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

Athens adopted the Ionic alphabet as used in Miletus, in preference to their own ‘Attic’ style, which had not distinguished long E (H—eta) and long O (Ω—omega) from their short versions.

Q ( qoppa ) was originally a back [k] used before back vowels [o] and [u]. Early inscriptions use FH to represent [f], since F was originally a sign for [w] or [v]. Most of the Ionic dialects (including those at Miletus and Athens) had lost this sound, hence its disappearance from the offical Greek alphabet. But there is a bizarre twist here. Chalcis and Eretria, which founded Pithecusae and Cumae, actually spoke Ionic dialects, and so might have been expected to drop F in writing too.

In principle, it is possible that this distinctive product of the eastern Mediterranean was brought to the west by the other great colonial civilisation, the Phoenicians, but the countries that became (and have remained to this day) pre-eminent in wine-making happen to be in the Greek sphere of influence, Italy and Gaul/France, rather than North Africa and Spain.

This event is immortalised (along with other evidence, Greek and Indian) in two example sentences of the second-century Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali (3.2.111): arunad yavanan sāketam , ‘The Greek has besieged Saketa’ (a city close to Faizabad on the Gaghra); arunad yavanan mādhyamikam , “The Greek has besieged Madhyamika’ (a city close to Chittaurgarh, south of the Rajasthan desert). In each case, the sentence needs to be veridical in order to illustrate the point, that this tense (LaN, the imperfect) is used ‘of a recent public occurrence not actually witnessed by the speaker but potentially so’. Since of these two only Saketa is actually on the way to Patna from the Panjab, it appears that the Greeks also campaigned farther south and west, in Rajasthan.

It is also the origin of the romantic boy’s name Romeo.

It is interesting from a modern standpoint—and indeed from a classical Indian one, concerned to distinguish the complementary roles of Brahman /scholar, Kshatriya /warrior-king and Vaiśya/ trader—that the question of who the leaders in business were never seems to have occurred to the Greeks or Romans. Fortunes were certainly being made, but this was seen as an occasion more for indulgence than glory.

Two fields where the Romans never used Greek were law and the military. This was true even in Greek’s heartland in the eastern Mediterranean, where Latin otherwise made little headway.

Libanius, a Greek resident of Antioch in Syria in the fourth century AD, wrote sixty-four speeches which range over municipal, educational and cultural matters, as well as an autobiography and an encomium of the city. He mentions the existence of Aramaic just once, although it was spoken in the country all around (Mango 1980: ch. 1).

He would have hated the irony that he is generally known by this Latinised Greek version of his name. He was Judah the Hammer, yẖūdāh maqqābā.

Visitors from Parthia, Media, Elam, Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia Minor, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and Libya around Cyrene, together with Romans, foreign Jews, Cretans and Arabs, are explicitly distinguished (Acts ii.9-10).

Known as Philádelphos , ‘Lover of His Sister’: indeed he married her, in an amazing Greek adoption of Egyptian pharaonic tradition.

These were not the only pan-Hellenic games: two others were the Pythian games in Delphi, and the Isthmian games, organised by Corinth.

The only known case where early Greeks took a less ethnocentric view of their language was in Egypt: there is a graffito from 591 BC, written by a Greek mercenary on the leg of a statue at Abu Simbel. He refers to the Greeks among his party as alloglōssous , ‘of another language’, i.e. than the Egyptians. And Herodotus too uses this term of Greeks in Egypt (2.154). Contrast the more typical attitude of Strabo (vi.1.2), viewing Romans in Italy as still barbarians by contrast with the Greeks there.

The authors are in fact extremely few, and are still recognisable as the core of a traditional, classical education in western Europe. The dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes; the historian Thucydides; the philosopher Plato; and a handful of orators culminating in Demosthenes, who inveighed against the threat of Philip of Macedon. Greek traditional attitudes dating back to the Roman empire effectively still defined the British school syllabus that I studied in the 1960s.

Another feature of the writings besides their style was innovative. Christians were important in popularising the new format for books, the ‘codex’, with separate two-sided pages attached to a spine, as against the traditional scroll. This set the format for at least the next two thousand years. The conjecture is that this made books much easier to access when bookmarking, and quoting, important passages (Harris 1989: 296).

Both Greek homilía and Latin sermō originally meant an informal conversation, a chat.

His host, Artavazdes, the king of Armenia, was also a Greek scholar, apparently, to the extent of having written his own plays in the language (Plutarch, Crassus , fin.).

Over the three years AD 114-17, the whole area was taken and lost again by the emperor Trajan. But the north-western portion, Osroëne, was incorporated for two centuries after a Roman campaign in 164.

Mango (1980: ch. 1) puts the population of the eastern Mediterranean provinces in the mid-sixth century at 30 million, with 8 million in Egypt, 9 million in Syria-Palestine-Mesopotamia, 10 million in Anatolia and 3-4 million in the Balkans. Note also how Anatolia had twice the population of Greece and the European provinces.

The writing was on the wall for the Byzantines in that year of 1071: news also arrived that the Normans had taken Bari, ending 535 years of their empire in Italy.

The Greek Orthodox patriarchate indeed gained from the Turkish conquest, since the Sultan Mehmet rationalised his Orthodox subjects after taking Constantinople, incorporating the Bulgarian and Serbian patriarchates under the authority of Constantinople. Linguistically, of course, they remained separate.

e.g. zingiberi , ‘ginger’, sakkharon , ‘sugar’ (see Chapter 5, “The character of Sanskrit’, p. 192).

Close to the full list seems to be spíti , ‘house’ (from Latin hospitium , ‘inn’), skamnío , ‘bench’ (scamnum), pórta , ‘door’, kámara , ‘room’, vérga , ‘rod’, and possibly áspros , ‘white’ (from Latin asper , ‘rough’). Compare the vastly longer list of borrowings by Welsh (which was in close contact with Latin for half the time). (See Chapter 7, ‘Consilium: The rationale of Roman imperium’, p. 303.)

It has been suggested that the favourite choice of the Christian word for ‘love’, agápē , is influenced by Hebrew ’āhēb , ‘love’ (which happens to have much stronger sexual overtones than the Greek), and Greek skébar;nē , ‘tent’, by Hebrew &s car;eken , ‘dwelling’ (Moule 1959: 186).