There is a language, terrifying to us...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.