757, which describes Day and Night passing each other on the threshold to the same house each day. While Hesiod mentions no vehicle for them, chariots taking celstial divinities across the sky is a common idea across Indo-Eurostan. A little digging shows that Dawn herself, mentioned in line 3 of Mimnermus' poem, is given her own chariot in the Odyssey (23.243-246), and several times in Vedic and Avestan literature (M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, p.223.). We don't know enough about Mimnermus' model of the celestial mechanics, but it's certainly possible that the other chariot refers not to another of Helios', but someone else's.

Finally, the word I've been translating chariot, ὀχέων (a funky heteroclite in Homer, ὁ ὄχος, τὰ ὄχεα, but normal 2nd. declension plural in other authors), has a wider range of meaning. While chariot is certainly the common sense, it can mean anything which holds or carries something. In Odyssey 5.404 it describes harbors, λιμένες νηῶν ὄχοι. And it can even describe a ship, ὄχος ταχυήρης "a swift-oared vehicle." The related word ὄχημα covers the same range, from chariot to ship to vehicle. Right now I'm inclined to see ἑτέρω ὀχέων being contrasted not to some other horse-drawn conveyance, but to Helios' splendid sea-faring bed. In any case, I see no good reason to meddle with the paradosis.

Octavating a Tenor Guitar (Martin LXM "Little Martin" Tenor)

2009-04-18T11:54:00.005-05:00

In the last year or so I've started spending more of my spare time playing music again. For quite a long time my only instrument were the tin whistle and Irish flute (a keyless, wooden flute which is fingered the same as the tin whiste). Then I made a little stretch, and got a mandolin, which I played for years, again mostly Irish, some Scottish stuff, and any random other thing that grabbed my attention, such as the medieval Lamento di Tristano, so often played at absurdly slow speeds. Somewhere along the way I got myself an old 20s Gibson Oriole tenor banjo, which I've always treated as an unusually noisy mandolin, including tuning it down to GDAE from the usual tenor CGDA.

Unfortunately, neither the tenor banjo nor the mandolin have much sustain. There is only one way to fake out sustain on these instruments — tremolo. After years of playing the mandolin, however, I must now admit that I have a really serious hang-up about tremolo. It doesn't matter what you're playing — bluegrass, jazz, celtic folk, whatever — once the tremolo starts I have a spaghetti sauce ad in my brain. Also, playing the high course on a mandolin (two very small wires tuned in unison to E) is not unlike playing a tuned cheese slicer.

So, a few weeks ago, I finally gave in and ordered a tenor guitar. This instrument was invented around the 20s when the guitar fad overtook the banjo fad (which in turn had replaced a mandolin fad), so that musicians used to the 5ths tuning of the tenor banjo could just pick up a guitar and go. This is perfect for my needs — I don't have to learn yet another fingering system, and I get more sustain out of the deal. It's normal for people coming from an Irish music background to tune both tenor banjos and tenor guitars down like an octave mandolin, GDAE an octave below a normal mandolin. So I got some heavier strings put them on my new Martin (.012, .022w, .032w, .042w). There were a few problems.

First, a .042 wound string will not fit in the nut on these guitars. Neither will the 0.032w. Second, these big, fat strings flop around, even at correct tension, and were buzzing... a lot. Finally, these new Martins are, as they say, modest instruments. Some unevenness in the frets was exposed by the patterns of buzz. Fortunately, I'm on a first name basis with a local luthier, who handed my Martin over to an apprentice to (1) widen the grooves in the nut for the lowest two strings, (2) file the frets into evenness and (3) raise the action a bit with a new saddle. This has improved things quite a bit. If I'm lazy about my finger placement and land too far behind a fret I still risk some buzz, but nothing like before.

So, any celto-mandolin or celto-tenor players wanting to venture into tenor guitar will find the LXM Tenor an affordable option, but you'll need a little extra work done to it to make it work best down in GDAE. If you're prepared to sand down a new saddle for yourself and aren't scared of a file, you could perhaps do the adjustments yourself, but I doubt any repair shop will charge too much to do them.

Internet Stemmatics

2009-03-30T16:48:00.002-05:00

In June 2005 the Times Literary Supplement carried an article by Martin West containing a much fuller version of Sappho 58 than we'd had before. The extra text had been found in mummy cartonnage at the University of Cologne. This was cause for great excitement, and it didn't take very long at all for a transcription to appear on the Classics-L mailing list.

Unfortunately, there was a small problem — there were two typos in the text, one a spacing issue, and one an interesting metagrammatism — *ἔμαπψε for ἔμαρψε — presumably caused by interference between English "P" and Greek "Ρ" (rho, an /r/ sound). Within hours of appearing on the mailing list, however, the poem — with errors — was all over the internet, on blogs and web pages. There are still some sites that have these errors.

I've recently started loading up Scholiastae.org with some of the major texts, to make it easy for people to drop scholia in without having to deal with some of the initial wikification of a large text (dividing into sections, line number marking, etc.). So I've been spending time looking over already-digitized texts of authors available on the web, which don't appear to be breaking copyright rules and which will be easily converted into wiki format.

When deciding on a text to use for Hesiod's Theogony, I realized that all but a tiny handful of versions of that on the web are from a single source, apparently based on Rzach's old Teubner edition. I know they're from the same source because they all contain the same error in line 268:

αἵ ῥ᾽ ἀνέμων πνοιῇσι καὶ οἰωνοῖς ἕμ᾽ ἕπονται

The underlined word is nonsense, a corruption of elided ἅμα which anticipates the start of the next word — a common enough scribal error. Last time I googled, only four hits show up on that line with the correct ἅμ’, though I've fixed copies I've found on open wikis, and I'll be sending out a few pieces of email. But I do wonder how long the error will persist.

RIP William Harris

2009-02-24T17:02:00.003-06:00

I have learned through Nick, who learned from Harris' son, that Bill Harris died last Sunday, February 22nd.

I got to know Bill from his web site, Humanities and the Liberal Arts. I had just started to study Greek on my own again, and stumbled on his web page, probably looking for sites about Homer. I emailed him about a stray link in May 2000, and we corresponded ever since, sometimes very regularly, sometimes with quiet spots. It was a casual comment by him that led to the creation of Aoidoi.org — I still have the email, July 10, 2002. From that time on we communicated regularly about our own web sites, sharing new work for the other's comment. Without his enthusiasm about the project — there's a lot of email between us about it — Aoidoi.org might have faded away early.

I know that plenty of other people have been encouraged in their studies by him.

His death is a shock to me, the tears coming only today, because we had been mailing each other about some of his work only a few weeks ago. 83, about to start his second round of chemo, and he had been recording himself reciting verse — Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas — and was intending to record some Sappho, in both English and Greek. He was always interested in getting verse off the page and into people's mouths, in whatever language. Last month was the first time I ever heard his voice.

I hadn't told him about the Scholiastae.org site yet, because I wanted to be able to show him a success, after a few more people got involved and posted things, taking control of their own education. That site, too, wouldn't exist but for him. I should have told him sooner.

New site: scholiastae.org

2009-02-21T20:39:00.003-06:00

After years of waiting for web software to allow collaborative editing of documents like the ones I produce for Aoidoi.org, I finally gave up and wrote an extension to MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia.

Testing of the extension is done, so now there's Scholiastae.org. You can see an example of the output — and the markup from the "view source" tab — for Catullus 48.

There aren't many texts there yet. I have a few works of Lucian I will be working up in the next few weeks, but of course I hope other people will be moved to create an account and add and comment upon works.

New Year's Gallimaufry

2009-01-04T15:45:00.005-06:00

2008 was not a year of many blog posts. I thought I'd make a few random comments, before moving on to 2009.

I got my house re-sided at the end of the summer. Naturally, I take out a substantial debt to pay for this, just before the market exploded. My timing is, as always, impeccable.

The last few months of the year saw me start playing music again. In another month I hope to have my callouses back enough that I can slide notes on my mandolin without slicing open my fingers. I also went off the deep end, and got a 5-string banjo, on which I play old-time and celtic tunes — no bluegrass for me, thanks. In part, I blame Cathy Moore for playing all those funky, non-old-time tunes on the 5-string and making it work.

To make time for the music, my desultory attempts to get Latin back into my brain have been shut down.

I've mostly been reading Greek prose the last few months, but I have several things in the pipeline for Aoidoi. These will not see fruition for a month or so. A piece of web software I would love for Aoidoi does not yet exist, but I am afraid to write it.

Given the lovely state of the economy, paying to take classes in Greek seems like an extravagance right now. I'll probably not be doing that in the next year. Another sign of the economy and the strange state of contemporary American politics — for the first time in her 80 years, my grandmother voted Democratic last November.

I never had warts as a child, but I enter 2009 with a giant one on my face — very attractive. Good thing I don't believe in omens.

In Praise of Little Ideas

2008-11-12T17:16:00.005-06:00

While it is true that there are plenty of science fiction authors who are writerly, whose language shows signs of care beyond the bare need to tell the story, it is nonetheless the case that most of such literature is read for the ideas. A good number of these ideas are conventional, a well-worn path the experienced reader of science fiction uses to get up to speed on whatever it is the author is about to do that's new.

Though I might appreciate The Big Idea in many of these books as a way to generate a story or to work out the idea, an awful lot of the time I don't consider The Big Idea terribly plausible. From time to time, however, I do run across a Little Idea — a one-off or a minor point — that strikes me as either absolutely true or a Really Good Idea.

For example, in one book, the title of which I cannot even remember, is a scene in a giant space ship several kilometers in length. Charlie Stross has convinced me that travel between solar systems is monumentally impractical, as much magic as dragons and rings of power. In any case, in this book the computing subsystems all over the ship were a pain in the ass to deal with because they were all kept on isolated networks. It turns out most of the ship's computers were riddled with viruses and couldn't be connected safely. This, sadly, strikes me as all too likely, should it ever happen that we have a legitimate reason to build such ships.

In Vernor Vinge's most recent book, Rainbows End, he makes occasional mention of the "Friends of Privacy," an organization that produces lots of false information about people all over the internet, with the goal of concealing people who want a little privacy in a world of ubiquitous online presence and data recording. This seems to me at least a possible development, and, frankly, given the growth of the participatory panopticon, a desirable one.

I have recently been reading Neal Stephenson's latest tome, Anathem. Because it's Neal Stephenson book it has quite a few Big Ideas. You can read the overview at the link, but the main point I'm interested in here is the world of this book, scholars are sequestered away in things quite like convents — here called "concents" — while the outside world goes on without them. Once a year doors are opened which allow those inside and those outside to mingle for about a week. Within the concents populations are sequestered from each other, too, so that the "centenarians," for example, only encounter the outside world once every hundred years. Within the concents people select different specialties — physics, philosophy, math, etc. One brilliant Little Idea mentioned a few times in passing and with a minor role late in the book is the order known as the Lorites,

Lorite: A member of an Order founded by Saunt [< Savant — Wm] Lora, who believed that all of the ideas that the human mind was capable of coming up with had already been come up with. Lorites are, therefore, historians of thought who assist other avout in their work my making them aware of others who have thought similar things in the past, and thereby preventing them from re-inventing the wheel.

People who've spent a lot of time with me have heard me complain that the field of computer science seems so consistently and utterly ignorant of its own intellectual past. This is a field that desperately needs Lorites. Granted, about half of the time our CS Lorites would be saying one of three things — (1) Lisp did this in 1960-mumble; (2) Alan Kay's group did this in 1970-mumble; or (3) MULTICS — but there'd still be plenty of work for them. Lots of fields of study could probably use a Lorite or two in the department. It would certainly save wasted paper on pointless dissertations and books.

Greek prose has meter, too: Clausulae

2008-10-09T18:59:00.003-05:00

Since I may be auditing a Greek class next semester on Plutarch, I decided to do a little background digging early. My primary reading in Greek is still usually verse, though I have slowly been working my way out into prose authors. When searching on Plutarch's prose style I ran across a few references to clausulae, a habit of prose rhythm — meter, really — at the end of sentences or major clauses. I already knew some Latin authors did this. Cicero, for example, was evidently fond of a double cretic, -u--u- (I'll always notate the final common syllable as long). It would not naturally have occurred to me that Greek prose authors before the Hellenistic period used clausulae, but it turns out it was fairly common after Thrasymachus, whom Greek tradition says invented these metrical touches in prose.

The first systematic study of these I can find reference to is by A.W. de Groot, who has an entire book of tables, Handbook of Greek Prose Rhythm (our library has a German edition, but I will have to delve into the oft-pillaged Cutter stacks to find it). By comparing frequencies of metrical patterns within a sentence to their frequency at the end you can see which patterns were preferred for the end of a line. It also turns out certain patterns were scrupulously avoided. For example, a hemiepies (-uu-uu-, a fundamental unit of Epic meter) occurs naturally in Plutarch's Lives 2.5% of the time, but only 0.8% finally. Other obviously Epic metrical patterns are avoided some authors, though Plutarch makes no special efforts to control the oft-avoided adonic end, -uu--.

Certain clausulae are common, regardless of author or genre: -u-- is very popular, and in the Moralia Plutarch uses it a whopping 29.1% of the time:

ὥστε καθίσας περὶ τὸν νεὼν τὰ μὲν αὐτὸς ἠρξάμην ζητεῖν, τὰ δ’ ἐκείνους ἐρωτᾶν [-u--], ὑπὸ τοῦ τόπου καὶ τῶν λόγων αὐτῶν ἀνεμνήσθην ἃ πάλαι ποτὲ καθ’ ὃν καιρὸν ἐπεδήμει Νέρων ἠκούσαμεν Ἀμμωνίου καί τινων ἄλλων διεξιόντων [-u--], ἐνταῦθα τῆς αὐτῆς ἀπορίας ὁμοίως ἐμπεσούσης [-u--].

The E at Delphi, 385B

-u-- is also used by Xenophon, Lysias, Isocrates, Demosthenes (this is the only clausula he obviously favors), Plato, Aristotle and sometimes Lucian (sometimes he avoids it).

Other common clausulae:

-u--- : Isocrates, Isaeus, Plato (in some works; avoided in the Laws), Plutarch

-u--u- : (Cicero's double cretic again) Aeschines, Aristotle, Lysias, Lucian; avoided by Isocrates

----u- : Lysias, Isaeus, Aeschines, Plato, Aristotle, Lucian; avoided by Plutarch

-uu-u- : Lysias, Isocrates, Xenophon, Aeschines, Plato, Lucian

Thucydides is fairly restrained, obviously preferring only -uu--- and avoiding -u-u- (a shape favored, on the other hand, by Xenophon).

Here's a selection of Xenophon's Cyropaedia (1.2.1 - 1.2.2) with some clausula noted:

Πατρὸς μὲν δὴ ὁ Κῦρος λέγεται γενέσθαι Καμβύσου Περσῶν βασιλέως [uuu-]· ὁ δὲ Καμβύσης οὗτος τοῦ Περσειδῶν γένους ἦν [-u--]· οἱ δὲ Περσεῖδαι ἀπὸ Περσέως κλήιζονται· μητρὸς δὲ ὁμολογεῖται Μανδάνης γενέσθαι [-u--]· ἡ δὲ Μανδάνη αὕτη Ἀστυάγους ἦν θυγάτηρ τοῦ Μήδων γενομένου βασιλέως [uuu-]. φῦναι δὲ ὁ Κῦρος λέγεται καὶ ἄιδεται ἔτι καὶ νῦν ὑπὸ τῶν βαρβάρων εἶδος μὲν κάλλιστος, ψυχὴν δὲ φιλανθρωπότατος καὶ φιλομαθέστατος καὶ φιλοτιμότατος, ὥστε πάντα μὲν πόνον ἀνατλῆναι, πάντα δὲ κίνδυνον ὑπομεῖναι τοῦ ἐπαινεῖσθαι ἕνεκα. φύσιν μὲν δὴ τῆς μορφῆς καὶ τῆς ψυχῆς τοιαύτην ἔχων διαμνημονεύεται [-u-u-]· ἐπαιδεύθη γε μὴν ἐν Περσῶν νόμοις· οὗτοι δὲ δοκοῦσιν οἱ νόμοι ἄρχεσθαι τοῦ κοινοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἐπιμελούμενοι οὐκ ἔνθενπερ ἐν ταῖς πλείσταις πόλεσιν ἄρχονται. αἱ μὲν γὰρ πλεῖσται πόλεις ἀφεῖσαι παιδεύειν ὅπως τις ἐθέλει τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ παῖδας, καὶ αὐτοὺς τοὺς πρεσβυτέρους ὅπως ἐθέλουσι διάγειν, ἔπειτα προστάττουσιν αὐτοῖς μὴ κλέπτειν μηδὲ ἁρπάζειν, μὴ βίαι εἰς οἰκίαν παριέναι [uuu-], μὴ παίειν ὃν μὴ δίκαιον [-u--], μὴ μοιχεύειν, μὴ ἀπειθεῖν ἄρχοντι, καὶ τἆλλα τὰ τοιαῦτα ὡσαύτως· ἢν δέ τις τούτων τι παραβαίνηι, ζημίαν αὐτοῖς ἐπέθεσαν [uuu-].

Until now I've been telling people on Textkit asking about Greek pronunciation that vowel quantities probably didn't matter to appreciate prose. I guess I'll have to stop saying that.

_____
I've grabbed the data for this post from W.H. Shewring's Prose-rhythm and the Comparative Method, CQ v.25 no.1 pp. 12-22. He has a lot more on the Greek authors, as well as all the Latin authors I've skipped here. And F.H. Sandbach's Rhythm and Authenticity in Plutarch's Moralia, CQ v.33 no.3/4 pp.194-203. I still have to track down de Groot.

Patsy Cline Greeked

2008-09-07T20:09:00.003-05:00

About a month ago my iPod handed me a classic Patsy Cline tune, Leaving on your Mind. For some reason I decided the song needed to be translated into ancient Greek. I decided on quatrains of glyconics (xx-uu-u-) with the occasional anaclastic glyconic, a.k.a. the choriambic dimeter, xx-x-uu-. Here's the original:

If you've got leavin' on your mind
Tell me now, get it over
Hurt me now, get it over
If you've got leavin' on your mind

If there's a new love in your heart
Well, tell me now, get it over
Hurt me now, get it over
If there's a new love in your heart

Don't leave me here
In a world filled with dreams that might have been
Hurt me now, get it over
I may learn to love again

If there's a new love in your heart
Well, tell me now, get it over
Hurt me now, get it over
If there's a new love in your heart

Hurt me now, get it over
If there's a new love in your heart

I removed some of the repeats. I indulged in an outrageous aeolic future infinitive — ἀπολειψέμεν — using a verb Lucian disapproved of for men to describe "leaving." However, I don't think ἐκπέμπω quite captures the right feel for "leaving" in this song.

εἰ μέλλεις ἀπολειψέμεν,
ἐμοὶ μὲν λέγε νῦν τελῶν,
πήμηνον δέ με νῦν τελῶν
εἰ μέλλεις ἀπολειψέμεν.

εἰ δ’ ἐν θυμῷ καινὸς ἔρως,
ἐμοὶ μὲν λέγε νῦν τελῶν,
πήμηνον δέ με νῦν τελῶν
εἰ δ’ ἐν θυμῷ καινὸς ἔρως.

στᾶσαν ἐνθάδε μὴ λίπῃς
παθοῦσάν τέ με καὶ μάτην.
πήμηνον δέ με νῦν τελῶν,
ἀλλ’ αὖθίς πού μοι φιλία.

In my first pass I bungled the meter of the third line from the end. I'm still not certain about my repairs there.

Gentium in Emacs via Unicode

2008-08-04T17:47:00.002-05:00

I spent a little time over the weekend tweaking my Carbon Emacs configuration. When I first started using it I had to spend several interesting hours to get it to use a Mac-ish font large enough that I didn't go blind. I settled on a 15 point Vera Sans Mono. Unfortunately, the Greek that it picks for this isn't so nice. So with a little more digging, I managed to get Emacs to use Gentium for the Greek, but it had to be tweaked a bit for size:


;;; Greek extended
(set-fontset-font
 "fontset-default"
 (cons (decode-char 'ucs #x1f00)
       (decode-char 'ucs #x1fef))
 "-apple-gentium-medium-r-normal--18-180-72-72-m-180-iso10646-1")

;; "Greek and Coptic"  U+0374 - U+03FB
(set-fontset-font
 "fontset-default"
 (cons (decode-char 'ucs #x0374)
       (decode-char 'ucs #x03fb))
 "-apple-gentium-medium-r-normal--18-180-72-72-m-180-iso10646-1")

Yes, it really does take an 18 point Gentium to match a 15 point Vera Sans Mono.

My next step was to tweak the fontset to include Cuneiform (via the nice Neo-Assyrian Assurbanipal font), but MULE, Emacs' internationalization library, chokes on Unicode code points in in the 0x12000's where Cuneiform lives. I suppose my commentary on the Enûma Eliš focused on interpretive dance will have to wait.

Aoidoi: Mesomedes' Hymn to Nemesis

2008-07-14T19:36:00.003-05:00

This week, the somewhat strange Hymn to Nemesis.

The poem starts off with a fairly striking equestrian image:

Νέμεσι πτερόεσσα βίου ῥοπά,
κυανῶπι θεά, θύγατερ Δίκας
ἃ κοῦφα φρυάγματα θνατῶν
ἐπέχεις ἀδάμαντι χαλινῷ...

Winged Nemsis, scale of life,
dark-eyed goddess, daughter of Justice,
you who check the vain whinnying of mortals
with an adamant bit...

The word I've translated "scale" above — ῤοπή, rhope — covers an interesting semantic range. The basic image, if the LSJ is to be believed, is of a scale sinking. But it covers everything from balance and weight, or "outcome," out to more remote notions like "decisive influence, crisis" or even just "moment."

Aoidoi: two poems of Solon

2008-07-06T11:00:00.002-05:00

Yet more elegiacs, this time two fragments of Solon in a single document, Solon 9 & 11

Aoidoi: "The Toils of the Sun"

2008-07-04T11:16:00.002-05:00

Yet more Mimnermus, this time 12 (West), The toils of the sun.

Aoidoi: “Like the leaves of spring”

2008-06-22T20:20:00.002-05:00

A new poem is ready for Aoidoi.org, Mimnermus 2, Like the leaves of spring.

Roots and Tendrils

2008-05-16T20:12:00.002-05:00

I've been hammering away at a Common Lisp library for SVG. Last week I decided to take a break from studying the arcana of clipping windows and alpha masks to see if I could translate some of the gallery examples from NodeBox into SVG nicely. My library isn't ready for Graphic Cellular Domestication — that'll take Javascript — but some of the random walk ones turned out ok:

I quite like my modification of the tendrils algorithm, if I do say so myself:

Of course, SVG isn't recognized as an uploadable image format many places, so the pictures are PNG.

Computing Truisms, or, My 39th Birthday

2008-04-12T08:53:00.002-05:00

We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins. — Ellen Ullman

I hope I can be a computing industry pundit when I grow up. They get to mouth off about whatever they think the next big thing is, make gross generalizations about what the "average programmer" is like and even grosser generalizations about the "average user." I have no idea what the perfect X in computing, but there are exactly two gross generalizations I'm prepared to make with confidence:

First, Most programming is devoted to converting data from one ridiculous format into another ridiculous format. Actual programmers I've told this to tend to agree with me. I've recently started to churn out lisp libraries and of the four I'm working on now only one isn't obviously a data transformation problem.

Second, Most systems administration is a form archaeology. At an IT shop of any size it will really take months — up to half a year — for a new hire to really understand what's going on and where everything is, and that only in broad outline. Worse, even long-time staff may not know everything the computers are up to. In the last month I've run across things I once knew about and then basically forgot when they stopped being relevant. For example, we once used Netscape's (RIP) calendar manager program. Two weeks ago I discovered that we migrated that entire application infrastructure at least twice since shutting it down. Whenever a particular web service moved to a new machine, the calendar manager came along, a sort of junk DNA. I got rid of it this week.

Nine years ago Bryan, while he was a student working for me, wrote a perl script to do a small piece of file system sanity-enforcement. It has run once a night every night during those nine years. I feel I should publicly apologize to Bryan for not afflicting him — or the other students — with code reviews. More idiomatic but still readable perl could have saved him about 30% of the typing that went into the script. It works, so it'll probably run another nine years, and since it's so well-behaved I'll probably forget about again in short order.

A few months ago user C had a problem he suspected was related to his quota. It wasn't but he wanted a way to see what his quota was. Because of the oddball file system we use the normal tools for that don't work. I just work with C directly when he has disk issues, but thought up a scheme to let people check their quotas more easily, dashed off a quick note in the req (other people might call that a "trouble ticket") about it, and left it there for when I had time to code up a solution. Last week, while looking for something else, I discovered that I already solved the problem in 2004. Not only solved, but because my programs log compulsively, I know that users have been using it, including the newest faculty hires. Who told them the program existed?! The design that went into the req wasn't an invention but a memory.

Today I turn 39 (next prime birthday: 41, next power of two, 64). In a computing age it's too easy to compare a brain to a computer, but recently I've started to wonder if my own brain isn't rather too much like another computational archaeology site. Things burble up out of my unconscious onto the whiteboard in my brain with every sign of novelty and shoot out my mouth. An hour later I wonder if it's new, or if the scent of yinhao jasmine tea, the act of scratching my nose, or trying to remember if I turned off the stove has reactivated some random tangle of a hilbert-space memory trace in my neurons and shot a context-free memory upstairs to be misidentified as a new thought. As aging worries go, this one's pretty minor. My martial arts abused joints should probably get more of my attention.

Somewhere a cardiologist got their wings

2008-02-26T22:18:00.004-06:00

Last week a group of us had dinner and tasty if a bit snooty beers at Brasserie V. One appetizer was almond-stuffed dates wrapped in bacon. These were so good that it was decided the recipe should be reproduced at this week's Geeks' Night In. So, along with the evening's bottling and brewing of beer, dates were stuffed, wrapped in bacon, skewered, lightly sprinkled with brown sugar and broiled.

Our version was also delicious. My brilliant innovation came when I spied the loaf of French bread looking lonely on the table. I ripped a hunk off, and dipped it into the date-flavored bacon fat left in the broiling pan. Everyone else was appalled — including, I hasten to add, Chuck. Until they tried it.

I should be studying...

2008-02-17T14:54:00.006-06:00

Instead I did this:

I blame Nicholas' recent posts.

I had brief anxieties when the wind and the cold really started. Branches were falling off neighbors' trees and my working area was right under some suspicious branches. I was ready to bolt at the first hint of a crack above me.

It's the little things: Lisp + Unicode

2008-02-14T18:32:00.004-06:00

This little snippet of code makes me giddy out of proportion to what it accomplishes:

 ;; A non-final sigma cannot occur at the end of the string.
 (when (char= (elt uni (1- (length uni))) #\σ)
   (setf (elt uni (1- (length uni))) #\ς))

That this is so easy is a lucky accident of Common Lisp's history. The "common" in Common Lisp is because it was supposed to unite several popular (hey, it was the 80s), but incompatible, Lisp variants. There were lots more kinds of computers in wide use in the 80s, and many different encoding schemes for text. Thus, Common Lisp strings were always arrays of characters which were not necessarily bytes, or even ASCII. EBCDIC, anyone?

Well, the betacode to unicode conversion library works. Next up, indexing Perseus' exotic XML texts.

Weekend Puzzlements

2008-02-04T07:37:00.000-06:00

1) If the system name of the DTD is a 404-ed URL is your XML document valid?

2) What's the point of a DTD, anyway, if you're just going to obliterate it when you think up something cleverer?

3) Anyone who thinks the modern world is "too coldly rational" isn't paying attention.

Answering him she spoke...

2008-01-30T20:56:00.000-06:00

I recently read the BMCR review of A. Kelly's A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer, Iliad VIII. It seemed very interesting so I was delighted to find it in our library. The review will give more details, but basically he presents the text of Iliad VIII on one page and on the facing page gives the title and number indexed to the referential lexicon for every phrase of interest. The entries in that lexicon may be specific phrases, like κέκλυτέ μοι or more general thematic matters — a chariot journey, say.

For each of these entries he has checked the rest of the Iliad for similar words, phrases and scenes, seeking out narrative similarities. The results are really fascinating. For example, the phrase κέκλυτέ μοι is in every case used by someone under a delusion: "[s]peeches so introduced are allotted to figures of particular authority, and contain proposals which are not usually carried out (a narrative disjunction being the result when they are not) and reveal the speaker's delusion" (p. 76). Or οὐδ’ ἀπιθήσεν "denotes acceptance of a command or suggestion (usually from a previous speech), connoting that its substance is then played out in the course of the narrative in the manner forseen by the character giving the command. The command is usually successful." (p. 54). Or again, ἰθὺς μεμαῶτος ("straight eager") "accompanies the onset of a character about to be defeated."

So not only is Homer helping to keep the audience straight with the usual pragmatic tools available to Greek — like those flourishing particles — but the formulaic language itself has a sort of, well, narrative semantics I guess you might call it.

Appendix A is devoted to three speech introduction formulae. He hunts down every scene in the Iliad where two or more of these are used. According to him τὸν δ’ ἠμείβετ’ ἔπειτα indicates emotional perturbation, τὸν δ’ αὖτε προσέειπεν is used when the speaker "will or wants to align himself in a co-operative relationship with the first speaker," and the (similar to the first) τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος προσέφη "represents a relatively greater determination on the part of the speaker to impose his or her will upon the narrative."

Considering the size of Iliad VIII, the commentary is substantial — 515 pages total for the book. I've barely begun to stare closely at all the comparative passages Kelly mentions, and I suspect some of his comments hang of very thin threads indeed. But I've have been paying closer attention to the speech introductions in the Odyssey books we're reading in class. So far Appendix A seems rock solid.

Arc, or, Láadan for Programmers

2008-01-30T17:37:00.000-06:00

Paul Graham, six years after announcing it, has released arc, his new dialect of lisp.

One of the odder corners of my library — for most people at least — will be the section that has all the books on constructed languages. Of course there's Esperanto, but Klingon is represented along with several works on Tolkien's languages. I also have the second edition of A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan by Suzette Haden Elgin (neatly abbreviated SHE). SHE is a linguist by training, but is also a science fiction writer. She created Láadan not only for a series of books, but as an experiment to see if a language designed specifically to represent the views of women could change society, sort of an informal test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Láadan is thus presented as representing women's views better somehow. I've never really been convinced that it does so — I know more gay men who have learned the language than women — but there is no doubt it does represent the viewpoint of one extremely intelligent woman.

Arc is just Láadanified lisp. It represents the particular views of one particular lisp programmer. He may be aiming at a hundred year language, but all I can see is perfectly conventional lisp with a few common functions spelled differently and a few parentheses eccentrically deleted.

This was my first warning sign:

It's not for everyone. In fact, Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language.

Whatever one's feelings about speech codes, I think it's safe to say that any time someone warns you, or brags, that they're about to be politically incorrect you're almost certainly in for some first class assholism or lunacy. I've not previously seen it used in a programming language context, but it seems to hold here, too.

At long last, Graham's vaporous Microsofting of lisp is over. I need to prepare some Homer (I'm taking a class again this semester), but I think I'll spend some time this evening refining my Common Lisp betacode to unicode conversion library, and maybe play with Hunchentoot some more.

A new convert to the LOOP facility

2008-01-20T14:17:00.000-06:00

Some Common Lisp programmers hate the LOOP facility, some don't. I used to fall into the first camp, for various reasons, the most important of which is that LOOP is effectively a specialized looping language grafted onto lisp. Normally I'm a big fan of a single syntactic mode for all corners of a language (like the lisp family, or Smalltalk, quite unlike C or, god help us, perl).

I've been working on some basic forecasting and time series code recently, and I have to say, when you're looping over different time series and smoothing windows, LOOP results in neater code than almost any language I can think of. Here's a simple moving average forecast (in the interest of space, all examples have my anal-retentive sanity checking assertions removed):

(defmethod single-moving-average ((data sequence) (order integer))
  (let ((n (length data)))
    (/ (reduce #'+ data :start (- n order))
       order)))

For such simple sums, the functional style reduce does the job. Once you get to a weighted moving average the math starts to get tricker. As I was thinking about the many, many traversals of sequences I'd be doing, I decided to check out LOOP more seriously by reading a chapter from Seibel's book I had previously skipped, 22. LOOP for Black Belts. I started to develop warm feelings for LOOP immediately. For starters, it does a great job of encapsulating the various sorts of set-up and tear-down you have to do when rolling your own loop so the mechanical bits for doing loops don't infest the rest of your code.

One really lovely touch makes it easy to avoid the off-by-one error — and fussing about — that comes when you use zero-indexed arrays. The FOR clause may indicate exclusive or inclusive bounds, with TO n including n, and BELOW n going up to but not including it. So here's a simple weighted moving average function:

(defmethod weighted-moving-average ((data sequence) (order integer))
  (let ((n (length data)))
    (/ (loop for i from 0 below n
             sum (* (elt data i) (+ i 1)))
       (/ (* n (+ n 1)) 2.0))))

Now I didn't really have to use LOOP for this, but the code I think is somewhat cleaner. The SUM clause accumulates by summing successive values of the expression after it, and in this simple LOOP clause that final sum will be the value of the expression.

My biggest example of LOOP-fu this weekend is a weighted moving average smoothing function. It takes a sequence of data and a sequence of weights and spits out a vector of the smoothed data. In this implementation I simply take the original values at the edges of the data where the smoothing sequence is longer than available values. What I need to do at each step is apply the weight vector to a window of data to compute the moving average for that step. This brings out the other really lovely feature of LOOP: parallel loop values. Here's the scary result, somewhat un-lisp-like to my eyes, but clearer I suspect than I'd be able to produce with functional style tools and DO:

(defmethod weighted-average ((data sequence) (weights sequence))
  (let ((d-n (length data))
        (w-n (length weights)))
    (loop with smoothed = (make-array (list d-n))
          with start = (- w-n 1)
          with end = (- d-n w-n)
          with denom = (reduce #'+ weights)
          for i from 0 below d-n
          if (or (< i start) (> i end))
            do (setf (aref smoothed i) (elt data i))
          else
            do (setf (aref smoothed i)
                     (/ (loop for j from 0 below w-n
                              for dj from (- i start) to i
                              summing (* (elt weights j) (elt data dj)))
                        denom))
          finally (return smoothed))))

A LOOP within a LOOP! The underlined section shows the parallel loop indices, j going over the weights sequence and dj going over the current window on the data. In the outer LOOP I went a bit crazy and used a lot of its abilities — initializing temporary variables, LOOP conditionals, a FINALLY clause — with the results that look like an Algol-Lisp chimera.

If I were a code purist weighted-average would probably make me crazy. Good thing I'm not.

Aoidoi: more cranky poetry

2008-01-07T19:05:00.000-06:00

The Delectus Indelectatus — a collection of brief, cranky poems — has been converted to unicode and has grown by five more poems.

APA Sunday, Jan 6th — Winding Down

2008-01-06T17:04:00.000-06:00

In addition to the receptions the evenings are filled with meetings of various specialized organizations. I spent some time last night at a reading session for the Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin Literature. Most of the time was spent on Latin, and in a desperate attempt to get to Greek I tried to get people interested in one of Palladas' grumpy elegiacs. Alas, though comfortable with public speaking, public reciting makes me nervous. And I badly overemphasized a semantic range of one of Palladas' words in my disordered mental state. On the plus side, several of the attendees were very fluent reciters of Ovid. This is motivating.

Linguistics II

One of the organizers of this session was Benjamin Fortson, IV, and I had to restrain myself from full-on fanboy mode and gush about his Indo-European book at him. The first talk from Tim Barnes on a common epithet formula for Nestor, amassed evidence suggesting the word γερήνιος isn't a toponym at all but a non-Ionic (and non-Aeolic) by-form related to γέρων (old man). The rest of the track was on Italic languages, hardly my speciality. I got to hear le sauvage noble talk about Paelignian, after he was humorously introduced as one of the "last native speakers of Oscan" (or something like that). I do expect van den Berg's talk about the semantic range of malignitas to be useful to me in the future — far in the future, given the rate at which I'm reacquainting myself with Latin these days.

Homer

Several of these talks were very literary in nature, and I'll pass over them.

R. Blankenborg's talk, however, Tuning in: Tracing the Rhythmical Phrase in Homer, made me rather cranky. Most unwelcome to me are (1) the reintroduction of the terminology of thesis and arsis and (2) the analysis of the Homeric hexameter in terms of feet. From his hand-out, "Meter is about the balance within the individual foot." He made the not (to me) controversial assertion that any given thesis (argh!) is measured against the arsis, not against other theses. That is, the hexameter isn't stuck on a fixed tempo. He then went on to say that the arsis necessarily has less duration than the thesis:

μῆνιν ἄειδε > (synaphaea) μῆ.νι.να.
duration of μῆ must be longer than νι.να.

This struck me as typologically unlikely, and I asked him to clarify if he was saying this duration difference was phonetic or a recitation artifact. He said it was the later. Unfortunately this still seems to fly in the face of several Homeric practices. First, sometimes Homer will play some surprising stunts in the princeps (= thesis) position, with the result that a short, open vowel is scanned heavy. This same sort of behavior is not deployed in the biceps (= arsis). Paraphrasing West, a contracted biceps must come by it's length more honestly. I personally would expect the licenses and restrictions to be reversed under Blankenborg's metrical regime.

Finally, if I understand him correctly (our speakers had no mics, very annoying) he seems to be saying that an intonation unit (a phrase) crossing the metrical line will not be modified by crossing the line, that is, phrase structure wins out over metrical segmentation. This would make the hexameter unique among Greek stichic meters. We know in the iambics of Attic drama certain kinds of trickiness are avoided when you get close to metrical line end, which is often taken to signify a slower speaking speed, in which stunts are harder to get away with, near the metrical line end. Indeed, a weak metrical line end would take the Hexameter out of Indo-European poetics altogether, where it is precisely the line end which is most highly regulated.

On the other hand, what he said about rhythmical prominence seems potentially more productive. In particular, the idea that there are pre-pausal metrical habits (sort of like the clausulae of prose, I suppose). He believes pre-pausal word ends should be shaped like an anapest (uu- or --) and end on a princeps (thesis) position. This seems reasonable, and I'll be watching for that when next I read Homer.

Comics

The last session I went to was on comics and the classics. Frank Miller got two papers, one of course on 300, but evidently Thermopylae also figures in one of the Sin City story-lines. I was happy to see Neil Gaiman (Sandman #30, August) get a paper. I never know what to say about classics reception.

Varia

I have yet more poems I want to work on for Aoidoi.org.

I cannot justify the cost of attending the APA every year, but I wouldn't be surprised if I make it a few more times.

APA Anecdote: The Name Tag

2008-01-05T17:35:00.000-06:00

The best response to learning my background came today: "you came here for fun?"

APA Saturday, Jan 5th — Fewer Handouts

2008-01-05T15:55:00.000-06:00

I just got back from a papyrological session, Culture and Society in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Several of these were fiercely technical, but one paper on the distribution of postponed γάρ was short, sweet and full of numbers, which always makes me happy (Stephen Bay, Postponement of Conjunctive γάρ in the Papyri). He noted the contexts in which this postponement occurred. It turns out it frequently keeps company with prepositions, which immediately brought to my mind that in Modern Greek some ancient prepositions have merged with the article so tightly that they're written as one word. *εἰς τὸν γὰρ... or the like might sometimes have seemed like natural enclitic behavior.

The morning session, "The Future is Now? Digital Library Projects and Scholarship and Teaching in Classics," was somewhat exasperating to me. Last spring I attended a giant workship about "cyberinfrastructure" in the University setting, and there was a rather serious disconnect between the haves up on stage and the have-nots in the audience. It was hard to get the big computing centers to really take the problems of smaller departments seriously. This same issue showed up today. The people on stage might be getting tenure by virtue of their digital publications, but in my life graduate students are often unprepared to admit in public they use Perseus.

Second, the orthodoxy of Moore's Law was the sole faith represented. In the traditional publishing model you write a book, it goes to reviewers and an editor, finally gets typeset and is sold for a modest fee (ha!) and at the end you have the most reliable mass storage and retrieval device for text so far ever created. In the brave, new digital and open world you have to do all of that and commit to maintaining the work indefinitely. We know almost nothing about really long-term digital storage, and we need only look to Perseus for the sad state of even short-term reliability. My books never crash for an entire weekend. Doing this correctly will cost beaucoup bucks, and neither I nor other people in the audience were able to get firm comments on funding except for catechismic recitation about ever-cheaper disk storage.

It was also suggested that some of these issues should be foisted off on university libraries. This is doubtless correct in the long term, since librarians have some experience in storing and, rather more importantly, finding again intellectual production. But university libraries are for the most part just as squeezed for resources as everyone else, at least those in the Humanities.

Once again I heard it said that, at least for infrastructure, the Humanities should parasitize the hard sciences, who get much more funding for giant digital projects. This just makes me sad.

In terms of facts, one thing that struck me is that evidently a lot of digitial Humanities resources are very poor at identifying to the world what they are and how you would use them.

I played my "gloomy sysadmin" role and asked everyone if they knew what would happen to their data when the died. We need data wills, including a list of executors so it doesn't get deleted by accident.

Varia

By now I have several poems I want to work up for Aoidoi, thanks to papers.

I look forward to flitting between this evening's many receptions, where I can think happy thoughts.

APA Friday, Jan 4th — Oh, the hand-outs

2008-01-04T21:48:00.000-06:00

Truly vast numbers of trees must meet their end due to this conference. Every single talk I attended today — all 15 minutes — had a hand-out, most about three pages, some as many as five. Several are in A4 format, which I must say satisfies the same deep, smooth part of my brain that likes symmetry. The National Research School in Classical Studies in the Netherlands appears to have an entire department devoted to conference handouts for their scholars — these have better typesetting than some classics books I own. The current owners of Teubner should chat with these people before publishing one more book.

8:30 - 11:00am

There wasn't any particular session that grabbed me for this time slot, so I wandered between sessions picking up particular talks. I started in the Greek Rhetoric session and caught Gunter Martin's talk The Interplay of Comedy and Rhetoric in Foruth-Century Athens. While I haven't yet dipped into comedy of any period, his critique of the idea that Middle Comedy was apolitical seem to me basically sound: Menander is hardly the only measure, and we need to be careful with fragmentary evidence. His mass of hand-out examples seem convincing, but this is hardly my usual area of interest. One trusts a paper will appear in some journal sooner rather than later.

T.A. van Berkel's Spoken like a Hunter: Dio of Prusa's Euboean Oration reminds me how little I still know about classics. Apparently lots of critics have things to say about this work and this author, both of which I have not previously heard of. I cannot meaningfully comment on her talk except to say that I'm tickled by the idea that Plato's Republic was early considered excessively digressive, and that this might have provided the model for an oration some consider incoherent.

I switched over to the Classical Tradition track so I could catch Anne Mahoney's talk, Pascoli's Cena in Caudiano Nervae. I see Mahoney's name frequently attached to interesting reviews and articles on Greek meter, so I figured I had to see anything she might present. I'm not currently in any position to talk about Latin, but this talk was about a late 18th early 19th century Italian author who wrote in both Italian and Latin. Of course the focus was on his Latin work. For me personally the zombie-like second life of Latin is in some ways more interesting that the Romans, so I shall have to come back to Pascoli when my Latin is in better order.

I ditched out at this point to hunt down more substantial sustenance than coffee. I learned last night that not just Unix conference attendees appreciate fine brews deep into the night, and was still catching up from a somewhat tardy awakening.

11:15an - 1:15pm: Linguistics

This session was more my speed. The room was crowded, which inspired surprised comment from the presider. Philology might be making something of a come-back.

Stéphanie Bakker's talk, On the so-called Attributive and Predicative Position in Ancient Greek has been the most important of the presentations I have seen, at least in terms of changing how I read Greek myself. The traditional terminology and explanation starts to fall over most obviously when heavier modifiers get involved (participle phrases, genitives), but hardly only then, and her fabulously typeset hand-out has good Herodotean examples. Her argument is that modifiers of a noun not preceded by the article are merely descriptive, while those with the article "modify the reference," that is, they select or clarify which referent is actually meant:

ὁ δὲ βασιλήιος πῆχυς τοῦ μετρίου ἐστὶ πήχεος μέζων τρισὶ δακτύλοισι. (Hdt. 1.178.3)
The royal measure is greater by three fingers breadth than the common measure.

καὶ αἱρέουσι ἔρημον τὸ ἄστυ καί τινας ὀλίγους εὑρίσκουσι τῶν Ἀθηναίων ἐν τῷ ἱρῷ ἐόντας ... (Hdt. 8.51.2)
When then took the town it was deserted and in the sacred precinct they found a few Athenians...

I need to hunt down her earlier work on constituent order in noun phrases.

Coulter H. George's The Historical Present in Classical Greek and the Development of Greek Aspect was pretty nifty. He starts from some of the insights of the pragmatists but tries to make that work falsifiable by noting the company verb forms (present, imperfect, aorist) keep with phrases of time (dative, genitive or accusative). He has nice charts of the behavior of verbs broken down by Aksionsart, resulting in a reasonably strong showing that punctual verbs may use the historical present but durative ones rarely do. His idea is that the historical present in Attic represents a higher degree of punctuality than the aorist. In the questions it became clear that this greater punctuality may be a pragmatic (i.e., narrative) consideration.

The other talks in this session were also interesting but take us into areas I cannot really talk about (Indo-Aryan and Latin historical linguistics). There's another linguistics session Sunday morning.

1:30pm - 4:00pm: Archaic and Classical Poetry

There were several interesting talks in this session but I find myself at a bit of a loss to talk about them. I've not really read Tyrtaeus much, so I cannot respond to Maria Noussia's talk defending him somewhat from critics (he didn't need to argue his points — his audience already embraced what he was reminding them of). Mark Alonge ("Standing" Greek Choruses) amassed citations about the collocation of χορός and ἵστημι to suggest emendations to Electra and Iphiginia in Tauris that seemed pretty solid. So often in this field we have to work with sparse data a and little sure knowledge. The rest of the papers seemed to skate pretty close to the edges of what we know.

(See the abstracts for some more details.)

Varia

I signed up for the APA meeting online. I was required to fill in an affiliation field. Since I'm not actually a student at the UW, I just put in Aoidoi.org as my affiliation. This has provoked interesting responses. One person described the name as intriguing, but one person in the elevator said, somewhat aggressively, "What is that? Who are you?"

I found one Textkit member turned graduate student.

A surprising number of people are aghast at the current publish-or-perish system. "Why do you have to have a book within two years? You don't know anything yet!" In previous generations you might easily go a decade before your first book, often longer. Many people seem to regard current publishing as a huge expense for insight that might more profitably be condensed into a good paper. My own feeling is that as Greek especially fades from most universities as a unique field classicists need to take control of scholarly publishing away from people like Brill. Peer-reviewed, online and open is the only way scholarly work will be seen by anyone but the very richest institutions. Academic publishers will eventually reach a stage where classicists no longer support them. Latin will always have a place, but I'm somewhat cynical about the future of classical Greek. I expect In a few generations a local hellenist to be about as common as a local sumeriologist. Not everyone here is quite so gloomy as I am on this.

APA: Opening Salvo

2008-01-03T17:04:00.001-06:00

Well, here I am, using an extortionate internet connection.

Except for registration and committee meetings I have no business at, the conference hasn't technically started yet, but already I've managed to buy a book, Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue, Helma Dik. There are modest discounts from some vendors, which simply adds to the temptations. I should avoid that room for the remainder of the conference.

I have run into two people I remember from the UT-Austin Classics department from, ah, a while ago. Et le sauvage noble!

APA Pre-game

2008-01-02T18:32:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow I head to Chicago for the 2008 Annual Meeting of the APA. The last non-work conference I spent my own money on was the 1999 Congress of the Esperanto League of North America in St. Louis. I'd guess there'll be fewer aged socialists at the APA, but, given the increasingly mercantile nature of US universities, it may not be a less quixotic enterprise.

For the last two months there has been a painful Saga of Wm's Tooth, and I had some anxiety that I'd be in pain for the entire APA, but an emergency root canal on December 28th has solved all problems. I just need not to swallow the temporary crown.

I have a laptop, and the hotel has wireless, so I will be conference blogging. Of course I'll be focusing on sessions on Greek verse of any period — there's an entire session on Homer — Linguistics, and computer-classics hybrid geekery. There's nothing especially Greeky in one time slot, so I'll probably attend the Catullus session. I'll probably also hit the evening workshop for the Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin Literature if I'm not camped out at Russian Tea Time sucking down kasha and currant tea.

laptop: acquired and charged, useful software installed (solving my travel anxiety problem)

bookbag: cleaned out and reloaded with moleskine cahiers and printouts of confirmation numbers

Hero fountain pens: freshly loaded up with the terrifying inks I favor, packed

luggage: nearly packed

portable school edition of Alcestis with notes and vocab: tucked in coat pocket

I was disappointed to learn there is no discount at the book stalls until the last day, at which point it becomes a feeding frenzy, with dignified giants in the field sprinting like new-born fawns and gnawing off would-be competitors' arms in the ruckus.

I just hope Madison doesn't wash away when all that snow melts Sunday and Monday. I'll try not to worry about it.

Huffing Web 2.0: The "Web OS"

2007-12-13T07:56:00.000-06:00

If you write a pile of AJAX and server code which fills our browsers with something that looks vaguely like a windowed desktop, congratulations on your innovation, and good luck rising to the top of the ever-growing pile of these. If your marketing people tell you to advertise this as a "Web OS" bop them on the head with a wiffle bat and tell them to try again. If you, the developer, are tempted to call it a Web OS, change professions this instant.

A desktop-looking thingie running in a browser is just a GUI app. It's an operating system as much as my first cell phone's a Cray supercompter.

Procto-paroemiaca

2007-12-10T19:24:00.001-06:00

It's amazing what you can find randomly opening a book! Yet another gem from the Greek proverbs book. Dan'll love this one, and Laudator may want to add this to his collection, as well (p. 447):

πρωκτὸς λουτροῦ περιγίνεται· ὅταν τις μὴ δύνηται ἀπονίψασθαι, ἀλλ’ ἡ κοιλία αὐτῷ ἐπιφέρηται· * * τῶν ἀνωφελῶν.

Τhe anus overwhelms the bath: whenever someone is not able to wash, but the feces accumulates on him. [ * * ] of worthless/harmful things/people.

The editors think there's text missing where the asterisks are.

The verb περιγίγνεται, which I am used to seeing in battle accounts, makes this proverb especially vivid for me.

There is an extensive footnote on this one which people with Latin and Greek both may find interesting. Several of the scholia seem to point to more precise, if somewhat contradictory, senses of the proverb:

παροιμιακὸν τοῦτο ἐπὶ τῶν ἐπὶ κακῷ τῷ ἑαυτῶν νικώντων· ἢ ἐπὶ τῶν ἀεὶ μολυνομένων καὶ βιαζομένων καθαίρεσθαι.

This proverb is about those conquering their own problems; or about those who constantly defile themselves and are forced to clean up.

Καλλίστρατος δέ φησι· παροιμία, πρωκτὸς λουτροῦ περιγνίνῃ, ἑπὶ τῶν βιαζομένων εἰς κακὸν ἑαυτούς· ὡς εἴ τις βιάζοιτο μὴ ἀποπλύνεσθαι.

Callistratus says, "a proverb, 'the anus overcomes the bath,' used about those compelled to do themselves ill, as if someone were forced to not wash."

There is a huge ambiguity in the first quote concerning the infinitive καθαίρεσθαι. The base sense is "cleanse, wash off" but it also has a specific medical sense, "purge, evacuate," which might include pharmacological aid (see the LSJ entry on καθαίρω).

Scholiastic Greek, even with the help of Dickey's book, is still often a puzzle, so I'll happily accept other suggestions for translation.

A Particular Proverb

2007-12-10T18:49:00.000-06:00

I recently ran across an old collection of Greek Proverbs (Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum, Ernst von Leutsch, Friedrich Wilhelm Schneidewin, at the googleborg). It's great for random browsing. Most of the time the proverb is listed with with explanatory material, usually short but sometimes quite extensive. Some of them, however, are self explanatory, such as this one that comes in two variants:

οὐδὲν ἦν τἄλλα πάντα πλὴν χρυσός (p. 285)
It was all nothing else except gold.

The variant collected from Plutarch, however, is more interesting:

οὐδὲν ἦν ἄρα τὰ ἄλλα πλὴν ὁ χρυσός (p. 335)
It was nothing except the gold after all.

Both versions are appropriate to politics of all periods, but the second one is especially nice, demonstrating as it does a special use of ἄρα which indicates the new perception of a previously unrecognized truth. It frequently does this in the company of imperfects of εἶναι, as here. This use of ἄρα seems to have been fairly persistent. I cannot think of any Homeric examples, but Hesiod starts off his Works and Days with an example:

οὐκ ἄρα μοῦνον ἔην Ἐρίδων γένος, ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν 11
εἰσὶ δύω·

There wasn't only one race of Strife after all, but upon the earth
there are two.

Sadly, the index nominum didn't deem ἄρα worthy of indexing.

Metrical Fanboys at the APA Annual Meeting

2007-12-05T20:38:00.001-06:00

On a less cranky note than the previous post, I just finalized arrangements to attend the 2008 annual meeting of the American Philological Association. I'll be the balding guy with AOIDOI.ORG for the affiliation field of his name tag. Perhaps I'll do some conference blogging if I can get someone to lend me a laptop for a few days. I hope some of my non-commenting readership will stop me and say "hi" or "that December translation of Xenophon was disastrous" or something.

Those Pesky Single People

2007-12-05T16:19:00.000-06:00

Do the pitying looks no longer properly motivate the future spinster? Do the condescending "we just want you to be happy"s no longer get suitably enthusiastic agreement from the creepy bachelor uncle? Does "be fruitful and multiply" not motivate your secular single friends? Well, now you have another way to intrude yourself into that single person's life and lay on the guilt: single people are unecological!

Before officers had pistols

2007-11-27T18:18:00.000-06:00

Xenophon's Anabasis 1.3.1:

ἐνταῦθα ἔμεινεν ὁ Κῦρος καὶ ἡ στρατιὰ ἡμέρας εἴκοσιν· οἱ γὰρ στρατιῶται οὐκ ἔφασαν ἰέναι τοῦ πρόσω· ὑπώπτευον γὰρ ἤδη ἐπὶ βασιλέα ἰέναι· μισθωθῆναι δὲ οὐκ ἐπὶ τούτῳ ἔφασαν. πρῶτος δὲ Κλέαρχος τοὺς αὑτοῦ στρατιώτας ἐβιάζετο ἰέναι· οἱ δ᾽ αὐτόν τε ἔβαλλον καὶ τὰ ὑποζύγια τὰ ἐκείνου, ἐπεὶ ἄρξαιντο προϊέναι. Κλέαρχος δὲ τότε μὲν μικρὸν ἐξέφυγε μὴ καταπετρωθῆναι, ὕστερον δ᾽ ἐπεὶ ἔγνω ὅτι οὐ δυνήσεται βιάσασθαι, συνήγαγεν ἐκκλησίαν τῶν αὑτοῦ στρατιωτῶν.

There Cyrus and the army remained for twenty days, because the soldiers said they would would not go forward. They now suspected that they were going against the great king, and they said they hadn't been paid for that. Clearchus was the first to try to make his army go. They pelted him and the pack animals whenever they tried to go forward. Clearchus then fled for a bit so as not to get stoned to death, and later, when he realized he'd not be able to force them, called an assembly of his own troops.

Greeks! What can you do with these people?

Pseudo-Callisthenes Enwebbened

2007-11-23T17:36:00.000-06:00

In case my own blogging is too impossibly obscure, I offer up much lighter reading: the Alexander Romance in blog format. It's in Greek, of course, transcribed from an offering of the GoogleBorg. Where the scan has a bug-squish instead of a letter I supplement from Leif Bergson's 1965 Der Griechische Alexanderroman Rezension β. The Greek is very easy and it's already divided into lots of teeny chapters, so the blog format seemed like a good way to transcribe it for now.

As far as I can see there are no online editions of this yet. When I finish each book (there are three) I'll take the blog posts and turn them into a single, nicer document.

The Astronautilia and the shadow of Homer

2007-11-15T18:35:00.000-06:00

A bit more than a year ago I mentioned the Astronautilia and its author, Jan Křesadlo. Thanks to the help of his son, who very kindly sent me a PDF copy of the Greek portion of the manuscript (all of it), I can now present the opening to that work: Astronautilia (PDF).

As in the Ode to Stalin, Křesadlo's use of the heroic hexameter is sometimes a bit of a shock. When I first started reading the Astronautilia I found this a bit off-putting. Now I'm inclined to look on this more favorably, even if not all of his verses are things you'd want to show to a tutor at Oxford, say, for fear of inducing a stroke.

Based on current web logs, the commentary I did on Theocritus 13 may go down in Aoidoi.org history as the least popular effort ever — worse even than the notes on Pindar. I myself came away from working on that with a sense that Theocritus, and the Alexandrian poets in general, were on the near edge of artistic panic thanks to the overwhelming shadow of Homer. Part of this impression may come from my choice of reading to prepare for Theocritus, but it's hard not to see the dialect, the curious twisting of Homeric words and phasing, and the bucolic digressions as a desperate attempt to get out of that massive shadow. Right now I'm not sure I want to read Theocritus again, but I have some sympathy for the guy. He made a good effort to make the hexameter his own.

Having seen Theocritus' struggles, I'm now a lot more kindly disposed toward Křesadlo's sometimes radical innovations in his Epic hexameters. He observed the licenses Homer allowed himself and then ran with those ideas. The manuscript as sent to me — I don't know if it appears in the edition with the facing Czech translation — has a glossary of "unusual forms and words." In that you can really see Křesadlo taking hold of Epic Greek and making it serve his own purposes. Excepting the imports from Modern Greek, his process is clearly modeled on variations found in standard Epic Greek. The very first line announces he's not producing a school exercise in the style of Homer:

ἀρχόμενος πρῶτον Μουσῶν χορῷ εἰξ Ἑλικῶνος

In Epic the preposition represented in Attic by ἐν, "in," has two additional metrical variants, ἐνί and εἰν. There is no metrical reason at all to lengthen the preposition ἐξ, "out (of)," but Křesadlo has produced a free Homerism, εἰξ, unexampled in any Greek I've ever seen.

There are curiosities of declension:

ἄνηρες = ἄνερες = ἄνδρες (influenced by Modern, Greek, evidently)
κύωνες = κύνες modeled on ἄνηρες

He produces numerous doublets, giving him several metrical choices for a single word:

ἑλκήθρος -ου ὁ = ἑλκήθρον -ου τό "sledge"
ἐξίσωσις -εως ἡ = ἐξισώοσις "equation," a shocking reinterpretation of Epic distraction

"Robot" got special attention, as is appropriate in science fiction, with no fewer than four forms: ῥόβοτος -ου ὁ, ῥοβότης -ου ὁ, ῥόβως -ωτος ὁ, ῤουβώτης -ου ὁ, as well as ῥοβότη ἡ “she-robot.” My favorite definition is φεῖσρος -ου ὁ “fazer - an established sci-fi weapon shooting pernicious rays.” The resulting mix of Homeric phrasing and robots is interesting (Αν. ι. 25, p.89):

βῆν ἴμεν πρὸς πτολίεθρον ἐγὼ καὶ Φράντα ῥοβώτης

His freedom with the hexameter is also on display in this line. And he hasn't just used the Epic dialect for his art. He grabbed the scholarly apparatus of ancient texts and turned that into part of the work, too — sometimes he marks his own lines as doubtful, putting them [in square brackets.]

With the possible exception of Nonnos' Dionysiaca, the Astronautilia has to be the most wild and even disorienting appropriation of Homeric language I have ever seen, and am ever likely to see. I simply cannot imagine what motivated Křesadlo to produce such a work, and my innocence of the Czech language leaves me with little chance to compare this with his other works. But even with the shocks of meter I can't help but be delighted the Astronautilia exists.

On accenting first declension genitive plurals in adjectives

2007-11-13T19:21:00.000-06:00

In the course of editing Theocritus 13 one of my proof-reader and sanity-checkers raised red flags about the accenting of the adjective in this line (citation form κυανέος):

ἅτις κυανεᾶν οὐχ ἅψατο Συνδρομάδων ναῦς, 22

Now in first declension nouns, no matter where the accent is in the nominative, in the genitive plural the accent is perispomenon, νίκη, νικῶν. This is presented as a rule in most textbooks, but if you know Epic then it's clear that the accent is the result of the contraction of -άων (long alpha).

In Attic, first and second declension adjectives have forms and accenting identical to the nouns except for the feminine first declension genitive plural, which is accented like the masculine/neuter form. Thus, in Attic ἀξίων γυναικῶν not *ἀξιῶν γυναικῶν. Homer, however, keeps the full -άων ending (or derivatives of it, -έων, or after vowels -ῶν).

So what's going on with κυανεᾶν? Not one of my grammars has anything to say about this. From the form it's clear that this is a Doric (or Aeolic) contraction from -άων, so I was prepared to accept the accenting in all the editors of Theocritus I could find. I still wanted some clear statement about this, however. Finally I had to resort to an accenting manual, Chandler's A Practical Introduction to Greek Accentuation (GoogleBorg), which is actually a massive work. The very large section 203 (p.55) starts with,

Feminine adjectives and participles following the first declension (which in the oblique cases of the singular and in all cases of the plural are subject to the rules laid down for oblique cases in the first declension) present some peculiarities.

He then goes on to citations from the ancient grammarians. Then, section 204 (p.56),

The Aeolic and Doric genitives in αν are circumflexed, as κυλιχνᾶν, Τηϊᾶν, ...

So there you go. You need never worry about this perplexing matter again.

Aoidoi: Theocritus 13 — Hylas

2007-11-11T12:29:00.000-06:00

Another longish poem, Theocritus 13, also known as the Rape of Hylas (taking the sense of "seizure" for rape rather than sexual violence, though the poem is perhaps ambiguous on that point). For amusement and edification I also made use of an old volume from Google Books and transcribed the ancient scholia on this poem.

Sci-Fi Surf Rock

2007-10-17T19:59:00.000-05:00

A barely noticed musical interlude during Morning Edition somehow wormed itself into my brains some weeks ago, so today I find myself poking around the likely places looking for — instrumental Surf music. Lucky for me that revival already happened in the 90s, so research is easy.

What strikes me is that there's a little subgenre, Space Rock, which uses effects even more than Surf already does, and has, of course, sci-fi themes. "The Ventures in Space," Ziggy Stardust, The P-Funk Mothership, Man... or Astro-Man? — what is it about sci-fi and rock?

In case anyone is curious, the song that got this started is "La Planche," by The Vanduras.

Happy Fun Time with the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice

2007-09-26T15:33:00.000-05:00

If I were more philosophically advanced perhaps I wouldn't take quite so much joy in this, via Ash-sharq al-awsat:

According to Dr. Al-Marshood, the two commission members approached the girls in order to "politely" advise and guide them regarding their inappropriate clothing.

Consequently, the two girls started verbally abusing the commission members, which then lead to one of the girls pepper-spraying them in the face as the other girl filmed the incident on her mobile phone, while continuing to hurl insults at them.

Most excellent.

Wm's Improvised Beet Salad, Thai Flavor

2007-09-24T16:54:00.000-05:00

several medium roasted beets

one large-ish cucumber, or most of one of those European "burpless" ones

cayenne pepper

one lime

fish sauce

cilantro, if you're not one of those people for whom it tastes like soap

The best way to roast the beets I've found is to trim, wash and wrap them individually in foil and bake at 350 until tender, about 50-70 minutes for medium beets, 90 for the big daddies we're getting this late in autumn. Peeling them after roasting is a greater danger to clothing, but much easier.

After the beets are cooled and peeled, medium dice the beets and the cuke — seed the cuke if it it's one of the watery varieties. Toss in a bowl with the juice of the lime, several sturdy dashes of the cayenne and at least 1 tsp of fish sauce, more if you share my fondness for it. If you're afraid of the fish sauce, you may want add some salt. Chill for a bit, toss in a handful of cilantro before serving.

There are in both Thai and ancient Roman cooking simple recipes which pair melon and fish sauce. Beets aren't quite like melons, but it's hard to lose with the the sweet + tart + salty combo. Here's the Roman recipe, from Apicius (85):

pepones et melones: piper, puleinum, mel vel passum, liquamen, acetum. interdum et silfi accedit.

Cantaloupe and melon: pepper, pennyroyal, honey or passum, fish sauce , vinegar. Sometimes also silphium is added.

Passum was a sweet wine made from raisins. Sylphium is a probably extinct plant about which ethnobotanists dearly love to speculate. It may have been like a milder asafoedita.

Travel Anxiety

2007-08-24T21:11:00.001-05:00

In addition to the usual worries about air travel most people have — schedules, did I remember to pack enough socks, where will my luggage end up this time? — I have another massive decision to make. With my reading material do I include the big and useful Greek dictionary or the crappy but less heavy one?

Some Archilochus

2007-08-19T15:37:00.000-05:00

Worked up for Aoidoi: Archilochus 13, mourning recent deaths at sea, reportedly including his sister's husband.

No Roses in Homer

2007-08-13T21:12:00.000-05:00

Someone posted a brief poem on the Textkit forum as a verse composition challenge. Unfortunately, the opening stanza is mostly a list, which is always a nightmare in verse translation. I decided to check Homer to see if there are any epithets with rose I could use to save me some metrical pains. There aren't, because Homer not once uses the word rose, ῥόδον. Nor does Hesiod, nor any of the Homeric Hymns except one, the Hymn to Demeter, where it is part of — ta-dah! — a list:

ἄνθεά τ' αἰνυμένην, ῥόδα καὶ κρόκον ἠδ' ἴα καλὰ 6

There are compounds and derivatives involving roses — ῥοδόεις, the famous ῥοδοδάκτυλος. Just no roses themselves. This is surprising to me.

Aoidoi.org: Pindar's Isthmian 2

2007-08-06T17:21:00.000-05:00

Using the new house style made possible by XeTeX I worked up (rather, finished working up) the famous poem with the "Mercenary Muse," Pindar's Isthmian 2.

Ratatouille, or, What do the critics know?

2007-07-28T10:53:00.000-05:00

If you fear spoilers, you should probably just stop reading right now.

When I saw Ratatouille earlier this week, after I left I felt that some editor somewhere needed a bit more backbone to stand up to Brad Bird. Now I'm not quite so sure.

I was feeling a little bit ambivalent about Bird after his last film, The Incredibles, which has the very in-your-face message that excellence is better — "everybody's special" means nobody is. Aristotle would have grokked this, but in contemporary culture this out-loud aristocratic sentiment all too often keeps company with odious political movements. But there was nothing else in the film worry me about Bird's agenda, unlike the most recent Star Wars movies, which are full of the worst sort of divine-right, aristocratic nonsense.

More than one reviewer has complained about the scene in Ratatouille where Rémy — our heroic little chef — and his father go on a trip to see what humans do to rats. They go to what I assume is supposed to be a rat-catcher's business and see dead rats hanging above boxes of poisons in the store-front window. One reviewer thought this pointless. I think it's absoultely vital for the message of this film.

The scene is at night and dark, so I wouldn't say it's gratuitously bloody or violent. But there certainly is something alarming about the scene: a dozen rats all hung from ugly, outsized traps. The arrangement is tidy and one could, if feeling a bit overheated, call the presentation ritualistic. Rémy's father has brought him to witness an atrocity.

The entire movie is about Rémy escaping the identity imposed on him by an accident of birth. Near the end of the film there's a brief scene where he declines to go home either with his family or his human companion, Linguini. The parting is friendly, and Rémy walks down the street in his own direction. For him to go his own way — being a chef and a rat — requires him to be able to not be hindered by the terrible history between humans and rats. Perhaps in the film Rémy forgives faster than any but a saint in real life could manage, but this idea, that we don't need to be enslaved by imposed identities or by history, is a powerful one I can endorse whole-heartedly.

I don't think I'm reading too much into this. The same film ends with a remarkable monologue on art criticism.

Edit: And now I see that the original work on the film was done by Jan Pinkava. What don't the Pinkavas do?

A Cynic's Internet Dictionary: wise

2007-07-25T14:28:00.000-05:00

wise adj., of statements, commonplace or banal sentiment expressed in a manner advocates of the sentiment have not previously encountered; giving the impression of insight though obscure, elevated or metaphorical language; adj., of people, prone to expressing banalities in novel language.

XeTeX equals classicist joy

2007-07-16T20:28:00.000-05:00

When I first started Aoidoi.org, before Unicode was yet widely available, I used a very ugly combination of an HTML templating engine and long Unix pipelines to turn Betacode in fake tags (thanks to the template system) into GIF images of Greek. The pipeline started with the production of a LaTeX file, which was run through latex, then dvips, then ps2gif, after which all the LaTeX goo was cleaned up.

After not too many years of that I decided to go with PDFs, which let me actually save the work of LaTeX. Over time I have accumulated a lot of extra styles to do things like metrical symbols, and multiple levels of footnotes — which I hijack into something like what Pharr's Aeneid and many other student editions look like. But until now I have had to use a very nasty encoding scheme to represent the Greek:

\GRK{o>i m`en >ipp'hwn str'oton, o>i d`e p'esdwn,}
\footnotetextC[1]{
\bgrk{o>i} $=$ \bgrk{o< i}.  \SP 
\bgrk{o>i m`en ... o>i d'e}, ``some... others...'' with the main verb in 
  line 2,  \bgrk{fa~is(i)}.  
...

Nor have I ever found a usable polytonic Greek font that I could use in LaTeX which had a bold font available. Normally the headword in vocabulary notes or comments is in bold. It makes it a lot easier to find when you're moving back and forth between the text and the help.

But now I have XeTeX, a version of LaTeX that understands Unicode, so I can use real Greek in LaTeX source now. And, better yet, XeTeX is capable of using any TT or OT font installed on your system. So now I have several usable polytonic Greek bolds to use in commentaries. There's no single family that really makes me happy — either I like the Greek side, or the Latin side, not both. When Gentium finally has the promised bold, I'll be very happy. In the meantime I'm still trying to find the best mix of fonts to get something non-awful. Here's a current attempt, Sappho PMG 976, using Gentium for the main body Greek, all the Latin, and for the bold in the notes the lovely Greek Font Society (GFS) Neohellenic Bold. I'm very partial to their Didot face on the Greek side, and it has a nice bold, but something is wonky with the Latin side.

For amusement I used the GFS font inspired by a 16th century face, GFS Complutum, to typeset the first book of the Odyssey, Rhapsodia A. The backwards "y" looking thing is a nu.

If any Hellenist reading this post decides to grab XeTeX and play around, note that 1) you really want the fontspec extra and 2) you cannot use it with metre.sty. I have hacked at fontspec.sty so that it and metre.sty play nice. Contact me if you want a copy.

Copular Intrusion

2007-07-05T19:30:00.000-05:00

A recent question on the Textkit Forum sent me rummaging through Perseus XML files of Greek texts, looking for a rather surprising construction. I wonder how many other people hunt for Ancient Greek comparanda using grep and emacs? In any case, the original question was about Plato's Apology 18c,

οὗτοι, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, <οἱ> ταύτην τὴν φήμην κατασκεδάσαντες, οἱ δεινοί εἰσίν μου κατήγοροι.

The entire underlined phrase is the predicate, and the puzzle is the bold-faced εἰσίν — this is the verb, smack in the middle of a noun phrase. In English it'd be like saying "the small is dog mean" instead of "the small dog is mean." Well, not exactly, given Greek word order, but it's still a bit of a surprise. The enclitic μου is less a surprise, and a number of other enclitics and postpositives could appear in the middle of a noun phrase without anyone but rank beginners batting an eye (δέ, γε, κτλ.) I already knew forms of εἰμί, including εἰσι(ν), are enclitic. I hadn't fully appreciated that they can be postpositive. Sir Kenneth Dover (Greek Word Order, p. 13):

(xi) The verb εἰναι cannot be classed as q without many qualifications and reservations, not all of which admit of a satisfactory classification. εἶναι as a copula tends, in most authors, to be treated as q; when it is first word in a clause, we import into its translation nuances which the context does not always demand and sometimes scarcely justifies. I use the symbol M^q for εἶναι in its copulative sense.

He uses q to mean postpostives and M to mean non-prepositive, non-postpositive "mobiles," mostly what we'd consider content words (nouns, verbs, etc.). He invents a special sign for εἰμί to indicate its dual status as both mobile and postpositive. Nonetheless, it doesn't seem to fall in the middle of noun phrases very often. Though I didn't search all of Plato, I did check the Republic where I found only one case that seems similar, with an articular infinitive phrase (just a snazzy noun phrase, really), 339c:

τὸ δὲ ὀρθῶς ἆρα τὸ τὰ συμφέροντά ἐστι τίθεσθαι ἑαυτοῖς, τὸ δὲ μὴ ὀρθῶς ἀσύμφορα; ἢ πῶς λέγεις;

"Correctly" then is to lay down [laws] for their own advantage, and "not correctly" their disadvantage? Or what did you mean?

This was an upsetting find. I had first assumed that the odd placement of εἰσίν was due to the danger of garden path confusion, where the participle phrase might be construed as the predicate if the verb went after the demonstrative or the participle. In the Republic sentence other word orders are possible which could accomodate ἐστι outside the noun phrase. In my somewhat random searching of other texts I finally found a magnificent example from Aeschines, Against Timarchus 117:

ἔστι δ᾽ ὁ μὲν πρότερός μοι λόγος προδιήγησις τῆς ἀπολογίας ἧς ἀκούω μέλλειν γίγνεσθαι, ἵνα μὴ τοῦτο ἐμοῦ παραλιπόντος ὁ τὰς τῶν λόγων τέχνας κατεπαγγελλόμενος τοὺς νέους διδάσκειν ἀπάτῃ τινὶ παραλογισάμενος ὑμᾶς ἀφέληται τὸ τῆς πόλεως συμφέρον. ὁ δὲ δεύτερός ἐστί μοι λόγος παράκλησις τῶν πολιτῶν πρὸς ἀρετήν.

My first point is anticipation.... My second point is exhortation...

A compliant corpus is so agreeable. Here we have perfectly parallel, contrasting phrases of the sort Greek dearly loves, one with an expected use, one with an intruding ἐστί. I've been a big fan of the work of the Dutch classicists investigating Greek grammar from the standpoint of Functional Grammar, especially Helma Dik's work on word order. When I saw the Aeschines example I was immediately reminded of the paper On Unemphatic “Emphatic” Pronouns in Greek: Nominative pronounsin Plato and Sophocles (APA abstract and handout). Unfortunately I'm really out of my depth here, in that my knowledge of Functional Grammar is fairly superficial. I have a basic understanding of its operation at the level of the clause. What I don't know is if the Topic-Focus elements are recursive and one can reasonably speak of Focus in a phrase part of a larger clause — because right now I'm pretty sure the intrusive forms of εἰμί indicate Contrastive Focus on the word they follow. What I'm not sure about is whether this Focus motivates, or is motivated by, the placement of the copula.

ἄλλα δ’ ἔτι λολικά

2007-05-31T18:13:00.000-05:00

It has been fun watching the lol* phenomenon explode wildly out of control. For a while last night I watched the IRC chat for lolcode — including feature votes — with great interest. I expect a lolcode metacircular evaluator within the week.

Truly, we are approaching the lolsingularity. I wonder what supplements Ray Kurzweil will be popping for that.

Aoidoi: Sappho 16

2007-05-24T19:06:00.000-05:00

New for Aoidoi.org, Sappho's fragment 16:

οἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον, οἰ δὲ πέσδων
οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ' ἐπὶ γᾶν μέλαιναν
ἔμμεναι κάλλιστον· ἔγω δὲ κῆν' ὄττω τις ἔραται.

Some say it's an army of cavalry, others the infantry,
and others the navy, that's the most beautiful thing on
the black earth. But I say it's that which one loves.

That's only the opening of the poem. It also got a recitation in Greek and English in the recent In Our Time episode, "Greek and Roman Love Poetry" (RA of podcast).

λολικὸς αἴλουρος

2007-05-23T18:42:00.000-05:00

In response to some testiness on a forum that seemed in danger of escalating, I was inspired to create a lolcat in ancient Greek —

Perseus is not a new kind of crutch.

2007-04-26T20:14:00.000-05:00

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born. — Alan Kay

Early in April 2007 one of the few redeeming web sites on the entire internet, Perseus, had a security compromise. For two weeks the site was completely down, and as of this writing, three weeks later, it is still barely usable on those occasions when it is even capable of answering a HTTP GET request. It wasn't exactly overpowered before the security problem.

The absence of Perseus drew comment in all the expected places, but Mark Goodacre made a comment on his blog which I confess I find completely baffling:

Useful as these are in teaching and research, and grateful as we are to their developers, perhaps we should all sponsor "electronic free April" every year and insist that everyone has a good month each year when they are only allowed access to print resources for Greek. Perhaps we could institute it as a kind of compulsory Lent abstinence for all NT scholars and students?

Unless one believes that tedious labor (κάματος) is a worthwhile goal in itself, I cannot see how this is a good idea.

There is not a single resource Perseus offers which doesn't exist in print. The Greek and Latin texts of course have been around a good long while, but the commentaries and lexica for them have existed nearly as long. I don't know how long concordances have existed, but several centuries at least. There are interlinears available for the most popular texts, and parallel translations have their own publishing industry (Loeb, Budé). I can wander down to my local bookstore and buy a brand new copy of a work with the morphology parsed for me — Vergil comes in for this treatment especially — and numerous dictionaries will provide parsing help for beginners, plus you can always get one of those verb books for Greek.

The only thing new thing Perseus offers is speed. I have spent many, many hours of my life paging through dictionaries. The vast majority of the time I know exactly what the lemma is (modulo declensional class), so there's no intellectual work in this at all. Further, using the Perseus lexica is probably superior for most people because it gives us access to the largest editions of these works. At home I have only the Middle Liddell. With Perseus I can spend a lot more quality time getting full range of a word's use from the Great Scott — a far better use of time than flipping pages.

It has been quipped that computers allow us to make errors faster than ever before. They certainly make it possible to indulge in poor study habits more easily and more quickly than before. That problem is not in the computers, but in us. Instead of giving up Perseus for Lent, we should give up checking translations from Perseus and Loebs. Instead of relying on Perseus word lookup, the impoverished dictionaries at the end of student editions or marginalia, let us build lists of words to memorize.

Driving home a point in the Works and Days, Hesiod addresses his brother Perses:

σοὶ δ’ εἰ πλούτου θυμὸς ἐέλδεται ἐν φρεσὶν ᾗσιν,
ὧδ’ ἔρδειν, καὶ ἔργον ἐπ’ ἔργῳ ἐργάζεσθαι. 382

But if the spirit in your own soul wants wealth,
do as I say, and upon work pile work with work.

The Greek word for work, ἔργον (ergon, earlier *wergon) is cognate with English. Hesiod plays with phonetics, and issues the command to do with a very similar sounding word, erdein. What he doesn't do is recommend κάματος, wearying toil. That word is frequently paired with words for "pain" and "woe" in Epic. Learning these difficult languages, and reading the refined and literary works in them, is a lot of work in the best of circumstances. Why add needless toil?

Callipygian Aphrodite

2007-04-02T20:13:00.000-05:00

From Athenaeus 12.555 (text via Google Books, whose top-notch quality control is responsible for the doubtful readings at the end):

οὕτω δὲ ἐξήρηντο τῶν ἡδυπαθειῶν· οἱ τότε, ὡς καὶ καλλιπύγου Ἀφροδίτης ἱερὸν ἱδρύσασθαι ἀπὸ τοιαύτης αἰτίας. ἀνδρὶ ἀγροίκῳ ἐγένοντο δύο καλαὶ θυγατέρες. αὗται φιλονεικήσασαί ποτε πρὸς ἑαυτάς, προελθοῦσαι ἐπὶ τὴν λεωφόρον διεκρίνοντο, ποτέρα εἴη καλλιπυγοτέρα. καί ποτε παριόντος νεανίσκου, πατέρα πρεσβύτην ἔχοντος, ἐπέδειξαν ἑαυτὰς καὶ τούτῳ· καὶ ὃς θεασάμενος ἔκρινε τὴν πρεσβυτέραν· ἧς καὶ εἰς ἔρωτα ἐμπεσὼν, ἐλθὼν εἰς ἄστυ, κλινήρης γίνεται, καὶ διηγεῖται τὰ γεγενημένα τῷ ἀδελφῷ ἑαυτοῦ, ὄντι νεωτέρῳ. ὁ δὲ καὶ αὐτὸς ἐλθὼν εἰς ἀγροὺς, καὶ θεασάμενος τὰς παῖδας, ἐρᾷ καὶ αὐτὸς τῆς ἑτέρας. ὁ οὖν πατήρ, ἐπεὶ παρακαλῶν αὐτοὺς ἐνδοξοτέρους λαβεῖν γάμους οὐκ ἔπειθεν, ἄγεται ἐκ τοῦ ἀγροῦ τὰς παῖδας αὐτοῖς, πείσας ἐκείνων τὸν πατέρα, καὶ ζεύγνυσι τοῖς υἱοῖς. αὗται οὖν ὑπὸ τῶν πολιτῶν καλλίπυγοι ἐκαλοῦντο, ὡς καὶ ὁ Μεγαλοπολίτης Κερκιδᾶς ἐν τοῖς ἰάμβοις ἱστορεῖ, λέγων·

ἦν καλλιπύγων ζεῦγος ἐν Συρακούσαις·

[α]ὗται οὖν, ἐπιλαβόμεναι οὐσίας λαμπρᾶς, ἱδρύσαντο [Ἀ]φροδίτης ἱερόν, καλέσασαι Καλλίπυγον τὴν θεόν, ὡς ἱστο[ρ]εῖ καὶ Ἀρχέλαος ἐν τοῖς ἰάμβοις.

In limping Old High Translationese:

They so loved their pleasures that they once set up a temple to Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks in this way: a farmer had two beautiful daughters. They loved disputing with each other and once went to the public road to judge which had the most beautiful buttocks. And when a young man with an old father came near they showed themselves to him. And after seeing them, he picked the elder. He even fell in love with her and went to the city, became bedridden, and went through what happened to his brother, who was younger. And then he [the younger one —wm] went to the country himself, looked at the girls and he fell in love with the other one. Therefore their father, since he couldn't convince them to make a more suitable marriage, brought the girls from the country for them, after convincing their father, and married them to his sons. So these girls were called "callipygian" [having beautiful buttocks] by the citizens, as the Megalopolitan Cercidas relates in his iambics:

There was a pair of callipygian [girls] in Syracuse.

And these girls, after getting a lot of property, set up a temple of Aphrodite, calling the goddess "Callipygian" as Archelaos also relates in his iambics.

I'm not sure I've got ἐξήρηντο right. And I'm very puzzled by the elder brother becoming bedridden after seeing these beautiful young ladies. I don't know if that's normal love-sick behavior for ancient Greeks.

Aoidoi: a Description of Winter

2007-03-31T12:36:00.000-05:00

Worked up for Aoidoi, Hesiod's description of Winter from the Works and Days, lines 504-535.

More on those acorns in Hesiod...

2007-02-14T07:55:00.000-06:00

There have been two posts in response to mine at Laudator Temporis Acti regarding human consumption of acorns, Eating Acorns and More on Eating Acorns, which last brings in Don Quixote.

Hesiod Works and Days 230-233

2007-02-08T17:50:00.000-06:00

Hesiod is naming some of the rewards from Zeus for acting justly (please forgive the Old High Translationese):

οὐδέ ποτ᾽ ἰθυδίκῃσι μετ᾽ ἀνδράσι λιμὸς ὀπηδεῖ 230
οὐδ᾽ ἄτη, θαλίῃς δὲ μεμηλότα ἔργα νέμονται.
τοῖσι φέρει μὲν γαῖα πολὺν βίον, οὔρεσι δὲ δρῦς
ἄκρη μέν τε φέρει βαλάνους, μέσση δὲ μελίσσας:

Nor does famine ever follow after men giving right judgement,
nor folly, but in abundance they attend to the fields in their care.
To them the earth bears much sustenance, and on the mountains
the oak bears acorns on all branches and within it (it bears) bees.

I'm disappointed in West's commentary. "βαλάνους: used as pig-fodder in Homer (Od. 10.242, 13.409), but it looks as if Hesiod sees some greater value in them. Some varieties of acorn, at least after roasting, are supportable by the human digestion, ..." Discussion about human acorn consumption follows, and then an attempt to suggest the word βάλανος might mean "chestnut" here — not completely unlikely, though it seems unnecessary.

Acorn mast is still used to fatten up pigs (Serrano ham!), who will eat that nearly to the exclusion of all else when it's available. Homer certainly recognized the value of acorns for a good pig:

δήεις τόν γε σύεσσι παρήμενον: αἱ δὲ νέμονται
πὰρ Κόρακος πέτρῃ ἐπί τε κρήνῃ Ἀρεθούσῃ,
ἔσθουσαι βάλανον μενοεικέα καὶ μέλαν ὕδωρ
πίνουσαι, τά θ᾽ ὕεσσι τρέφει τεθαλυῖαν ἀλοιφήν. 410

You'll find him [a swineherd] with the pigs, who pasture
beside Korax Rock near Arethousa Spring
eating plentiful acorn and drinking dark water,
which makes pigs fat with dripping lard.

(For "dripping" for θάλλω, see The Meaning of IE *dhal- by Steven Lowenstam, TAPA Vol. 109 (1979) pp. 125-135.)

Nice fat pigs are a valuable commodity, not to mention tasty. We don't eat bees, but the honey they produce. We don't eat fields, but the grain they produce. I don't see why Hesiod cannot then list acorns as a good, not as a food for us, but for their value for growing fat pigs.

Hesiod, Pigeons and Neil Gaiman

2007-02-07T17:07:00.000-06:00

I have been taking a university class in Hesiod this semester. After being treated to a Freudian interpretation, or at least the start of one, of the Ages of Man section of the Works it occured to me that anyone about to embark on reading mythology of any sort should have to read Neil Gaiman.

If, say, you were wandering through the (in)Humanities Building on UW campus one day, and suddenly found yourself transported to a parallel, Gaimanesque world — and who's to say this doesn't happen all the time? — things are just going to run a certain way, and you'll know better than to question it. You take tea with a disheveled madman in one of the music practice rooms. You try to leave when done, and he calmly informs you that you must of course offer your shoes to the door to exit. To do anything but hand your shoes over is pointless. Any attempt to get out of this obligation — and it is an obligation even the gods themselves are subject to — can only turn out badly. So you hand over your shoes to the damn door, and out you go. No explanation will ever be forthcoming.

I was watching Gaiman's Neverwhere again recently, and the Nightsbridge incident seems to capture the essence of this. After Hunter and the dreamy and hapless Richard Mayhew cross the Nightsbridge and find their rat-speaker companion missing, Richard wants to go back to get her. Hunter says, "She's gone. The bridge takes its toll. Be grateful it did not take you, too." And that's that. No pity and no explanation — just like life.

To the arbitrary hostility of the world now add the human facility for superstition. Any creature capable of learning is probably susceptible to superstition. It seems to be a natural outcome of that ability. In the 1940s B.F. Skinner showed that if you give a hungry pigeon food at random times it will develop a number of overtly "superstitious" behaviors (the paper's a classic, 'Superstition' in the Pigeon). Any sufficiently rewarding experience is a potential creator or reinforcer of superstition, from lucky rocketship underpants to sync; sync; sync; reboot.

The Greeks did have a mania for aitia, explanations for why this or that feature of their religion was so. But I can't help but think that some of the modern interpretations offered to explain, say, oddities of the Pandora story, are just as wrong-headed as the lucubrations of the ancient scholiasts who so often come in for mocking. Some things are just inexplicable.

From cold storage: The Stillsuit of Elendil

2007-01-25T07:20:00.000-06:00

Lightly edited, a post from my old blog. I find it convenient to refer to when I want to explain Old High Translationese.

While on the subject of genre authors with a taste for archaic prose...

I have been known, from time to time, to say rude things about Tolkien's writing and his writing style. China Mieville has done the same with a lot more panache than I can manage and David Brin has a lenghty article: J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress. So none of my grouching is new or interesting.

But while thinking on the puzzle of Frank Herbert's sometimes archaizing style, my thoughts naturally turned to Tolkien's tortured prose. And I had a revelation.

Tolkien, or Professor Tolkien as Peter Jackson calls him constantly on the special features tracks on the LOTR DVDs, was a philologist. He studied dead languages. You can, from time to time, still find his academic work cited in articles on historical linguistics. In both Latin and Greek, which were certainly central to Tolkien's education, sentences can tolerate word orders that English would never put up with. Homer, for example, regularly puts adjectives some distance from the noun they go with. It's stylish, and because of the grammar of these languages, perfectly clear (or nearly so).

When you first study Greek and Latin, your teacher might expect you to produce fairly literal translations. I've been an instructor for several ancient Greek mailing list groups, and I also plead with the students to stay close to the Greek as possible when we start. I need to make sure they're understanding the grammar correctly, and aren't just fudging it. Once their command of Greek is more solid, then I'll generally tolerate quite free translations. But that initial habit of the literal translation leaves its mark. I produced this clunking monstrosity just this week for the Odyssey translation group (Od.2.81-83):

All the people felt pity.
And there all the others sat in silence, nor did anyone dare
to answer Telemachus with strong words.

This very literal translation is nearly a gloss - hardly English at all. And yet I continue to produce English like this because if all of us in the group were to work too freely no one else could use our translations to check their own work.

My revelation: Tolkien's natural language is Old High Translationese^*!

^* Old High Translationese corr. Classicist Translationese ms.

Scented at the Symposium

2007-01-14T17:49:00.000-06:00

I have never been a fan of oils and unguents and I really can't stand to have them on me for very long. Even the thought of it is a little annoying, which means that from time to time — more often than you might think — reading Greek poetry causes me a mild mental distress. Evidently, dousing yourself in scented oil was a standard part of symposium culture. Alcaeus mentions it at least twice:

κὰδ δὲ χευάτω μύρον ἆδυ κὰτ τὼ
στήθεος ἄμμι. (Z 39)

and pour sweet unguent down
our chests.

and:

χέε μοι μύρον
καὶ κὰτ τὼ πολίω στήθεος. (B 18)

pour unguent also
on my grey chest.

Even pious Xenophanes indulged:

νῦν γὰρ δὴ ζάπεδον καθαρὸν καὶ χεῖρες ἁπάντων
καὶ κύλικες· πλεκτοὺς δ’ ἀμφιτιθεῖ στεφάνους,
ἄλλος δ’ εὐῶδες μύρον ἐν φιάλῃ παρατείνει· (B 1 West)

For now the floor is clean, and the hands of all
and the cups (are clean); one person puts on a woven garland,
and another hands out sweet-smelling unguent in a bowl.

Now Xenonphanes and Alcaeus were both from the Levantine side of the Greek world, where the use of scented oils had been going on a good long time. The Egyptians were heavy users of oils from the Levant, too. Of course they wore it as perfume but it could also be used as an offering. While reading the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt recently I learned that the tomb of Semerkhet (~2950 BC) had so much scented oil poured down the entry ramp that the oil soaked into the stone to a depth of about three feet. Nearly 5000 years later the aroma is still detectable.

Another thing I learned while reading the Oxford book is that climatologists describe Egypt's current climate as hyperarid, and suddenly I figured out why people in the region might be coating themselves in oil, apart from the luxurious aroma: to stop itching. In dry climates (southern California) and in winter (heating systems) my overreactive skin dries out and makes life a little difficult for me. Dermatologists recommend bath oil, an idea I'm still trying to come to terms with. How much of that early oil use in these dry Mediterranean climates was therapeutic, how much a luxury?

A Midwinter Ramble

2007-01-04T16:57:00.000-06:00

While walking home today I saw a caterpillar crawling onto the sidewalk. It's in for a very nasty surprise when Wisconsin's Winter recovers its wits — which it surely will manage at least once before spring arrives.

After nearly two years of bureaucratic obstacles, surprise retirements and general disorder, I am finally registered to take a class in the Classics department at UW this spring. Actually, I'm registered as a "special student" which means mostly that I pay full tuition and my grade will be recorded. In every other way I'm a second-class citizen. For example, I only get to sign up for class a few days before it starts.

I take it as a sign that the Little Gods of Bureaucracy have been propitated that I got a giant, and very stylish, packet of mail today from University Housing. The cover letter starts, "Congratulations on your recent acceptance into Graduate Student program at UW-Madison!" Ok, so some Little God wasn't sufficiently appeased.

Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite

2007-01-02T22:27:00.000-06:00

Homeric Hymn Six has gotten the usual Aoidoi.org treatment: to Aphrodite.

The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Tea Cozy

2006-12-26T11:18:00.000-06:00

Last week a friend gave me a tea cozy. It wasn't so much a Christmas present as something she picked up when she saw it, knowing that I've had trouble finding one that wasn't in the shape of a little lamb or in some, um, busy floral print.

This thing is amazing. I have quite warm tea three hours after it was brewed. It works so well, in fact, that the handle becomes almost unbearably hot, especially for the first hour or so.

This post exists mostly as an excuse for the title.

What I learned from Carl Sagan

2006-12-20T07:27:00.000-06:00

Today is the 10th anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan. There is a memorial blogathon going on. See his son's blog, Nick Sagan, for many more links.

I first encountered Carl Sagan from the TV series Cosmos. I convinced my mom to get me the book for it, which I read repeatedly. Of course I loved the astronomy in it. Though I never once considered a career in astronomy, I have photos from the Hubble on my walls, and belong to The Planetary Society, which Sagan helped found.

But the two things that really remain in my mind about Cosmos have to do with the ancient world. First, I learned that the ancient Greeks were pretty cool. Most computer science people will know the name Eratosthenes from a method for finding primes. I know him as the first guy to measure the circumference of the earth. I learned how easily learning can be lost.

Second, I learned about the horrible death of Hypatia of Alexandria at the hands of fanatics, and I learned Sagan's opinion on such things. Suddenly I had the start, at least, of a framework for my own nebulous skepticism about religion. A more systematic skepticism would have to wait for me to grow up and read a lot more, but Sagan pointed me in the right direction.

At the end of Contact, just before the credits, the word "For Carl" appear. That can still choke me up a bit. I should dig up my copy of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark...

Filtering the Online

2006-12-12T17:11:00.000-06:00

I recently added to new feeds to my RSS reader. Sometimes I add a site only to remove it a week or two later. These two will stay.

The first is for Cartoon Brew, a dual effort. I found it when searching for some information on modernism in 50s era cartoons, and found one of the site author's books, Cartoon Modern (linked to from the Brew page itself).

The second is the appallingly named No Fat Clips!!!, which has comments in English and Italian on very short pieces (films, commercials, etc.), including the very recent and — what? charming? sweet?! — And The Red Man Went Green. Just watch it (other formats here).

The Lunacy of the Lunate Sigma: A Rant

2006-12-11T17:45:00.000-06:00

I was very excited last week to get the OCT edition of Hesiod — a requirement for a class I might actually get to take. My shocked, initial joy at finding a legible text in a new OCT, and decked out with a beefy apparatus, was dampened when I noticed a serious pet-peeve of mine — the silly lunate sigma.

For those who don't know Greek, the lowercase letter sigma (sounds "s") comes in two forms, one used at the end of a word, one used everywehere else, like σῖτος sitos "(food made from) grain" (cf. parasite). The lunate sigma, an ancient form of the letter, looks like a lowercase "c", ϲῖτοϲ.

For reasons I cannot fathom, it has become fashionable to use the lunate sigma in modern editions of Greek works. What is so bizarre about this that the lunate form is a zombie. In any modern text of, say, Homer, the font used is based on the habits of the Late Byzantine scholars from whom Western Europe reacquainteded itself with ancient Greek learning. The lunate sigma is alien to those hands. If we really must enforce sigma to a single form, there's much better precedent for using the non-final shape everywhere (see Thompson's A Handbook of Greek and Latin Palaeography for the evidence).

Another problem with the lunate sigma is that, as an intruder, it rarely plays well with other letters in a face. I've seen one book (I think the current "Teach Yourself" for classical Greek) that appears to have had the lunate form crammed in without any kerning information. It looks just terrible. OCT has done a better job with the lowercase form, but the uppercase form looks like it's delirious from a wasting disease. The best lunate sigma I've ever seen seems to have been designed with the rest of the font, and appears in H. van Thiel's Scholia D on Homer.

Now, I would be happy to see lunate sigmas in an apparatus. In fact, I would applaud it. But I cannot figure out why it's ending up in the main body of texts. It isn't more historically accurate, or is so only in a wildly eccentric way. It often looks awful. Greek offers a vast array of difficulties for beginners, so simplifying sigma isn't going to help anything at all. Finally, it is an active impediment to reading for people experienced with Greek. Unless they've never seen a word before, people don't actually phonate words when reading an alphabet. After years of experience "the" goes straight into your brain as "the." The shape of the word counts, so ruining my familiar εἰς and σῖτος to favor εἰϲ and ϲῖτοϲ is just annoying.

And don't get me started on adscript iota.

Focusing the Mind

2006-11-29T20:51:00.000-06:00

At my place of work 2006 started with three Unix sysadmins. It appears it's going to end with one, namely me. Today was my third day solo.

A lack of options, the saying goes, focuses the mind admirably. In my situation, that means I've been scripting like mad to make sure I get information in a timely way and don't overlook anything. And the last few days I've been coming home and writing even more code, but of a more complicated nature. Normally this would make me cranky, to be doing work programming in the evening, but since this particular project is intended only for me, I get to choose my language. I've been reacquainting myself with Common Lisp. I had forgotten how fun programming could be —

;;; Insert timed data point, returning the previous value (useful for
;;; some statistical models).
(defmethod update ((dh ts-datahistory) val &key timestamp)
  (let ((ts (if (null timestamp) (get-universal-time) timestamp)))
    (multiple-value-bind (idx daytype) (bin-index dh ts)
      (macrolet ((ref-and-set (accessor)
                   `(prog1
                     (,accessor dh idx)
                     (setf (,accessor dh idx) val))))
        (if (eq daytype 'weekday)
            (ref-and-set weekday-history-ref)
            (ref-and-set weekend-history-ref))))))

I don't know how many of my readers will understand that, but it just fills me with joy to use such a tool. Lexically scoped macros!

Next up, quality time with North & Hillard's Greek Prose Composition...

Crowded Voting

2006-11-07T08:46:00.000-06:00

Since my polling place is only slightly out of my way to work, I vote on my way in. I got there just as they were letting people vote, and already there was quite a line. The poll workers seemed cheery, but the polling official already looked a bit harassed. He may be in for a tough day.

Double Dipping the Surplus Value

2006-10-30T19:13:00.000-06:00

I have been thinking recently, as I often have cause to do, on the wretched state of software. This has lead me to an economic analysis of the software industry, not something I'd normally indulge in, but now that I have the vocabulary for what was annoying me, perhaps I can dwell on some other matter.

"Surplus value" is a technical term, associated with Marx but by no means discovered by him, describing how capital accumulation takes place. Horribly simplified, surplus value is the difference between the selling price of something and the labor cost, with the idea being that it's mostly unpaid labor that makes value for a business (i.e., people aren't really paid for the full value of their work). As I said, this simplification is gross, but it's the basic idea, no great surprise nor particularly radical.

Whatever you feel is the correct relationship between labor and the pay for that labor, it seems to me that software companies who produce crappy software (that is, most of them) rely on not one but two sources of surplus value, first from their own employees, second from the poor shlubs who buy their software and then have to hire even more IT staff. How much of that expensive software companies are convinced buy would get any use if there weren't an army of acolytes running around tending to it?

What percent of the average IT budget (training and salaries) is devoted to necessary infrastructure and what percent to dealing with software that doesn't quite work as advertized?

An Eye on Alzheimer's

2006-10-04T20:12:00.000-05:00

Now this is just cool: Optics Tests For Early Alzheimer's Diagnosis Make Significant Advances. It turns out that Alzheimer's isn't just a brain disease, but a systemic one. The same amyloid protein that clogs up the brains of Alzheimer's victims also collect at the edge of the lens of the eye. They already did a Phase I human trial, so it may be that in the not too distant future it will be possible to catch, and verify the diagnosis of, Alzheimer's earlier in the course of the disease.

This comes by way of ScienceDaily, which everyone should have in their syndication list (feed).

Quotable Euripides

2006-10-03T11:24:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Medea recently. As I read (slowly), I keep coming across tidbits that recommend themselves for memorization. My pocket Moleskine now has quite a few lines from the play, and I use that to memorize from while on the bus. It turns out books of quotations were popular even in ancient times, and quotations from plays, especially Euripides and Menander, seem to have been especially popular.

Last week, during a review, I noticed a few lines of anapests that I decided I should be able to recite:

(Τρ).
δεινὰ τυράννων λήματα καί πως—
ὀλίγ’ ἀρχόμενοι, πολλὰ κρατοῦντες — 120
χαλεπῶς ὀργὰς μεταβάλλουσιν.

(Nurse:)
The wants of despots are terrible and —
since they are ruled little and command much —
only (πως) with difficulty do they change their impulses.

Suddenly it's completely current.

Ode to Stalin

2006-09-17T12:26:00.000-05:00

Since reading the AKWN article about the Astronautilia — a modern, sci-fi poem by Czech author Jan Křesadlo in Homeric Greek — I've been trying to find a copy. No luck so far. But in searching for it I found an article from this year about Křesadlo which has a small image of "Óda na Stalina" - an "Ode to Stalin" I presume. [Article] [Image]

The image is a bit small, so it's sometimes hard to be clear on some of the letters, though the basic tone is pretty clear:

Στᾶλιν, ἄναξ, ἄγαμαί σε. σὺ λευκολίθῳ ἐνὶ Κρέμλῳ
ἑζόμενος κρατέεις πάντας Ῥώσσας Τατάρους τε...

Stalin, lord, I revere you. You rule all Russia (?) and the
Tatars while sitting in the white-stoned Kremlin...

The image ends with the line “Πάντες δειδίοτες (sic) κινέουσι ποδάς τε πυγήν τε,” "everyone afraid moves (their) feet and butt." There doesn't seem to be punctuation at the end of that line, so it may be there's more after that.

I don't know when Křesadlo wrote this. The language of this ode is filled with Epic morphology and phrasing, λευκολίθῳ ἐνὶ Κρέμλῳ, but it also contains a number of eccentricities in accenting and scansion, which, with the subject matter, make me suspect this is an early work. If anyone can read Czech, I'd love to know if the article makes mention of when this fragment was composed.

Recipes of my Father

2006-09-05T17:19:00.000-05:00

Yesterday my dad called, and we started off our chat in the usual way — he griped about the sorry state of the Red Socks, the even sorrier state of farming on the east coast (he's in rural New York), and, sorriest of all, the state of politics. He has worked all his life on farms in some capacity, and in these coversations I sometimes learn many interesting bits of wisdom based, often, on the cow. When it's raining hard, "it's like a cow pissing on a flat rock." Once, when discussing politics, he said "the more you kick shit, the more it stinks," something most of us would do well to remember.

Of course I talk to him when I'm planning some bit of house repair I've never done before, but yesterday I asked how he felt about clam chowder. He paused, and then said gravely, "I love clam chowder." I found out his preferred version: no tomato! But then he offered a soup recipe of such audacity that I feel I have to share it.

Oyster Soup

1 pint oysters (he usually gets his fresh)
1 stick butter
1 1/2 pint half-n-half

Simmer oysters gently, and not too long. Serve.

I'm a little scared to make this. Certainly I'm not going to make it until I plenty of guests around. It seems like it'd be rich enough to serve a dozen.

There is a language, terrifying to us...

2006-08-23T17:40:00.000-05:00

Since that remote time when I was a wee lad and learned there were other languages, I have never stopped learning as much as I could about language. Apart from seriously studying a few languages, I like to take tastes of pretty much any language I can get some reference on. There is a joke — "What is a linguist?" "Someone who takes a Swahili grammar home on Friday, and says he knows Swahili on Monday." But you just never know when it's useful to be able to say, "why, yes, West Greenlandic Inuit is ergative."

Apart from these many sampler plates, I have managed to reach what I call a "philological reading ability" — that is, I can read the language fairly reliably with occasional (or more frequent) recourse to no more than a good dictionary — of a number of languages with a somewhat scary reputation. Ancient Greek of course, by far the strongest currently, Classical Chinese, Sanskrit. My Classical Arabic is very poor these days, though I can still use a dictionary reliably, a greater accomplishment than you might think. Once I could read Old Norse somewhat well, and Old English.

But there is one language that has always stopped me dead in my tracks. It is the only language, apart from perhaps Navajo, that gives me anxiety to think about. That language is Old Irish. I have approached it several times, only to be defeated. Every time I pick up Lehmann's book, I become inconsolable before the week is out. Fortston, in his Indo-European Language and Culture gives the best description of the horror (I omit the macrons):

14.45. As these examples hint at, the effects of syncope and apocope in Irish are nowhere as apparent or as devastating as in verbal conjugations, especially those of verbs compounded with one or more preverbs. The effects are particularly widespread partly due to the fact that Old Irish had an especial fondness for piling preverbs together, giving syncope and apocope no shortage of syllablic gallows-fodder. ...

4.46. The amount of allomorphy (that is, variation in the form of a given morpheme) that these changes created was incredible, and it is worth digressing to give some examples. The Irish root fed- 'say' appears in such varied guises as fét, id and d, as in the following forms of the compound verb *at-fed- 'relate': 3rd sing. present ad-fét 'relates', perfective present ad-cuïd (*ad-com-fed), and 2nd pl. conjunct perfective present -éicdid. Sometimes the root is reduced to a single sound, particularly in the conjunct 3rd person singular s-subjunctive. Thus the 3rd sing. conjunct s-subjunctive of the verb as-boind (*as-bond-) 'refuses' is simply -op (pronounced -ob, the regular outcome of *-óss-bod-s-t!); and from *ret- 'run' (present rethid 'runs') we have the compound do-fúarat 'remains over' (*di-fó-uss-ret-), whose conjunct 3rd sing. s-subjunctive is -diúair (*dí-fo-uss-ret-s-t), with only the -r remaining of the original root, subjunctive suffix and personal ending (and very little left of the preceding preverbs).

Some famous historical linguist apparently said that learning Old Irish is like mowing the lawn — you have to do it regularly. (I forget the details of the quote, but that's the gist of it.)

So I know perfectly well what sort of language this is. And yet, last week, when I saw Sengoídelc: Old Irish for Beginners at the local bookstore (do they know I shop there?) I was overcome by language lust, and had to buy the thing, even though I had sworn myself to study no language other than Greek for a year last May. I'm just not going to have time to study OIr. until I retire or win the lottery (which I don't play).

But I'll be happy to have this book around when I finally decide I need to learn it. It's much nicer than the standard presentations available heretofore. It has graded sentences! which are even marked to give you some idea how much they've been modified from a wild original. Normally I'm a big fan of seeing wild version of the language as quickly as possible, but the amount you have to learn before you can reasonably understand OIr is so great that this somewhat gentler start is very welcome. There's still an awful lot to learn, but this book I think organizes that better.

I cannot imagine anyone other than a college student learning Old Irish, but this book is nonetheless somewhat eccentrically filled with cartoon sheep saying improbable things like guithir in tón "the hind side is being warmed" and fech in rríg "behold the king." But these are probably a relief when you're dealing with a language with a regular declension that goes fer, fir, fiur, fer, a fir ("man").

The standard list price of this is a little excessive, and it's not like I really needed it at a discount price either. Perhaps I'll dedicate a single dollar to the Tuatha Dé Danann and see about the lottery.

Aoidoi.org - Three Homeric Hymns

2006-08-15T16:41:00.000-05:00

Three new poems are up on Aoidoi.org, all Homeric Hymns.

The first two are quite small, and I worked these up as an example of the small prelude-like hymn, to Artemis and to Hephestus. Nicholas Swift, who last year worked up the The Shield of Achilles portion of the Iliad, did the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, all 495 lines of it. It's a great thing.

Nick sent me the first lines back in January, and the last few days saw the finishing touches. Neither of us is quite sure what life without Demeter is going to be like.

Homer and Hittites

2006-08-03T19:04:00.000-05:00

Another classics blog has appeared, Nestor's Cup.

I have petitioned him humbly to change the color scheme.

Two Thoughts on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter

2006-07-30T19:59:00.000-05:00

I expect the aoidification of the Hymn to Demeter will be complete in a few weeks. All the really major work is done, and I've made my full second pass through with the big pen. Now we just need to refine a few details, and settle the remaining questions.

One of those is a trivial textual question, for the end of the poem, ll.494-495:

πρόφρονες ἀντ’ ᾠδῆς βίοτον θυμήρε’ ὀπάζειν·
αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ καὶ σεῖο καὶ ἄλλης μνήσομ’ ἀοιδῆς.

This ending nearly perfectly repeated in one other hymn, 30 (To the Earth, Mother of All):

πρόφρων δ’ ἀντ’ ᾠδῆς βίοτον θυμήρε’ ὄπαζε·
αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ καὶ σεῖο καὶ ἄλλης μνήσομ’ ἀοιδῆς.

And less exactly on line 17 (of 19) of hymn 31 (to the Sun):

χαῖρε ἄναξ, πρόφρων δὲ βίον θυμήρε’ ὄπαζε.

It turns out the manuscript for the Demeter hymn actually has not ὀπάζειν but ὄπαζε, a singular imperative. Voss is responsible for the infinitive, which, it must be said, is a perfectly good use of the infinitive in Epic Greek. But if the only reason to use it is to avoid a problem with concord in number, I can't help but think lectio difficilior should guide us here, and accept the ms. reading. Such a mismatch isn't exactly unprecedented Greek. I think we'll go with ὄπαζε.

In How to Kill a Dragon Calvert Watkins argues in support of the existence of a particle ταρ (pp.150-151). It is frequently used with interrogatives, πῶς ταρ, τίς ταρ, κτλ. (I was delighted to see that West even uses this in his Teubner Iliad). However, the particle also occurs a few times after verbs of fearing, wailing and the like. The verb is usually at the start of a line, and occurs as V ταρ ἔπειτα.

There are two places in the Hymn to Demeter where verbs of shouting are followed by δ’ ἄρ’, which arroused my suspicions. Neither is at the start of the line, though they do start after the caesura. They're very similar:

ἦγ’ ὀλοφυρομένην· || ἰάχησε δ’ ἄρ’ ὄρθια φωνῇ 20
πολλ’ ἀεκαζομένην, || ἐβόησα δ’ ἄρ’ ὄρθια φωνῇ. 432

Line 20 describes Persephone's abduction. Line 432 is her describing this to her mother, Demeter. My Allen OCT lists no variants for either line, but I don't trust it. I have emailed someone to check for τ’ ἄρ’ in Richardson.

Doomed to Dilettantism

2006-07-20T18:34:00.000-05:00

I have been trying for over a year to take classes at the local U as a special student (so called — you get the last choice in everything). I was repeatedly thwarted by warps in the bureaucratic spacetime contiuum and communications trouble that almost lead to a local classics department getting immortalized in the most Hipponactean iambics I could manage.

I discovered yesterday that the one professor I was interested in studying with has retired, which also has taken away the one class I wanted to take in the fall. There will not be anyone to teach it this year.

Is δύσκολος a good translation for "cranky?" That'll fit into iambics, and elegy.

Stoic Universalism

2006-06-25T11:52:00.000-05:00

τὸ βούλημα τῆς φύσεως καταμαθεῖν ἔστιν ἐξ ὧν οὐ διαφερόμεθα πρὸς ἀλλήλους. “It is possible to learn the will of nature from those things by which we do not differ from one another.” Encheiridion of Epictetus, c.26.

On people who wear too much scent

2006-06-21T19:56:00.000-05:00

παντοδαπῶς με τυφλοῖ μύρου ὀδμὴ ᾧ σὺ κέχρισαι·
κείνης πως ὀδμῆς κρυπτομένη κακίων;

At the bucolic caesura I have taken a Homeric liberty with hiatus. Sterner metricians may substitute τῷ.

Yes, it does.

2006-06-21T07:35:00.000-05:00

Apart from Pascal's Wager — which is at best a caution to cover your derrière — this has got to be one of the worst arguments in the Great Theism Debates:

What is Dawkins’s response to those for whom his popularization of evolution causes so much pain? Essentially it is this: “Keep a stiff upper lip.” If “something is true,” he responds, “no amount of wishful thinking can undo it.” No doubt this is correct. But we might with as much propriety ask Dawkins: “If something is painful, does its truth justify inflicting it on people who find it disturbing?” Let us grant — only, to be sure, for the sake of argument — that Dawkins’s Darwinian explanation of Life, the Universe, and Everything is true. Does this in itself justify his strident shoving of it into our public discourse, knowing full well the emotional distress it will cause the spiritually sensitive? [full article]

How patronizing. "Oh, the poor, sensitive dears, leave them their comforts, even if false." Further, it is not wild-eyed idealism to believe that having more true information allows you to make better decisions in life, both practical and ethical. Mollycoddling the spiritually sensitive (whatever the hell that actually means) corrupts their decision-making process.

People are under no obligation to accept Dawkin's arguments. To suggest that they need to be protected from even hearing them due to their sensitive constitutions is manipulative emotional coercion.

An Ancient Greek on Obstetrics

2006-06-15T19:26:00.000-05:00

Medea, talking about the difficult life of women:

λέγουσι δ᾽ ἡμᾶς ὡς ἀκίνδυνον βίον
ζῶμεν κατ᾽ οἴκους, οἱ δὲ μάρνανται δορί,
κακῶς φρονοῦντες· ὡς τρὶς ἂν παρ᾽ ἀσπίδα 250
στῆναι θέλοιμ᾽ ἂν μᾶλλον ἢ τεκεῖν ἅπαξ.

And they say we live lives without danger
in our houses, while they go out and fight.
Their wits are addled! I'd rather stand in battle with
a shield three times than give birth once.

In the Greek the men "fight with spears" and she would "stand beside a shield", but "fight with spears" seems silly to me in English.

I have an old school edition of a few Greek plays in which some avid annotator has filled the margins with quotes from Shakespeare. It seems a bit excessive. But I can't help but think of Lady MacBeth when I read this, so I understand that mysterious compulsion a bit better.

My Oldest Books

2006-06-11T17:40:00.000-05:00

Several other people have been discussing their oldest books. Since I've not biblioblogged in a while, I'll mention my oldest.

My penultimate is Polybius, ex recognitione, Immanuelis Bekkeri, printed in Berlin in 1844. It was originally a two volume set (owned by Paul Geyer in 1867, and one Benedict Einarson some unspecified later time). At some point both volumes were jammed into a single library binding. This was a very high quality production, the binding and paper are sound and usable to this day, with minimal foxing.

My oldest book is ἩΡΟΔΟΤΟΥ ἹΣΤΟΡΙΩΝ ΛΟΓΟΙ Θ’, textus Johannis Schweighaeuseri, Volumen Secundum printed in 1818, apparently in Glasgow (Glasguae?). The paper is in good shape, though it has a lot more foxing, but the cover is falling apart. Once in the library of the Kimball Union Academy, Shelf D, No. 75, (which institution still exists).

I probably have a dozen more books from the late 1800s, mostly Greek topics. While I love a good, old book, I expect all of my books to survive actual use. For editions of Greek texts, I'm usually a more eager collector of the most current edition available, because I love a giant app.crit. more than I love the aroma of old books.

The Sycophancy Fallacy

2006-06-08T17:43:00.000-05:00

While I have, for health reasons, radically cut back on my reading of politcal blogs since the last presidential theatre season, a few times a week I do nonetheless check in on a few blogs, both left and right, to get a feel for what has caught people's attentions.

Just today I saw yet again an assertion I see regularly, namely, that the bloggers on The Other Side never say anything bad about their party of choice, that they're totally in thrall to them. On the face of it, this is positively delusional. If there is anything both left and right political bloggers as a class have in common, it is a passion for mercilessly savaging allied politicians. Not all of them of course, but there is hardly a lack of examples. The week following the "Nuclear Option" filibuster show-down probably offers 1000s of examples from both sides.

I have to wonder if people even think when they say something like that, or if it's some sort of phatic (WikiPedia def.) expression, like "well, that's the end of this post, I hope you enjoy it."

Wisconsine-Sichuan Duck

2006-06-05T18:17:00.000-05:00

On Saturday I had dinner with some friends at a local Chinese restaurant, which is best when you stick to the last two pages of the menu, where the Sichuan specialties are. Eric relates our dinner at length on his own blog. I agree with him that the duck was particularly fine. It was just finely sliced duck even more finely match-sticked red and yellow bell peppers. I know some people find duck a bit cloying at too fatty, but the slightly tart and crisp flavor of the pepper balanced it out better than I would have thought.

So I had to try my own version tonight, with a little twist. Rather than wait to thaw and quarter a whole duck, I indulged a bit and got a smoked duck breast (from Nueske's Farm — it was costlier than I recall from the last time I got it).

Ingredients:

half that duck breast cut into 1/4in strips (the short length, not long)
one red bell pepper, cut into strips
one yellow bell pepper, cut into strips
mirin
light soy

Start your rice. Slice your peppers, and the duck. I took out about 1/5th of the peppers from each color and shoved them into a bag for later snacking. If you don't, you'll want to use more duck.

Get your favored frying device very, very hot. Add oil (peanut, by preference), then add the duck strips. Keep them moving, and when they've browned a bit, chuck in the peppers. Keep it all moving quickly. After the heat gets back to the pan (1-2 minutes), add a splash of mirin and a splash of soy (maybe 1tsp each). Cook until the soy and mirin are well reduced, the result should be nearly dry.

Eat, and delight how something so simple can be so tasty.

Any Hellenists have some free time for Aoidoi.org?

2006-05-24T20:50:00.000-05:00

After we finished the Aoidoi commentary on the Shield of Achilles, Nick and I discussed what we might want to work on next. We settled on the Hymn to Demeter, as practice for work on a rather larger work (a secret for now), largely because Nick had already read it and had plenty of notes at hand. Today he sent me the last chuck of the just under 500 lines of the Hymn. Right now the document weighs in at 54 pages, and we have fine tuning and additional notes yet to finalize, so it will certainly be longer.

Between the two of us the final editing is pretty good. But this is big enough that I would feel better if we could get someone else to take a close look at it once we get closer to the final draft. I know there are practicing scholars who read this blog. If any of you out there has an interest in this particular text and the time to proof 50+ pages of Greek verse, vocabulary and grammar notes, please do contact me (email). I'm afraid all I can offer in compensation is gratitude and the modest κλέος Aoidoi.org has to grant.

Bragging: Metrical Breakthrough

2006-05-18T07:34:00.000-05:00

After years of reading hexameters, I can now usually read unseen verses in the correct meter without stumbling. I have had a much harder time with iambic trimeters, however, even after reading the entire Cyclops. All those substitutions! and the ancipites! This morning on the bus, while reading the opening to Medea, it finally clicked.

Using Euripides as my first serious exposure to trimeters was probably not the smartest decision.

Random Philology

2006-05-14T16:18:00.000-05:00

The Vedic Verbal Edifice. One curious turn of phrase common in Epic is βῆ δ’ ἴμεν. It has dozens of variations, from βάν ῥ’ ἴμεναι out to the set phrase βάσκ’ ἴθι (Iliad 2.8., though some might object to that last one being included). The phrase is a little unusual in that it's just a finite form of "to go" followed by an infitive with basically the same meaning. "He went to go?" Now forms of βαίνω sometimes take on the sense of "to step," so I can see how these both might be used together.

Since both stems have clear cognates in Vedic I wondered if there were parallels. At the moment I don't know of a good database that'd let me do a lexical search like that for the Vedic corpus, so I went to my Vedic grammar to look up forms. In Macdonell's Vedic Grammar for Students the entry for i (cognate of ἴμεν) has this listing of infinitives: étum (B.); étave, étavái, ityái, iyádhyai, áyase; étos. Such riches!

Phonetic Echos in Epic. Another common turn of phrase in Epic is αὐτὰρ ἐπεί/ἔπειτα. In fact, some Hellenistic critic referred to hackish Cyclic poets as "people who say 'αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα.'" I recently ran across αὖτις ἔπειτα in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (325), but a quick search shows that it appears once in the Odyssey, too, 11.98. I wonder how much that leading αὐτ- motivated the following ἔπειτα.

Mesomedes 1

2006-05-14T14:34:00.000-05:00

This weekend I got email from someone who brought my attention to a musical rendition of Mesomedes 1, a Hymn to the Muses (MP3). This reminded me that I had completed comments on this poem — probably really two poems — some time ago. I never published it, though I have no idea why. So I will now: Mesomedes 1.

His "Hymn to Nemesis" is interesting. I should work that up, too.