Greek and Latin alogia

[Natalia Pylypiuk]

Greetings!  My apologies for the tardiness of this response.  The mystical
poetry of Ihor Kalynec' and Vasyl' Stus have kept me away from this
electronic convivium.

    One cannot quarrel with the essence of Professor Clemisson's
thoughtful commentary.  The problem, as I see it, does not
concern whether early-modern Ukrainians were aware of Greek.
(Although some knew it better than others. If we trust
V. Nimchuk's judgement, Korec'kyj-Satanovs'kyj's command
of the language was not as strong as that of his colleague
Slavynec'kyj.)

   The issue at hand concerns the preponderance of Latin-language
literature, including manuals and dictionaries, available to
Ukrainian and Belarusian society in the 17th c.  Even the*Leksikon
latynskii* and the subsequent *Leksikon slovenolatynskii* relied
on Ambrosio Calepino's work. The title of the former acknowledges that
it was *z Kalepyna prelozhennyi.* One redaction of the latter states:
*Dictionarium Latinosclavonicum operi Ambrosii Calepini (seruata uerborum
integra serie) Conformatum...*  And, to the best of my
knowledge, no Greek-Slavonic dictionaries were prepared to
complement the L'viv confraternity's *Hrammatika ... ellynoslovenskaho
jazyka* (1591).  By mid-seventeenth century the linguistic orientation
had changed.

     What I am suggesting is that in the attempt to understand how
Ukrainian authors of the period applied the term alogia  in their own
(Ruthenian, Polish and Latin) writings we should study the
contexts in which the word appears as well as the literature that informed
them.  The vast majority of this literature was in Latin.

    Alogia has been used in Latin since at least the first century. For
example, Lucius Annaeus Seneca employed the noun
when speaking --if my memory serves me-- of irrational conduct.
Seneca, let us recall, was on the reading list of Ukrainian schoolboys
in the 17th and 18th cc.

     Concerning Dr. Peitlova's suggestion: I would not recommend
translating *Trynadcjat' alohij* as *Thirteen absurdities*
or as *Trynadcat' bessmyslennostej.* The English absurdity and
the Russian bessmyslenost' adequately convey only one of the meanings of
alohija, if we view it as an isolated vocable.  But if we interpret 
it in the context
of the collection by Kalynec', its polysemy comes to the fore.  Thus,
I recommend *Thirteen alogies,* as Dr. Svitlana Kobets had suggested
in her original posting.  Otherwise, we face the risk of being reductive.

Best regards,
N. Pylypiuk

>Although the educational orientation of the Ukrainian confraternity
>schools was indeed largely Latin, one should not underestimate their
>awareness of Greek: they did, after all, publish a grammar of it
>(Hrammatika dobrohlaholivaho ellinoslovenskaho jazyka, L'viv,
>Adelfotes [i.e. Bratstvo], 1591).  Epifanij, who certainly knew Greek
>very well, naturally renders alogija as be(z)slovesie, because
>logos=slovo.
>
>In rendering Church Slavonic "beslovesnoe" (note the neuter gender!!)
>as "bestia/dykoe zvirja", Berynda is surely aware of the underlying
>Greek "alogon zôon", of which the Church Slavonic is a loan
>translation and which has precisely this meaning.  (In Modern Greek,
>incidentally, "alogo" means a horse.)
>
>There seems little doubt that Ukrainian alohija is Byzantine Greek
>alogia, which had the same meaning, i.e. absurdity.  (It is not,
>apparently, current in Modern Greek.)  It is not inconceivable that it
>was borrowed via Latin, but still, borrowings non sunt multiplicanda
>praeter necessitatem.  It is interesting to note that, according to Šanskij,
>alogizm, which is current in modern Russian with this meaning,
>replaced an earlier alogia.  "Alogizm" is apparently a nineteenth-
>century borrowing from German.  I would guess (none of my German
>colleagues are around to ask) that Alogismus in German refers to the
>philosophical tendencies, in which case the younger borrowing must
>have been assimilated to the meaning of the older one.
>
>R.M.Cleminson,

>more details: "alogic'nost' - n. - nonsense;
                    "alogic'eskij - adj."-bessmyslennyj
[...]
>"alogia"comes from Greek and means :without any sense or 
>logic,absurdity; - "alogic'nyj -  >bessmyslennyj. Trynadcat' alohij 
>- means
>   13 nonsenses or absurdities; 13 bessmyslennostej.

>   Katarina Peitlova,Ph.D

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