The Winged Word. A Study in the Technique of Ancient Greek Oral Composition as Seen Principally through Hesiod's "Works and Days"

1977 ◽  
Vol 70 (6) ◽  
pp. 395
Author(s):  
Charles Rowan Beye ◽  
Berkley Peabody
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Oral Composition ◽  
Winged Word

How Dead Languages Work

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Coulter H. George
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Opportunity To Learn ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Old Irish ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
Rig Veda ◽  
Lost In Translation ◽  
Oral Composition

What could a Greek poet or Roman historian say in their language that’s lost in translation? After all, different languages have different personalities, and this is especially clear with languages of the ancient and medieval world. This book celebrates six such languages—Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Biblical Hebrew—by first introducing readers to their most distinctive features, then showing how these linguistic traits play out in short excerpts from actual ancient texts. It explores, for instance, how Homer’s Greek shows signs of oral composition, how Horace can achieve striking poetic effects through interlaced word order in his Latin, and how the poet of Beowulf achieves a remarkable intensity of expression through the resources of Old English. But these are languages that have shared connections as well. Readers will see how the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda uses words that come from roots found also in English, how turns of phrase characteristic of the Hebrew Bible found their way into English, and that even as unusual a language as Old Irish still builds on common Indo-European linguistic patterns. Since most people don’t have the opportunity to learn these languages, the book throughout aims to give such readers an aesthetic appreciation of just how rich and varied they are.

Greek

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-56
Author(s):  
Coulter H. George
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Formulaic Language ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Abstract Language ◽  
Oral Composition ◽  
Technical Terms ◽  
The Way

To lay the foundations for the linguistic discussion found in the remainder of the book, this chapter begins with a systematic introduction to some of the main features of Ancient Greek, explaining the necessary technical terms along the way. First comes a discussion of the sounds of Greek, focusing on those that are particularly characteristic of Greek, as well as the development of Greek from the Proto-Indo-European parent language. The chapter then introduces some of the ways Greek words, especially nouns and verbs, change their forms to suit the grammatical context, since such morphological richness will come up repeatedly in the book. Excerpts from three texts are then discussed: first, the Iliad, to show how formulaic language marks its origins as an oral composition; second, Thucydides, to highlight the abstract language that characterizes his history; third, the New Testament, to show how much translators sometimes need to rearrange the structure of a sentence in order for the syntax to make sense in English.

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