Aoidoi: on Hiatus

It should be obvious from the lack of posts here and updates to Aoidoi.org itself that I've not been producing work for the site much in the last to years or so. So, I'm declaring Aoidoi.org officially on hiatus.

I have no plans at all to take the site down, and I hope some day to have time to work on documents for it and Scholiastae again in the future, but right now Life is keeping me occupied with other things.

Scholiastae: Alciphron 2.6 and 2.7

Two more letters from Alciphron today. Since they are a dialog between Anicetus and Phoebiane, both are in the same document: Alciphron 2.6-7.

The first sentence of 2.7 was such a monument of Greek word order, I decided to make a dependency graph of it:

Scholiastae: Lucian "Pan and Hermes" and Alciphron 1.3

Two more brief texts for Scholiastae.org: Dialog of the Gods 2, Pan and Hermes; and Alciphron 1.3, Glaucus to his wife Galataea.

Scholiastae Changing

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

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.

Scholiastae.org: not entirely a success

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.

Learning Greek through Greek

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

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.

Internet Stemmatics

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.