Noemon Acragas

You have potentially made a huge erroneous assumption. It is not about the philological weight of the Catalogue vs other more "philologically superior" parts of the text which is relative. Why do you assume the choice was based on philology? Burial customs are all about maintaining IDENTITY. It is about ethnicity and identity. Greeks buried themselves holding the Catalogue of Ships so that there is ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT, that they were Greeks. There is nothing more to it. Several more mummies from Egypt from Al-Fayoum buried themselves with their Greek names inscribed in their tombs, their pictures attached yet some people claim they were not Greeks but Egyptians or Romans or mixed or anything but Greeks. Others went even further and put the Catalogue of Ships because it catalogues all the Greeks and they did not wish to leave any doubt to whoever dug them up.

@nick_krontiris Hey Nick, I have heard of Karagounis but have not read him.

@noemonas Hi Noemon, I've just stumbled onto your account so maybe this is a question that has already been answered, but are you familiar with the work of Chrys Caragounis?

@PYmius When you think about it, it really messes with one's head.

@noemonas What is the name of the PIE in the PIE language? How is it possible for any language (e.g. PIE) to be called by a name in Greek and not by its original language name?

Greek is foreign to Greeks but not foreign to English reconstructionists who are using not Sanskrit but guessed reconstructions of it to define their Greek. The guessed reconstruction of the guessed reconstruction of the guessed reconstruction is very real guys, but the largest and most continuous literary tradition on earth is "Fake". You couldn't really make this up even if you tried. XII. The Methodological Root: PIE-First Reconstruction The deepest problem with Allen's approach is not only any individual argument but the direction of the reconstruction itself. The Erasmian and comparative-philological tradition — from Blass through Brugmann to Allen — first reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) phonology, an entirely unattested language, using purely conjectural methods derived from Germanic, Italic, and Sanskrit, and then worked forward from this imaginary PIE to describe Classical Greek — which possesses the largest surviving literary corpus of any ancient language by an extraordinary margin. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae contains over 125 million words from Homer to the fall of Constantinople; for the period before 300 CE alone, the surviving Greek corpus amounts to approximately 57 million words (Peust, 2000) — more than the combined surviving corpora of Latin (~10 million), Akkadian (~10 million), Egyptian (~5 million), and every other ancient language together. The entire surviving Hebrew corpus predating the Septuagint amounts to roughly one to two thousand words of short inscriptions. The scriptural tradition was preserved and transmitted to the wider world through Greek. The methodological inversion is unprecedented: the most extensively attested and most continuously documented language in human history is made to conform to the phonology of a language that has no speakers, no inscriptions, and no manuscripts. The consequences are systematic. PIE reconstructions do not require labial fricatives in the positions occupied by β, and the Germanic languages — which provided the primary comparanda for the Indo-European comparativists of the nineteenth century — do not have [v] in the positions where Greek has β. The temptation to align ancient Greek with contemporary German pronunciation, so that Attic sounds like educated German, was not merely unconscious: Blass writes explicitly that 'Latin b, g, d and Greek β, γ, δ correspond to one another with perfect regularity', where the regularity in question is the regularity of his own reconstructed system, not of attested evidence. It's that easy at the end of the day. This is the entire weight of evidence for the reconstruction, "we use these letter to match the Greek so the Greek must have sounded just like us Germans". The internal chronology of the Erasmian model is itself a reductio ad absurdum. Between the adoption of the alphabet (VIII BC) and the classical period (V BC), only four to six sound changes are postulated. During the classical period itself (V–IV BC), virtually none. Then, in the six centuries from Alexander to Constantine (III BC – III AD), fully sixteen changes are crammed — the entire conversion from plosive to fricative for all nine mutes, the merger of multiple vowel pairs, the loss of vowel length, and the disappearance of the δασεῖα — followed by another millennium of near-total stability down to the present. In other words, 61.5% of all postulated changes are concentrated into 20% of the timeline — and that 20% coincides with the period of highest literacy, the strongest grammarian tradition, the most prestigious literary model (classical Attic), and the most effective educational system (the Hellenistic schools). This is the precise inverse of what every principle of historical linguistics would predict. Periods of high literacy and strong normative models conserve pronunciation; periods of upheaval and isolation accelerate change. The Erasmian timeline requires the opposite, and no proponent of the Erasmian model has offered an explanation for this paradox. Randall Buth has called the differences between modern Greek and the Hellenistic systems adiaphora — inconsequential; Kantor (2017) and Teodorsson reach similar conclusions for Palestinian and Ptolemaic Greek respectively. The scholarly controversy is about how far back these values extend — not about whether they were present. The Φ↔Θ interchange in archaic inscriptions, the absence of composite spellings ΤΗ/ΠΗ/ΚΗ in any alphabet that possessed the dedicated letters, and the Laconian θ→σ of 411 BCE place fricative values in the archaic and early classical periods — centuries before the Koine. The comparative method offers no independent check on these conclusions because it has no comparable evidence base. Germanic has no inscriptions from the period of the consonant shift and no grammarian descriptions; its phonology is reconstructed backwards from texts written centuries later, calibrated against Greek. Sanskrit was oral for centuries before its first inscriptions. Latin is uncertain at the relevant points. Greek alone has both contemporary grammarian descriptions and a massive inscriptional record from the periods in question. If any language should serve as the calibration standard for PIE reconstruction, it is Greek — and the Greek evidence, as we have shown, points to fricatives. Allen inverts this priority: he calibrates Greek against a PIE reconstruction that was itself derived from a misreading of the Greek evidence.

@Juanmanuelmaci x.com/noemonas/statu…

Creo que, después del post de ayer, no estaría de más que me extendiese un poco sobre el Catálogo de las naves, ese gran tramo de la Ilíada que ha llevado a la deserción de no pocos lectores modernos. Mi opinión es mixta. Como filólogo asumo (y defiendo) su gran importancia estructural en el poema. Y, desde luego, no lo considero una interpolación tardía, y así me uno a la tendencia actual de la crítica. Afortunadamente, se han dejado atrás esos escrúpulos analíticos del XIX que mandaban a la papelera todo lo que molestaba de alguna forma en los poemas homéricos y no "estaba a la altura" de un arquetipo apriorístico del poema. El catálogo, además, es un notable monumento del arte formular y memorístico. Y una gran fuente de información, lo cual casa muy bien con esa labor docente que los antiguos atribuían a Homero. Pero lo importante no es constatar cómo los antiguos (o parte de los antiguos) leían a Homero, sino cómo lo leemos desde el presente y qué nos dice. Por eso Homero es un clásico. De lo contrario, habría quedado confinado en la vitrina de un mueseo. Dicho lo cual, en fin, como mero lector, el Catálogo siempre me pareció tremendamente aburrido. No me lo salté, sin embargo, en mi primera lectura, adolescente, de la Ilíada, con la edición del gran Segalá entre las manos. Lo recorrí de cabo a rabo con cierta resignación reverente. Tampoco tendí a esquivarlo cuando he ido manejando otras traducciones. Aquí podía más mi lado traductor, pues me interesaba ver cómo los distintos traductores resolvían esos áridos versos. Mi recomendación, por tanto, a los lectores que se adentren por primera vez en el poema, es que no se lo salten ni, mucho menos, abandonen. No, al menos, en la primera lectura. El Catálogo de las naves siempre merece una primera vez. Considerémoslo (salvando todas las distancias salvables y aun a riesgo de emitir una gran boutade) como la Gran Nota al Pie de la Ilíada. O como el mapa que acompaña a las ediciones de El señor de los anillos. En un libro esos artefactos tienen su lugar. Pero en un poema oral como éste había que introducirlo en un canto (el II, concretamente), para dejar al espectador en suspense. Los espectadores antiguos podían regocijarse y sentir orgullo patrio al escuchar su terruño mencionado en la gran expedición a Troya. Los modernos tal vez lo veamos como aquellos intermedios de los cines de antes, cuando aparecía en la pantalla el letrerillo de "visite nuestro bar".

@noemonas I d wish they could take the trouble to learn modern Greek and realise themselves their huge access to the vast Greek literature of past millennia. I learned Italian because I liked the songs. If they are academics they shouldn't utter a single word without learning modern Greek.

These "Reconstructionists" seem unable to grasp the gravity of their own statements while praising the oral traditions of India. Poetry is meant to be understood by the audience. Otherwise is serves absolutely no purpose, like a tree falling with noone being around to hear it. This seems to have gone over their heads. Homer was never read in ancient Athens with a "reconstructed Homeric pronunciation", nor in Sparta or in Syracuse of old.

@parjanyudu @APC_Trades You seem unable to grasp the gravity of your own statements. Poetry is meant to be understood by your audience. Otherwise is serves absolutely no purpose, like a tree falling with noone being around to hear it. This seems to have gone over your head.

@APC_Trades See in India, for example, where multiple hyperstrict oral traditions have survived three–four millennials of invasions, diachonic evolution and lack of a writing system. Several Brāhmaṇa families decentralized into preserved different 'albums' of the same artist/composer.

Homer's Iliad Book 1 Lines 1-27 in Restored Ancient Greek Meter, Pitch Accents & Pronunciation with English translation.

@parjanyudu @psychotakes x.com/noemonas/statu…

@psychotakes Ancient Greek is a foreign language to Modern Greek in terms of phonology, morphology and mutually intelligibility. There is no native speaker of Ancient Greek.

You refered to is as such. I am quoting you saying it without actually definiting it while pretending you cracked Homeric Greek that neither Allen nor even Plato ever claimed to have done. Attic Greek is intelligible with Modern Greek and in many cases indistinguishable from modern Greek as well. Koine Greek aka Greater Attic adopted by Philipp which is taken to begin at 280BCE is virtually indistiguishable from Modern Greek. x.com/noemonas/statu…

Modern Greek is the only language to enjoy oral continuity, written continuity, grammatical & pronunciation instruction continuity with ancient and the largest continuous literature on earth by far. No other language in the world today still has 2 dedicated ancient grammar and pronunciation manuals the 'Techne Grammatike' of Thrax and the 'On the Literary Composition between Grammar and Rhetoric' by Alicarnaseus as well as Plato's Kratylos as well as around 100 million saved words from the antiquity alone.

Classic Attic from Plato: αἱ γυναῖκες, αἵπερ μάλιστα τὴν ἀρχαίαν φωνὴν σῴζουσι. νῦν δὲ ἀντὶ μὲν τοῦ ἰῶτα ἢ εἶ ἢ ἦτα μεταστρέφουσιν, ἀντὶ δὲ τοῦ δέλτα ζῆτα, ὡς δὴ μεγαλοπρεπέστερα ὄντα. Modern: οι γυναικες μαλιστα σωζουνε την αρχαια φωνη, ολοι ομως νυν δε αντι του ιοτα, ει και ητα μεταστρεφουν, αντι δε του δελτα, ζητα ως ταχα μου μεγαλοπρεπρεστερα οντα. Ἑρμογένης πῶς δή; Modern: Πως δηλαδη? Σωκράτης οἷον οἱ μὲν ἀρχαιότατοι ‘ἱμέραν’ τὴν ἡμέραν ἐκάλουν, οἱ δὲ ‘ἑμέραν,’ οἱ δὲ νῦν ‘ἡμέραν.’ οι μεν αρχαιοτατοι ιμεραν την ημερα καλουν, αλλοι δε εμεραν και οι νυν ημεραν. Ἑρμογένης ἔστι ταῦτα. Ετσι αυτα

@noemonas This does not change the fact Ancient Greek is practically foreign to us modern speakers, more so than English actually.

@o_gi__ Yeah man very "foreign", can't you see. It's virtually identical with 280BCE Greek. In the next post I will post some passages from Plato himself. x.com/SElenidis/stat…

@SElenidis I don't mute them or block them, I want them to learn from us so they can not claim to be ignorant later.

@noemonas I m sick and tired of non-Greeks who "know better". My illiterate grand-mother can read the Septuagint (3rd Century BC) and understand what she's reading. Any modern Greek speaker can do this too! there are Psalms for example that are identical with modern Greek. Mute the idiots

These "Indo-European" Pronunciation reconstructionists are using "Sanskrit" to define the Attic Greek, they claim Sanskrit survived orally while lacking a writing system and that their modern reconstructions of Sanskrit are not just awesome but awesome enough to define the Attic Greek too which survived not just orally but also in script, in literature, in continuous education, in law and in instruction by both secular and religious central authorities. Don't get me wrong, Indo-European is a great field when it comes to archeology, super-families of languages, but not when it comes to pronunciation of anything ancient. We have barely reconstructed ancient Egyptian with real Greek side by side to it while some IE people cliam to have reconstructed an unattested Proto language for which we have not a single marking.

There is no need to assume a common ancestor between dialects other than national pride. Only reason Portuguese consider Portuguese not a dialect of Spanish is nationalism. Only reason Croatians think of Croatian as different to Serbian is nationalism. No need to be called Proto-Slavic, Slavic is quite sufficient. PIE is imaginary.

@avatans There is no record of a language called Proto-Slavic. Does this mean that the similarity between Russian, Polish and Serbo-Croatian is just a coincidence?

There’s no record of a language called Proto-Indo-European. It’s an imaginary language. Read my review of JP Mallory’s book on Indo European homeland. open.substack.com/pub/avatanskum…

XII. The Methodological Root: PIE-First Reconstruction The deepest problem with Allen's approach is not only any individual argument but the direction of the reconstruction itself. The Erasmian and comparative-philological tradition — from Blass through Brugmann to Allen — first reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) phonology, an entirely unattested language, using purely conjectural methods derived from Germanic, Italic, and Sanskrit, and then worked forward from this imaginary PIE to describe Classical Greek — which possesses the largest surviving literary corpus of any ancient language by an extraordinary margin. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae contains over 125 million words from Homer to the fall of Constantinople; for the period before 300 CE alone, the surviving Greek corpus amounts to approximately 57 million words (Peust, 2000) — more than the combined surviving corpora of Latin (~10 million), Akkadian (~10 million), Egyptian (~5 million), and every other ancient language together. The entire surviving Hebrew corpus predating the Septuagint amounts to roughly one to two thousand words of short inscriptions. The scriptural tradition was preserved and transmitted to the wider world through Greek. The methodological inversion is unprecedented: the most extensively attested and most continuously documented language in human history is made to conform to the phonology of a language that has no speakers, no inscriptions, and no manuscripts. The consequences are systematic. PIE reconstructions do not require labial fricatives in the positions occupied by β, and the Germanic languages — which provided the primary comparanda for the Indo-European comparativists of the nineteenth century — do not have [v] in the positions where Greek has β. The temptation to align ancient Greek with contemporary German pronunciation, so that Attic sounds like educated German, was not merely unconscious: Blass writes explicitly that 'Latin b, g, d and Greek β, γ, δ correspond to one another with perfect regularity', where the regularity in question is the regularity of his own reconstructed system, not of attested evidence. The internal chronology of the Erasmian model is itself a reductio ad absurdum. Between the adoption of the alphabet (VIII BC) and the classical period (V BC), only four to six sound changes are postulated. During the classical period itself (V–IV BC), virtually none. Then, in the six centuries from Alexander to Constantine (III BC – III AD), fully sixteen changes are crammed — the entire conversion from plosive to fricative for all nine mutes, the merger of multiple vowel pairs, the loss of vowel length, and the disappearance of the δασεῖα — followed by another millennium of near-total stability down to the present. In other words, 61.5% of all postulated changes are concentrated into 20% of the timeline — and that 20% coincides with the period of highest literacy, the strongest grammarian tradition, the most prestigious literary model (classical Attic), and the most effective educational system (the Hellenistic schools). This is the precise inverse of what every principle of historical linguistics would predict. Periods of high literacy and strong normative models conserve pronunciation; periods of upheaval and isolation accelerate change. The Erasmian timeline requires the opposite, and no proponent of the Erasmian model has offered an explanation for this paradox. Randall Buth has called the differences between modern Greek and the Hellenistic systems adiaphora — inconsequential; Kantor (2017) and Teodorsson reach similar conclusions for Palestinian and Ptolemaic Greek respectively. The scholarly controversy is about how far back these values extend — not about whether they were present. The Φ↔Θ interchange in archaic inscriptions, the absence of composite spellings ΤΗ/ΠΗ/ΚΗ in any alphabet that possessed the dedicated letters, and the Laconian θ→σ of 411 BCE place fricative values in the archaic and early classical periods — centuries before the Koine. The comparative method offers no independent check on these conclusions because it has no comparable evidence base. Germanic has no inscriptions from the period of the consonant shift and no grammarian descriptions; its phonology is reconstructed backwards from texts written centuries later, calibrated against "reconstructed" Greek. Sanskrit was oral for centuries before its first inscriptions. Latin is uncertain at the relevant points. Greek alone has both contemporary grammarian descriptions and a massive inscriptional record from the periods in question. If any language should serve as the calibration standard for PIE reconstruction, it is Greek — and the Greek evidence, as we have shown, points to fricatives. Allen inverts this priority: he calibrates Greek against a PIE reconstruction that was itself derived from a misreading of the Greek evidence.

@psychotakes @realkoyima @parjanyudu @cruzera2 x.com/noemonas/statu… We never let them, 2 Cambridge dudes, Cheeke and Smith just run with it, they have been proven wrong time and again in every single century since but their acolytes insist.

@realkoyima @parjanyudu @cruzera2 This is why you don’t let foreigners become authority figures on your culture and heritage. They’ll spew whatever garbage they want willy nilly and deracinate you from your past

@psychotakes @parjanyudu @sofy66a Anglo-Indian sounds about right.

@parjanyudu @sofy66a No, I thought you might be Indian to be honest

@parjanyudu @psychotakes Robert Browning: