Greek and Latin Linguistics

This paper claims that if discourse segmentation would consider further criteria beside hypotactic divisions and modern punctuation, our understanding of the length of segments, of their combination, and of the meanings expressed would significantly change.

When verba dicendi that take the accusative and infinitive (AcI) are passivized, there exist two grammatical alternatives in Classical Latin: the personal NcI (1); and the (Imp)ersonal AcI (2):

(1) primi traduntur arte quadam verba vinxisse (Cic. Or. 40)

‘They first are related to have joined words with a certain skill.’

(2) Traditum est Homerum caecum fuisse. (Cic. Tusc. 5, 4)

This paper addresses problems in historical morphology and etymology of rregular comparatives in Ancient Greek, expanding on the seminal treatment by Leumann 1945 and relying on recent work on Indo-European background of this morphological class (Widmer 2004; Rau 2014).

The year 2010 saw the publication of Etymological Dictionary of Greek (EDG) by Robert S. P. Beekes. Written in English by one of the leading practitioners of Indo-European studies and published by Brill, this 1800-page dictionary is bound to become the standard reference work for classicists who will rely on it for their knowledge of the history of Greek vocabulary.

The hypothesis put forward by Bally (1903:329, 1942) that Gk. ταπεινός ‘low-lying’ (Hdt., Pind.+) is etymologically connected with τέμπεα/-η ‘defile, narrow-pass, valley’, and that it can be traced back to *tm̥pes-nó- (LIV²: 626 *temp- ‘to stretch, extend’, extended variant of *ten- ‘to stretch’) has encountered general skepticism. The term is nowadays still mentioned as obscure or Pre-Greek in etymological dictionaries (GEW 854, DELG 1093, EDG 1450).

As is well known, Pindar’s poetics exhibit reflexes of IE poetic inheritance at several levels, namely syntactic, phraseological and thematic (see Watkins 1995:448–59, 2002ab). This paper undertakes to make a short contribution to the field. It aims at gaining a deeper insight into some possible inherited IE conceptual patterns underlying two phraseological items of Pind. P. 2.52–6:

[...] ἐμὲ δὲ χρεών

φεύγειν δάκος ἀδινὸν κακαγοριᾶν

εἶδον γὰρ ἑκὰς ἐὼν τὰ πόλλ᾽ ἐν ἀμαχανίᾳ

ψογερὸν Ἀρχίλοχον βαρυλόγοις ἔχθεσιν

Recent work on expressions of obligation in Greek (Ruiz Yamuza 2008, Allan 2013) has refined our understanding of modal verbs like δεῖ and χρή by applying to the problem general linguistic advances in the realm of modality. But while making distinctions such as that between deontic and epistemic usages or setting up a scale of modal strength is a necessary first step towards determining the relative domains of δεῖ and χρή, a satisfactory theoretical account of the difference between the two remains elusive.

At the earliest stages of Latin poetry known to us, we can see the obsolescence of poetic meters based on word accent and the adoption/adaptation of Greek rhythms founded on syllable length. However, accentual rhythm never became entirely irrelevant to Latin verse-making, either because accentuation is affected by syllable length or because we can notice recurring accentual patterns in the extant Latin verses composed in the Greek mould.

The Act of Truth

The Perfect Participle Active in Homer: Against an Aeolic Phase