Chapter 1 - Introduction
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Chapter 1 - Introduction This study utilises a commercially available tagged corpus of ancient Greek to investigate a group of words that originated in Proto-Indo-European and show a number of interesting and diverse features in the modern descendants of that language, including Greek and English. I establish a statistical method for use in a corpus-linguistic, quantitative approach to the collection and interpretation of data, and use the results to develop and test hypotheses about the nature and cause of language change and to identify variations possibly unobservable by other methods, thus making them available for further study. Why study Greek? Ancient Greek continues to be learnt and studied because of the importance and prestige of Classical Greece and its literature, philosophy and polity to the history of western civilisation. Within Greece it has usually also been a compulsory school subject for reasons of national consciousness and identity. As long as interest in ancient history and the roots of our culture continues, it will be desirable for a linguistic approach to the study of the language to be maintained as one of the necessary tools for understanding ancient documents and culture. But, like Chinese, Greek is a language with a long and near-continuous recorded history, offering a unique source for the study of language change in general. At least in its written form, today’s Greek is recognisable as a version of the language of Homer nearly three thousand years ago.1 This conservatism is unusual in the world’s languages and deserves investigation, but at the 1 Substantial sound changes are obscured by historical spelling, but there is a high degree of retention of lexical items and of morphology (particularly in the nominal system). Homer is cited as an exemplar of the oldest known form of Greek because the language of the orally transmitted Homeric poems preserves many linguistic features that are thought to be more archaic than the language of the earliest Greek documents, the Linear B tablets dating from approximately 1400 BC. 3 same time Greek has a history of great variation, both diachronic and synchronic, that can contribute to our knowledge of how and why languages change. The particular group of words studied in this thesis, which are interesting for their diverse and little understood behaviour in many of the related languages of Europe, can be traced back through Greek to their common origins in Proto-Indo-European. Greek is one of the foundational languages in the history of linguistics. It was the observation of similarities and of the regularity of differences between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit that led to the postulation of family relationships between languages and so allowed the development of the comparative method of historical linguistics. This method has since been profitably applied to the identification and study of other language families and sub-families. Nineteenth century linguistic progress both arose from and stimulated further intensive study of Ancient Greek. The subsequent decline in classical studies does not diminish the importance of Greek, either as a vehicle for access to the ancient world or as a rich linguistic resource for the study of language change. From the perspective of the modern language, the long continuous history and the relative accessibility of the written Greek of most earlier periods to the speaker of Modern Greek make it both a natural and useful area of study.2 For Greeks it is also sometimes a matter of national pride not only to be familiar with what they regard as their own heritage but also to be active participants in scholarly debate over issues that concern Greece and Greek, such as the pronunciation of the ancient language by modern scholars.3 2 This accessibility is due to several sociological factors, including a minimum-hours requirement in school curricula, general familiarity with the conservative language of the Orthodox liturgy, and a long history of diglossia in which until the 1970s much education and written communication was conducted in an archaising form of Greek (known as Katharevousa, ‘purifying’). 3 This remains a contentious issue, and practice differs from country to country. The origins of the reconstruction of the ancient pronunciation and its introduction into teaching practices in England are 4 Apart from general interest in history, culture and language, there is another reason why Greek has been studied, and outside Greece it is now the principal cause why Ancient Greek is still learnt: it is the language of the New Testament. This collection of first-century documents, the earliest extant Christian writings, has been intensively studied since its beginning and has been hugely influential as the sacred text of a major world religion. The project of translating these scriptures into the world’s languages began very early4 and is still in progress, with the Summer Institute of Linguistics the largest and best-known trainer of translators.5 The majority of recent linguistic studies of Ancient Greek are contributions to the study of the New Testament and the world of early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism, although Mycenaean Greek and dialectology are also popular research areas. For a number of cultural reasons, then, as well as linguistic ones, study of the Greek language is rewarding. This study looks at a specific group of words and traces their origin and use in Homeric and Classical Greek, as detailed in recent studies, with the aim of comparing their use in the subsequent period of the language known as the Koine, to see whether changes can be discerned, and if so whether reasons for the changes can be suggested and verified. outlined by Allen 1987: 140-9. Petrounias 2007: 1266-79 contrasts practices in western countries and in Greece and lists the advantages and disadvantages of the opposing positions. 4 The first large-scale translation project in history was the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, beginning in the early third century BC (Dines 2004). Versions of the New Testament in Latin, Syriac, Armenian and other languages are known from about AD 180, which is approximately the beginning of the period of decline of Greek in the western empire (Aland & Aland 1989: 185ff). 5 Many translators work from English or other modern-language versions, but most agencies require translators to be familiar with Greek; it is also a compulsory subject in many theological colleges. 5 Outline of this study Chapter 2 surveys the history of the Greek language diachronically from its antecedents in Proto-Indo-European to the classical period, with particular reference to prepositional and preverbal particles (‘P-words’).6 After a brief survey of the evidence for Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested stage of the language, I review two studies of the P-words in relation to two synchronic states of the language, Homeric and Classical Greek, and give examples of the different usages in the two periods. In Chapter 3 I trace the development of the next stage of the language, the Koine or ‘Common Language’ of the hellenistic period, and look at the use of prepositions and preverbs in the New Testament (NT), with particular attention to the problem of developing a method of evaluating large sets of raw data. Comparisons are made with the data presented in Chapter 2 and in two other hellenistic Greek corpora, the Septuagint (LXX) and Apostolic Fathers (AF). P-word usage in the later Koine period, the era of the New Testament writings, is described in the context of establishing whether significant changes since the classical period can be detected and accounted for. (The individual documents comprising the three corpora are described in Appendix A, along with other data sources referred to.) In Chapter 4 I review the results of the comparisons and statistical tests made and the success of the methodologies used, and outline areas for further research. 6 Following O’Dowd’s use of the term for English (1998: passim), I call this group ‘P-words’ as a convenient superordinate term for the group of adverbs, prepositions and preverbs. They are called ‘particles’ by Luraghi when she wants to leave their lexical class unspecified (2003: 76), but this may be potentially confusing as the term ‘particle’ is used in Greek grammars for other parts of speech, such as conjunctions (and appears as ‘PTC’ in Luraghi’s morphemic glosses for some non-P-words). The class of prepositions that are also P-words is known as ‘proper prepositions’, to be distinguished from ‘improper prepositions’, which have a more restricted functional range; but this terminology fails to capture their other functions as preverbs and adverbs. 6 Methodology The basis of this study is the language of the middle Koine period as realised in the New Testament. Three corpora are used for a quantitative analysis of the usage of the P-word group, with a view to establishing the degree of variation, if any, in their usage over time and the statistical probability that such variation is not due to mere chance or insufficient data. Where a variation is shown to be statistically significant, grammaticalisation theory is used to suggest hypotheses about the usage of the P-words and the possible paths of change they could be expected to undergo. a. Corpus linguistics7 The corpora used for this study are grammatically tagged texts available in a database called Accordance, Version 7.0.3 of August 2006, produced by OakTree Software, Inc, in Florida.8 The principal corpus used is the group of 27 New Testament documents, in the most recent edition of Nestle-Aland known as NA27.9 It is fully tagged at the lexicogrammatical level using the GRAMCORD system developed by The GRAMCORD Institute of Vancouver, Washington.10 Two other corpora are also used: a selection of texts from the Septuagint (LXX),11 Greek 7 General information about the field of corpus linguistics in this section is drawn from O’Donnell 2005, which applies corpus linguistics to the study of the NT.