Palmer L.R. The Greek Language

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

< previous page page_x next page >

Page x

FIGURES IN THE TEXT

Fig. 1. The Distribution of the Indo-European Languages in the Third Millennium

B.C. 8

Fig. 2. The Linear B Syllabary 30

Fig. 3. The Distribution of the Greek Dialects c. 1300 B.C. 75

Fig. 4. The Distribution of the Greek Dialects in the Alphabetic Period 76

Fig. 5. A Proposed Genealogy of the 'North Mycenaean' Dialect 101

Fig. 6. The Greek Alphabet 203

< previous page page_x next page >

< previous page page_xi next page >

Page xi

PREFACE

In 1954, when The Latin Language was published, a companion volume on the Greek Language was already

envisaged. Its completion was put off for over twenty years by the decipherment of the Linear B script, which gave

us direct knowledge of Greek some five centuries earlier than Homer. Michael Ventris's brilliant discovery

provided for two decades the material for a new and highly productive academic industry. Now that there are signs

that the seam has been worked out and that, in default of new and rich finds, Linear B studies have virtually

reached the end of the road, the time is ripe to incorporate the results into a general work on the Greek language.

Like its predecessor, the book is divided into two parts: the first concentrates on tracing the development and

ramifications of the language as the vehicle and instrument of a great culture. After an attempt to site Greek in the

network of Indo-European dialects, it considers the complex and debatable problems presented by the entry of the

Proto-Greeks into their historical homeland and their linguistic debt to the pre-Greek substratum, whose identity

and provenance are also discussed.

A chapter on the Linear B texts and the nature of the Mycenaean 'chancellery' language is followed by one on the

Greek dialects of the 'Hellenic Age'. This is the necessary prelude to the core of the book, the chapters on the

manifold literary dialects of poetry and prose. The final chapter of the first part is concerned with the coalescence

of the ancient dialects into a Common Language and its further development into the various forms of Modern

Greek.

The second part is a condensed Comparative-Historical Grammar. Users of The Latin Language will doubtless note

and regret the absence of a chapter on Syntax. This was envisaged for the present volume; but time, space, and the

great rise in costs precluded its execution. The main reason is the mass of material. Latin was considered to end

with Charlemagne. Greek has a longer history. Except for a gap of some five

< previous page page_xi next page >

< previous page page_xii next page >

Page xii

centuries in the Dark Age which intervenes between the end of the Mycenaean civilization and the first 'alphabetic'

texts of the Hellenic Age, we have direct textual knowledge of Greek from the thirteenth century B.C. down to the

present day. Another consideration increased the size of the book. Whereas we felt able to dispense with

translations of the Latin examples (this has been deplored and remedied in the Italian edition), we were urged to

provide such aid for the Greek. The versions have no pretensions to literary merit. They serve a purely utilitarian

aim and are meant simply as aids to construing and analysing the examples.

The bibliography also serves a limited purpose. It lists merely a few works which will help the inquisitive reader

and student to find his way into the luxuriant jungle of the specialist literature.

As before, the duty of the contributor to such a series as The Great Languages remains 'to state the communis

opinio where one exists and elsewhere to set forth fairly the evidence and the divergent views which have been

expressed'. In a field so vast as that of the Greek language the reader will not be surprised to discover that there has

been ample scope for divergencies and that the author occasionally has views of hisown.

The completion of a book so long in gestation would have been impossible without the generous assistance of the

relevant departments of the University of Innsbruck: the Institut für klassische Philologie (Professor R. Muth), the

Institut für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft (Professor W. Meid) and the Universitätsbibliothek (Dr O.

Stranzinger).

The main debt owed by the author of such a work is to the general body of scholars, only a few of whom could be

named. Professor Anna Davies, the joint editor of The Great Languages, in particular gave generously of her time

and learning with the result that the book shed many of its imperfections.

My wife, as always, has been of constant support and infinite patience throughout the many vicissitudes of

composition, typing, checking, proofreading and index making. Undaunted by the loss in the post of the finally

processed typescript she set to work with speed and efficiency to reduce the delay to a minimum. To her this book

is dedicated quinquagesimo anno.

SISTRANS, TYROL

L.R. PALMER

< previous page page_xii next page >

< previous page page_1 next page >

Page 1

PART I

AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE

< previous page page_1 next page >

< previous page page_2 next page >

Page 2

Page 3

The Prehistory of the Greek Language

1. Greek and Indo-European

The Greek language, spoken today by between nine and ten million people in Greece itself and abroad, is one of

the best documented languages of the world, for we have direct knowledge of it over a time span of some 3,000

years. It appears first in the syllabic Linear B inscriptions of Mycenaean Greece and Crete, dated to not later than

the thirteenth century B.C. (see pp. 27-56). Then, after a Dark Age following the destruction of the Mycenaean

civilization, the language reappears in a new, written guise, an alphabetic script (based on a North Semitic script),

the earliest text being dated roughly to the last quarter of the eighth century B.C. From this time on there is an

unbroken chain of written testimony for the history of the language down to the present day.

The use of the comparative method enables us to reach farther back in time than the date of the earliest texts. In the

first place, ancient Greek is presented to us in the form of a number of dialects and this enables us to devise a

hypothetical ancestral form, 'Proto-Greek'. The dating of this and the entry of the' Proto-Greeks' into the land

which their descendants now occupy requires the assessment of archaeological and other data which will be

examined below. For the time being it will suffice to say that in all probability the Hellenization of the Balkan

peninsula took place in the first half of the second millennium B.C. and that the invaders imposed themselves as

conquerors on an indigenous population whose language(s) became extinct, but has (have) left traces in place-

names and in the vocabulary of Greek.

The history of Greek may be carried a stage farther back thanks to the fact that it is a member of the Indo-

European family, which comprises languages stretching from Celtic in Western Europe to the Indo-Aryan

languages of present-day

< previous page page_2 next page >

< previous page page_4 next page >

Page 4

India. Comparison of these languages enables us not only to reconstruct an ideal grammar of the parent Indo-

European (IE), but also to group them in major sub-families. The siting of Greek in this network of relationships is

arrived at by assessment of the peculiarities which it shares with certain other languages of the family. By this

means some guesses may be made about the history of the Greeks in the intermediate period between proto-Indo-

European and their entry into their historical habitat.

We have said 'comparison of languages', but in fact what the comparatist does is to compare linguistic descriptions

comprising lists of words (lexicons) and the rules by which these are formed into sentences (grammars). It follows

that the first step is to attempt at least a summary description of Greek based on the earliest available texts (see Part

II). This description will provide the necessary basis for assessing its Indo-European relationships. That task

performed, it will then be possible to trace the history of Greek, starting with the first invasions which are believed

to have brought about the Indo-Europeanization of Greece. There is, however, a possibility that the Greeks had

been preceded by another Indo-European people, just as the Anglo-Saxon peoples imposed themselves on a Britain

occupied perhaps a thousand years earlier by the Celts, both Celtic and Germanic being IE languages. This is a

delicate problem involving the assessment not only of the elusive evidence bearing on the languages of pre-Greek

populations and the contributions they made to the vocabulary of Greek, but also the archaeological evidence,

which reveals in the first instance patterns and movements of cultures, but not necessarily of peoples.

2. The Greekness of Greek

We first turn to the identity of Greek, that is the delineation of its linguistic physiognomy which, while affirming

its family relations, at the same time sets it apart from all other members of the Indo-European group. This

physiognomy is statable as a set of features which, taken as a whole, provides the investigator with a criterion

which enables him to decide that a given text is written in Greek and no other Indo-European language. The

separate features which make up this unmistak-

< previous page page_4 next page >

< previous page page_5 next page >

Page 5

able identity may be stated as equations between the reconstructed IE and the corresponding Greek representatives.

They comprise points of phonology and morphology. An illustration is the word for 'seven', IE *septm * >

which exemplifies two sound changes diagnostic of Greek: the aspiration of initial antevocalic *s (p. 2.35) and the

treatment of the sonant nasal (p. 217). Other phonological features are the changes of initial *j to the aspirate or to

(*jos > , *jugom > , p. 224), the unvoicing of the aspirated plosives (*bhero > , p. 229), the loss of all

plosives in word-final position (*galakt >

, p. 228), and the change of final *m to n (p. 223). A prosodic

feature is the limitation of the accent to one of the three final syllables of the word (p. 244). In the morphology of

the noun the most striking innovation of Greek was the reduction of the eight cases of IE to five (p. 277). In the

declension there was mutual influence between the o- and the a- stems, and both were influenced by the

pronominal inflexions (e.g. the replacement of the nominative plural *-os, *-as, by -oi and -ai). Conversely, the

noun inflexions have replaced most of the endings peculiar to the pronominal declension, so that Greek no longer

shows the IE difference between the two systems (still apparent for instance in Latin istius, istud, etc.), with the

exception of the neuter singular in -d (*tod >

with loss of final d, p. 285). The pronominal stems were

strengthened by combination and addition of deictic particles (e.g.

, pp. 285 f.). In the adjective a

new superlative in

was developed (pp. 281 f.). In the verbal system the IE present stem formations survived

only in fossil form, and a new set of productive formants developed, based largely on the inherited type in *-jo (pp.

261 f.). The originally independent aspectual stems were organized into regular conjugations (pp. 293 ff.), notable

features being the perfect in -k- (p. 306), the aorist passive in -

- (p. 302), and a number of future formations

(pp. 310 ff.). The development of the infinitive was a relatively late phenomenon, for the forms differ from dialect

to dialect (pp. 31 f.).

To this reconstructed Proto-Greek we must assign features which no longer figure in the texts of the post-

Mycenaean dialects. Vocalic hiatus was prevalent and the intervocalic aspirate ( < * VsV) still survived (for Myc.

see p. 41). It is also

< previous page page_5 next page >

< previous page page_6 next page >

Page 6

likely that the clusters -sm-, -sn- remained unchanged (e.g. *selasna, *usme, etc., p. 41). On the evidence of

Mycenaean (p. 42), Proto-Greek may well still have possessed the phoneme *-j (p. 224) not only in the positions

jV- and - VjV-, but in many of the clusters Cj (e.g. kjawetes, aljos, phulakjo, etc.). It is likely that the sonant liquids

and * were also retained since their dialectal treatment varies. That the labio-velar consonants still survived is

clear not only from their different representation in the dialects but also from the Linear B evidence (p. 40). It has

also been argued that the dissimilation of the aspirated plosives (Grassmann's Law) had not yet taken place, but see

pp. 230 f. Morphology will also have remained at a more archaic stage (e.g. the survival of athematic verbs such as

kteimi, later

To site Proto-Greek in a network of IE relations we simply list shared innovations. Shared archaisms carry little

weight for they may be merely accidental independent survivals left untouched by the continuous and random

process of linguistic renewal. One such survival is the preservation of the palatal plosives in the so-called centum

languages as opposed to the change to fricatives in the

languages. The latter comprise Indo-Iranian, Balto-

Slavonic, Armenian and Albanian, and it is plausibly deduced that the change took place within the Indo-European

period before their dispersal, that is to say it was a common isogloss of a group of Indo-European dialects. The

absence of this change, on the other hand, has no relevance for the grouping of the centum languages Celtic, Italic,

Germanic, Greek, Hittite and Tocharian. Below we shall see that Greek, though a centum language, has close

affinities with certain

languages. Thus while it makes sense to speak of a group characterized by the

change of *k to a sibilant, there was no corresponding centum group.

A special type of innovation is the exclusive selection of one possibility from a number of alternatives: e.g. the

inflexions of the dative, ablative, and instrumental plural have a characteristic -bh- in Indo-Iranian, Armenian,

Greek, Italic, and Celtic as against -m- in Germanic and Balto-Slavonic. Within Greek, the dialects select as

terminations of the first person plural active of the verb either

or , both of which may be attributed to Proto-

Greek (p. 297). Such 'selection' is a valid

< previous page page_6 next page >

< previous page page_7 next page >

Page 7

criterion for affinity. By assessment of such criteria scholars are generally agreed that Greek has closest affinities

to Armenian and Indo-Iranian. In the first place all three share a remarkable morphological featurethe augment (

, Skt. áricat, Arm. elik', p. 292). Common vocabulary items add some weight: e.g. a common expression for

'old man' (

, Skt. járant-, Arm. cer), the replacement of IE *man by *mrto *, a back-formation from *n-

mrto* 'immortal' ( , Skt. márta-, mrta-, Av. ). Greek shares with Armenian the prothetic vowel as in

, Arm. astl, 'man', Arm. ayr, and especially the word for 'nine' , Arm. inn (p. 221), and items of

vocabulary such as the verb 'to grind'

, Arm. alam, cf. 'flour', Arm. alewr, the bird-name , Arm.

çin, Skt. syena*, and the adjective 'empty' , Arm. sin. Add further the prohibitive particle Skt. ma, Arm.

mi, though this also occurs in Tocharian and Albanian. Indo-Iranian also has important connections with Balto-

Slavonic, which prompt the conclusion' that there did at one time exist a special relation between early Indo-

Iranian and those dialects of Indo-European which developed into the Baltic and Slavonic languages'.1

The location of the cradle lands of the Proto-Balm and Proto-Slavs is still under discussion, but it is an important

pointer that Baltic elements occur in the river and place names in the area between Vilna and Moscow. Study of

the hydronyms of the Upper Dnepr Basin shows a great density of Baltic elements north of the Pripet river,

whereas south of the river they are much sparser and interspersed with Iranian and Finnish names. The latter give

point to the linguistic connections of Indo-Iranian with Finno-Ugrian, a neighbouring but non-Indo-European

language family, comprising Finnish, Esthonian, Hungarian and a number of minor languages. This is regarded as

'conclusive evidence' of early contact and is another important pointer to the location of Proto-Indo-Iranian in

southern Russia with the Proto-Balts to the northwest and the Finno-Ugrians to the north-east (the homeland of the

latter being located in the vicinity of the River Oka).

Given these pointers we may arrange the IE languages in a schematic geographical pattern (Fig. 1). The

languages

1 Burrow, 18.

< previous page page_7 next page >

< previous page page_8 next page >

Page 8

Fig. 1.

The Distribution of the Indo-European Languages in the Third

Millennium B.C. (

languages in italics)

Occupy a central position flanked on the west by Germanic, Celtic and Italic, this group having certain points of

contact with Balto-Slavonic (e.g. the instrumental or dative plural in -m- occurs exclusively in Germanic, Baltic

and Slavonic).1 To the south lay the Anatolian group (Hittite, Luwian and Palaic), which was introduced into Asia

Minor c. 2000 B.C. To the east lay Tocharian (actually two related dialects, A and B), which is known to us from

texts found in Chinese Turkestan, dating from between the sixth and tenth centuries A.D.

The striking fact which emerges from the study of this network of interrelations is that Greek, though it is a centum

language, has no special connection with the western group. In particular, despite the close cultural symbiosis of

Rome and Greece in the historical period, Latin and Greek are linguistically, within the Indo-European family,

worlds apart. Burrow (p. 15), noting that the connections between Sanskrit and Greek far outweigh those with other

IE languages (outside Indo-Iranian), adds that some of the common features involved are of late IE origin (e.g. the

augment). Yet Greek, despite its affinities with the

group, did not participate in certain of the common

linguistic innovations of that group. This suggests that the Proto-Greeks, having participated in certain of the

common linguistic innovations of the central group, separated before the advent of the characteristic

sound-

changes.

1 For Italic see my Latin Language, 12 ff.

< previous page page_8 next page >