Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

w, written as f in some Greek alphabets, dropped out of pronunciation (and hence spelling) in most dialects. Hence the w in this Homeric word is, strictly speaking, conjectural, lōTnes is the same word, with a common contraction of a+o into ô. Later the Indians came to call the Greeks yavana too—although their first major encounter was with a warlike force led by Macedonians.

Near Oropus, which is on the coast facing Eretria, according to Strabo, ix.2.10.

Two other ethnonyms for Greek , seemingly much older, are Danaoi and Akhaioi. They are the words used by their ethnic poet Homer, writing some time in the early first millennium BC. The name Danaoi has associations with the city of Argos, a major city at the time when Homer represents Greece. Danaos is a legendary king of that city. Akhaioi , when it is used specifically, refers either to the people of an area in the north of the Peloponnese, with no particular claim to representative status, or to the people of Phthiotis, which is also notable in Homer as another part of the kingdom of Achilles ( Iliad , ii.684). Its Latin form, Achîvî , shows that it originally had a W at the end of the stem (hence really ’Akhaiwoi’ ). But in this form, with an inversion of the A and I, as Ahhiyawa , it does seem to figure as a term for a major kingdom in other documents, namely the royal correspondence (in cuneiform on baked clay tablets) of the Hittites who dominated Anatolia in the second millennium BC. So it seems that, early on, the Greeks were known abroad by yet another name.

Both these terms may have been used by the Egyptians. There is an inscription c . 1370 BC (on a statue base in a funerary temple of Amenophis III) which mentions the TNY along with a variety of other names locatable in Crete. Egyptian hieroglyphics usually omit vowels, and i or y between vowels is often lost in Greek, so this could be an explicit reference to the Danaioi. In another inscription c. 1186 BC, the DNYN are mentioned as one of the Sea-Peoples attacking Egypt. But in an earlier inscription c . 1218 BC, the IKWS, which could just possibly be the Akhaiwoi or Ahhiyawa , are mentioned as allies in the resistance against the Sea-Peoples (Strange 1980; Muhly et al. 1982).

It also had one colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, Amisūs, modern Samsun.

Although not prohibited by Carthaginian or Phoenician influence, the Adriatic received rather little attention from Greek colonists, and was not identified with a particular metropolis. However, it was de facto a Dorian area. Three major cities here were Epidamnos, later Dyrrhachium (now Durrazzë in Albania), founded by Corinth and the neighbouring island of Corcyra c .625 BC; Atria, in the Po delta, founded in late sixth century BC by Aegina (a Dorian city later cleared and repopulated by Athens); and Ancona, a city of the indigenous Piceni later refounded by Greek refugees from Syracuse in 387 BC. (The promise of the Venetian lagoon was not exploited in antiquity.)

For all its stately sound, this name ( Buzántion ) is just the diminutive of Búzas , as if Hongkers had become the official name of Hong Kong.

Cyrene, founded c .630, specialised in the growth and export of sílphion , a medicinal plant. But Greek was also to be heard farther east on the African shore, where a rather different kind of enterprise was established. Naucratis, ‘Sea-Queen’, was a pan-Hellenic emporium in the Nile delta, a centre for trade with the Egyptian market, in a trading concession allowed by the pharaoh. The initiative here had come from Ionian Greeks, from Miletus and Samos, conveniently sited just to the north. (See Chapter 4.)

Compare the figures for modern spoken English: two forms for most nouns ( word, words ), four for most verbs ( talk, talks, talked, talking ).

In this chapter, Greek names in the text are given in the conventional Latinised form: hence not Hēródotos, Akhaiós but Herodotus, Achaeus. In the romanised transcription, h has much the same force as in English, but is often used to aspirate a consonant: kh, ph, th could more accurately have been written k hp ht hin fact as in English ‘Can Pete take it?’ Except in diphthongs, au, eu , the Greek u was pronounced in Attic much as it is today in French, phonetically [y]; ou was a long ū, as in English rune. The accents in Greek up to the early centuries AD give some image of the pattern of tone, not stress; thereafter they just mark the stressed syllable.

As it happens, this pre-eminence of Attic was the result of cultural and commercial, not military, dominance. Athens, as we have seen, was early a major trading centre. But until the fifth century Greek literature had been the joint product of many different dialects.

An exception to this tendency for indigenous populations to survive Greek settlement was Sicily, where the Greek presence must have been particularly dense. They had at least thirteen separate colonies there, and the western end of the island was in the hands of another foreign incomer, Carthage, with three more. Nevertheless, the pre-existing Sicans, Elymians and Sicels had been very much a factor when land was originally sought for the new cities.

Such political fame as they acquired was associated with experiments in tyrannous megalomania, notably those of Dionysius of Syracuse (430-367 BC) and Agathocles of Acragas (361-284 BC), both of whom organised Greek wars against Carthage with zero net effect.

ekbebarbarōsthai: it had been two hundred years since Rome had conquered Greece, and begun its attempt to assimilate its culture; yet a Greek—and one educated at Rome at that—still classed Romans as barbarians.

This early Greek range is very different from the genres of medieval and modern European literature. There is no novel, no essay, no fantasy literature. Neither is there any literature devoted to religious devotion. As it happens, the first three of these were all Greek inventions too, but from a much later period, in the first centuries AD, when Greece was an enforced part of the Roman empire, and there was no serious expectation of a public career or public responsibilities. Affluent individuals were then free to explore more personal concerns, to write romances, and descriptions of personal adventures. Likewise, explorations of individual religious experience were alien to the Greek spirit in these earlier days, although they were later to become central after the spread of Christianity. The religious outpourings of the earlier period take the form of hymns to the Olympian gods, with an emphasis on recounting their myths.

Greek analysis of grammar was essentially complete when Dionysius the Thracian, working in Alexandria, the intellectual centre of Greece at the time, published his compilation of Stoic and Alexandrian work as Tékhnē Grammalik$ēA at the beginning of the first century BC.

This was a significant year for Athens, the first year of restored democracy after its conclusive defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.