17.1392, Review: Lang Description/Indo-European Lang:Luraghi (2005)

[linguist at LINGUISTLIST.ORG]

LINGUIST List: Vol-17-1392. Fri May 05 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.1392, Review: Lang Description/Indo-European Lang:Luraghi (2005)

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Laura Buszard-Welcher, U of California, Berkeley  
        Sheila Dooley, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Laura Buszard-Welcher <lbwelch at longnow.org>
================================================================  

This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our
supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We
welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite
the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. To start a discussion of
this book, you can use the Discussion form on the LINGUIST List website. For
the subject of the discussion, specify "Book Review" and the issue number of
this review. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for
the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and
follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the
book review staff directly.


===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 29-Apr-2006
From: Anne Mahoney < anne.mahoney at tufts.edu >
Subject: Ancient Greek 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 05 May 2006 13:27:08
From: Anne Mahoney < anne.mahoney at tufts.edu >
Subject: Ancient Greek 
 

Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-555.html 

AUTHOR: Luraghi, Silvia
TITLE: Ancient Greek
SERIES: Languages of the World/Materials 213
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2005

Anne Mahoney, Department of Classics, Tufts University

This small volume (just 101 pages) gives a description of the Greek 
language as it was used in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.  Its 
intended audience is linguists who want typological information about 
Ancient Greek, or who will be reading papers by Hellenists, but who 
are not deeply familiar with the language.  All the Greek examples are 
given in the Roman alphabet.  After some introductory remarks, the 
chapters cover phonology, morphological processes, morphosyntax, 
and syntax.  A short bibliography includes the basic references.

Although Silvia Luraghi is the major author, Anna Pompei and Stavros 
Skopeteas are also credited, working on the sections on subordination 
and on phonology and morphology, respectively.

Any description of Ancient Greek is complicated by the need to 
determine exactly what variants of the language will be included.  The 
language is first attested as early as the 12th century BC, in a variety 
called Mycenaean Greek and written in a syllabary conventionally 
called Linear B (see p. 10).  The canonical works of archaic and 
classical Greek literature date from roughly the 8th century BC to the 
first two centuries AD.  Many important prose works are written in 
Attic, the dialect of Athens, while others are in Ionic, a dialect very 
similar to Attic, originally used in the Greek cities of the coast of Asia 
Minor.  Dramatic verse is in Attic Greek, while lyric verse 
conventionally uses two or three other dialects. Inscriptions from the 
Greek world attest all these dialects and others besides (p. 8-12; see 
further Buck 1955, Meiggs and Lewis 1969).

As Alexander the Great and his successors spread Greek 
administration through the eastern Mediterranean, during the third 
century BC, a ''common'' variety (in Greek, ''koine'') came into use, and 
this is the main ancestor of Medieval and Modern Greek (p. 8; see 
further Horrocks 1995).

Luraghi sensibly restricts herself to the language of classical prose 
and drama, Attic Greek of the fifth and fourth centuries, but 
occasionally compares other varieties, particularly as used by Homer 
and Herodotus.

The first chapter, on phonology, details the vowels and consonants, 
syllable structure, and accentuation.  Linguists who primarily work on 
living languages may be surprised at the amount of detail available 
about the sound system of a language that has had no native 
speakers for over 2,000 years.  Evidence for reconstructing Ancient 
Greek phonology comes from the writings of native-speaker 
grammarians, from spelling variation in ancient texts, from loan words 
to and from other languages (particularly Latin but others as well), and 
from comparison with other Indo-European languages and with later 
stages of Greek. The standard reference is Allen (1968).

The next chapter is a brief review of the available morphological 
processes:  affixation, reduplication, apophony (or ablaut), and accent 
movement.  There is also a section on derivational morphology and 
compounding.  Luraghi points out that ''the general property of the 
Ancient Greek affixes is their highly fusional character'' (p. 23): 
internal sandhi and other phonological processes can make it 
impossible to say where one morpheme ends and the next begins.  As 
a result, the examples in the book are not segmented into 
morphemes, though the glosses do account for all of the morphemes.

Chapter 3, ''Parts of Speech and Grammatical Categories -- 
Morphosyntax,'' is the longest in the book at 45 pages.  Luraghi 
covers the formation and use of the five noun cases (nominative, 
genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative), with three genders 
(masculine, feminine, neuter) and three numbers (singular, plural, and 
a dual that is becoming obsolete by the period of interest).  The 
definite article, pronouns, and adjectives come next, with discussion of 
agreement rules.  Numerals appear as a separate class; cardinal 
numbers behave like adjectives but only ''1'' through ''4,'' 
hundreds, ''1000,'' and ''10000'' have case forms.  Ordinal numbers 
(''first, second,'' and so on) are simple adjectives.  Ancient Greek also 
has productive numeral adverbs (''six times'' and the like) and a variety 
of other derived number words (''fourfold,'' ''four times as many,'' and 
so on), for which see p. 47.

General adverbs and adpositions are discussed next.  In Greek almost 
all adpositions are prepositions, and in the earliest stages of the 
language these words could be prepositions, preverbs, or adverbs.

The largest section of the chapter discusses the luxuriant 
morphological system of the Ancient Greek verb.  Finite verb forms 
have person and number to agree with their subjects, tense (seven 
possibilities), mood (four finite moods), and voice (three possibilities), 
though not all of the conceivable combinations of these categories 
exist in the language.  Non-finite verb forms include infinitives and 
participles, plus some derived adjectives.  These forms are created by 
means of suffixes, as many as four for a given form, and in some 
instances also prefixes.  The chart on p. 52 gives a useful overview of 
how verb forms are made, showing the order in which suffixes appear 
and the ways they are combined.

As in other Indo-European languages, in Ancient Greek tense, aspect, 
and mood are closely linked.  Forms from the present system, the ''first 
principal part'' of a verb in standard lexica and grammars, have 
imperfective aspect; forms from the aorist system have punctual or 
perfective aspect.  The perfect system is stative or resultative, and 
forms in the future system usually do not distinguish aspect at all 
(details p. 55 and following).  In classical Greek, past indicative forms 
are marked by a prefix, called the ''augment,'' just as in Sanskrit; this 
prefix is not used in other moods, and was not consistently used in 
Mycenaean or Homeric Greek.  Luraghi's examples here are well 
chosen to demonstrate the contrasts between forms.

After sections on conjunctions and negation, the third chapter ends 
with a discussion of one of the most characteristic features of Ancient 
Greek, the ''big number of discourse particles, that serve text cohesion 
and interclause linkage'' (p. 69; the standard reference is Denniston 
1959).  Idiomatic Greek prose uses one or more particles at the start 
of nearly every sentence to indicate its logical connection with 
previous sentences.  While at one level these particles are easy, since 
they do not have inflectional forms, they do not govern other words, 
and they do not entail particular forms for the verbs in the clauses 
where they appear, they are nonetheless difficult because the choice 
of particle can make fairly subtle differences in the meaning of a 
sentence.

Chapter 4 is on syntax.  Ancient Greek has free word order (p. 73-75) 
and allows omission of subjects (p. 75).  Subordination can be 
expressed with various kinds of clauses containing finite verbs and 
introduced by subordinating conjunctions, or with phrases using 
participles or infinitives (p. 80 and following).  The sections of this 
chapter treat sentence types, parts of the simple sentence, 
interclausal coordination, and subordination.  Although some of the 
more arcane details are necessarily left out, this brief overview covers 
all the major constructions and sentence structures.

EVALUATION

This is a succinct, efficient introduction to Ancient Greek which should 
serve its intended audience (non-classicist linguists) very well.  It will 
also be useful for beginning graduate students in classical philology, 
who know Greek and are learning to approach it as linguistics.

Several of the explanations and charts are particularly good, and I 
expect to use them as supplements even in beginning Greek classes. 
The chart showing the possible morphemes in a verb form and their 
order (p. 52) is elegant.  The summary of conditional sentences (p. 89-
90) nicely shows the major types, imposing order on what is too often 
presented as a list of arbitrary rules to be memorized. The overview of 
word order (p. 73-75), with particular attention to the position of verbs, 
is a good introduction.

The bibliography includes pretty much all the standard works, with 
entries in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish.  The only 
arguably significant omission is the work of A. M. Devine and L. D. 
Stephens (for example 1994).  After working through the present 
volume, readers could continue with Rijksbaron (2002) or Horrocks 
(1997), depending on their particular interests or needs.

A few small errors or infelicities should be noted.  First, there is a long-
standing tradition in classics of referring to authors and works by 
standard abbreviations and citation schemes, as ''Ar. Lys. 714,'' ''Th. 
8.44.1,'' or ''Hes. Th. 22'' (all from p. 33).  This efficient system is 
universally understood by classicists, but a non-specialist may not 
realize that the above examples refer to ''Aristophanes, Lysistrata line 
714,'' ''Thucydides book 8, chapter 44, section 1,'' and ''Hesiod, 
Theogony line 22'' respectively.  See the Oxford Classical Dictionary 
(Hornblower and Spawforth, 2003) or the Lexicon of Liddell, Scott, 
and Jones (1996) for the key to the abbreviations.

Next, there are occasional typographical errors, though they rarely 
interfere with comprehension.  One that will cause confusion is on p. 
16:  ''In the earlier Attic inscriptions a special symbol koppa (*) is used 
as an allograph of 'K' before 'O'.''  The symbol is supposed to appear 
where I have written an asterisk, but what appears instead is a half-
bracket.  Koppa looks something like a lollipop:  it is a circle with a 
descender, and in the Roman alphabet it develops into the letter ''Q.''  
The only other really misleading typo is on p. 86, where the translation 
reads ''... for a of miserable man'' and should presumably read 
instead ''... for a miserable man'' or ''... for the sake of a miserable 
man.''

Finally, the translations of the examples are always accurate, and 
generally graceful in English, but occasionally so free as not to show 
off the grammatical feature being demonstrated.  For example, on p. 
33, sentence 9 is glossed as ''do not hide a crisis that affects us,'' but 
this does not account for the accusative pronoun that is the reason for 
quoting this line; a gloss like ''do not hide from me an evil that we 
suffer'' would make the point clearer.  Or on p. 95, example 131 is 
glossed as ''to the Euphrates river, the width of which was four 
stadia.''  Although this is the best way to express this idea in English, it 
does not show how the participle works in the Greek; an 
ungraceful ''translationese'' gloss like ''to the Euphrates river, being of 
four stadia in respect of its width'' might facilitate understanding the 
Greek.

These are fairly small points, however, and do not detract from the 
value of the book.  Linguists wanting an overview of Ancient Greek will 
find this an excellent starting point.

REFERENCES

Allen, W. S. (1968) Vox Graeca:  A Guide to the Pronunciation of 
Classical Greek. Cambridge U. Press.

Buck, Carl Darling. (1955) The Greek Dialects:  Grammar, Selected 
Inscriptions, Glossary.  U. Chicago Press.

Denniston, J. D.  (1959)  The Greek Particles, 2nd ed.  Oxford U. 
Press.

Devine, A. M., and Lawrence D. Stephens.  (1994)  The Prosody of 
Greek Speech. Oxford U. Press.

Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth.  (2003)  The Oxford 
Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. revised.  Oxford U. Press.

Horrocks, Geoffrey C.  (1997) Greek:  A History of the Language and 
its Speakers. London:  Longman.

Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott, revised Sir Henry Stuart 
Jones. (1996) A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with revised 
supplement.  Oxford U. Press.

Meiggs, Russell, and David Lewis.  (1969)  A Selection of Greek 
Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C.  Oxford U. 
Press

Rijksbaron, Albert.  (2002) The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in 
Classical Greek:  An Introduction, 3rd ed.  Amsterdam:  Gieben. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER


Anne Mahoney teaches in the classics department at Tufts University. 
Her research interests include Greek and Latin meter and poetics, 
Indo-European linguistics, and language pedagogy.





-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-17-1392