The Eponymous Archons of Athens

Philosophy of Science, Calendars

Philosophy of Science

There is a syntactic issue with this clause. Philoponus uses a third personal plural future indicative [skhésousin] of ἔχω, ékhō, "to have." There are actually two forms of the future of ékhō, both of which Philoponus will use in this passage, σχήσω, skhésō, and ἕξω, héksō. The syntactic problem is that in Greek conditional sentences that have a future indicative in the consequent (the "apodosis"), the antecedent ("protasis") should be in the subjunctive, for the "future more vivid" condition, or in the future indicative, for the "future most vivid" condition [Chase and Phillips, A New Introduction to Greek, Harvard, 1941, 1965, p.188]. The "future less vivid" condition uses an optative in the antecedent, but then also in the consequent. Philoponus is clearly going for more vivid, so why does he use the optative? Well, this may be another Atticism, this time an inappropriate one. The optative was passing out of use in spoken Greek. Using it at all is part of an elevated literary style, but sometimes this practice results in mistakes. I think Philoponus makes a simple mistake here, using the optative instead of the subjunctive in a sort of over-correction, as when grammatical martinets urge English speakers to say, "It is I," instead of "It's me" [note]. Error or no, this doesn't really complicate the translation.

Copyright (c) 2003, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017, 2019, 2023 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

In the ancient world, indeed until the Renaissance, the empirical method didn't exist. You discovered things not by doing experiments but by sitting and thinking. It took centuries for people to begin to wonder, "If I actually did so-and-so, what would happen?"
Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues, A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages [Hill and Wang, New York, 2008, p.241]

Once upon a time, it was so obvious that a four-pound rock would plummet earthward twice as fast as a two-pound rock, that no one ever bothered to test it. That is, until Galileo Galilei came along and took ten minutes to perform an elegantly simple experiment that yielded a counterintuitive result and changed the course of history.
V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain [W.W. Norton & Company, 2011,, pp.xviii-xix, boldface added]

The Grammar of Philoponus's Statement

One of the key moments in the entire history of science is when Galileo Galilei dropped two different weights and, by seeing that they fell at the same rate, refuted Aristotle, who said they would fall at rates proportional to their weight. However, this experiment had been performed a thousand years earlier, as Galileo himself knew, by John Philoponus in Alexandria, during the remarkable Age of Justinian. And John knew what he was doing and that he had refuted Aristotle. He refuted, by experiment, most of Aristotle's physics.

Galileo's experiment is often presented as demonstrating the ignorance and complacency of Mediaeval thought, corrupted by religious dogmatism. But it demonstrates instead the ignorance and complacency of Modern history and philosophy of science, which have typically, as least as we see in public discourse and popular culture, not bothered to actually study enough Mediaeval science to know what was really going on. In the epigraphs above, we see how Derek Bickerton and V.S. Ramachandran, in linguistics and neuro-science respectively, have fallen prey to this incompetence. I have examined how bad this can get under Infantile Atheism.

Yet Philoponus is a familiar figure to scholars, naturally, of Late Antiquity and also of Islām, who find the greatest figures of Islamic philosophy discussing him. Much of Philoponus's commentary on Aristotle had been translated into Arabic along with Aristotle.

The truth of this matter is so stunning, and throws such a different light on the history of science, that I felt that, in a way, I could not properly believe it until I had seen Philoponus describe, in Greek, his own experiment -- to be sure that the modern translation had not misrepresented it. This desire posed a bit of a challenge, since the most recent Greek edition of Philoponus was published by the Academy of Letters of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1888.

Fortunately, the Firestone Library at Princeton has two copies of the Academy's truly massive edition of Greek commentaries on Aristotle. In January 2012, I dove into the stacks of the library and came up with the relevant volume. What follows is a key passage in the Greek text, in three parts, with the standard translation of Cohen and Drabkin. Having described Aristotle's theories on motion, Philoponus begins with a couple of preparatory remarks:

τοῦτο δὲ παντελῶς ἐστι ψεῦδος. καὶ τοῦτο ἔστι πιστώσασθαι κρεῖττον πάσης διὰ λογῶν ἀποδείξεως ἐξ αὐτῆς τῆς ἐναργείας.
But this [i.e. Aristotle's theory] is completely erroneous, and our view may be corroborated by actual observation more effectively than by any sort of verbal argument.
[Greek text, Commentaria in Aristotelem graeca, XVI-XVII, Joannes Philoponus, In Physicorum libros tres priores/quinque posteriores commentaria, ed. Hieronymus Vitelli, Academia litterarum regiae borussicae, Berlin, 1887-1888, p.683, lines 16-18; translation, A Source Book in Greek Science, edited by Morris R. Cohen and I.E. Drabkin, Harvard, 1948, 1975, p.220]

Here is something that otherwise we are led to think didn't exist in the Middle Ages, and that is positively denied by Derek Bickerton: a rejection of traditional authority together with an appeal to the phenomena and to experiment. There are two sentences in Greek that Cohen and Drabkin combine into one.

The first sentence is toūto dè pantelōs esti pseūdos, τοῦτο δὲ παντελῶς ἐστι ψεῦδος. The first word is the neuter singular of οὗτος, hoūtos, "this," a demonstrative pronoun. It is followed by dè, "but," which English would put first in the sentence. Next is a very interesting word, pantelôs, "competely." This has an adverbial ending on παντελής, pantelḗs, "complete, absolute, entire," which combines πᾶς, "all," with τέλος, télos, "completion, at last, end," which is familiar from the philosophical term "teleology," the theory of ends and purposes. So we get something like "all-completely." The sentence ends with esti, "is," and pseûdos, ψεῦδος, a noun, "falsehood," which we can recognize from the modern prefix "pseudo-." So a good literal translation of this sentence would be, "But this is completely [a] falsehood." A very blunt rejection of Aristotle.

The second sentence is kaì toūto ésti pistósasthai kreītton pásēs dià lógōn apodeíxeōs ex autēs tês enargeías. We begin with kaí, "and," followed by "this" and "is" again. Then we get an interesting verb in the future middle infinitive, from πιστόω, pistóō, "to prove, confirm." Greek possesses a "middle" voice, which can be a reflexive or have a more subtle (or conventional) meaning, in addition to the active and passive voices. So we begin with, "And this is to be proven..." We see a Latin future participle in such a role in the famous Delenda est Carthago, "Carthage is to be destroyed," of Cato the Elder.

Next, we get a neuter singular comparative adjective (agreeing with toūto), κρεῖττον, kreītton (maculine/feminine κρείττων, kreíttōn, which we see used by Michael Psellus for Constantinople), "stronger, better," from κρατύς, kratús, "strong." With "tt" instead of "ss," kreītton is an "Atticism," i.e. a form from the Attic or Athenian dialect of Greek. Philoponus is consciously writing in an elevated literary style, something that may be condemned by moderns, who nevertheless may themselves disparage the koinè dialect of the New Testament -- they want to seem egalitarian, on the one hand, but betray their own true snobbery (and/or disdain for Christianity), on other other. Comparatives in Greek take their objects, "better than," in the genitive. Looking for a genitive, we find pásēs apodeíxeōs, "all" or "any proving/demonstration." This is qualified by dià lógōn, "through words." Dià is familiar from words like "dialogue" or "dialectic," while lógos, λόγος, can mean "word," "discourse," "reason," "ratio," etc. Philoponus has said, "And this is to be proven, better than any demonstration through words..." So we want to know what is better than a verbal argument.

That will be ex autēs tês enargeías. Ex, "from, out of," is the form of ek before a vowel. Autēs is the genitive feminine of autós, αὐτός, "self." Enargeías is the genitive of a noun, ἐνάργεια, enárgeia, that actually does not occur in my Liddell and Scott Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon [Oxford, Clarendon, 1889, 1964]. The Intermediate lexicon does have the adjective enargés, ἐνάργής, "visible, palpable, in bodily shape" [p.258]. The noun, however, does occur in the Unabridged Liddell and Scott, with one of the meanings as "clearly perceived phenomenon, datum of experience" [Oxford, Clarendon, 1843, 1897, 1940, 1996, p.556], in other words, that which is visible, palpable, etc. -- i.e. what can be observed. So the whole phrase will be "from the [τῆς, tês] observable itself."

Note that ἐνάργεια is not the same word as ἐνέργεια, enérgeia. The latter means "actuality" in Aristotle's metaphysics, and it is now the familiar modern word "energy" in physics. See the relevant discussion on the issue of time.

Philoponus therefore says, "And this is to be proven, better than any demonstration through words, from the observable itself." Or we could rearrange a bit: "And this is to be proven from the observable itself, better than any demonstration through words." We may not expect such a statement of empiricism in the Middle Ages, but then it is appropriate for the man who is about to refute Aristotle by actually dropping weights.

Following the prefatory statements, Philoponus gets down to the experiment we can perform. I first saw this part quoted by G.E.R. Lloyd in Greek Science After Aristotle [W.W. Norton, 1973, p.160]. Lloyd seems to have consulted the Prussian Academy Greek text of Vitelli, which he referenced [in his Bibliography, p.181], and he had slightly modified the translation of Cohen and Drabkin. I will give the Cohen and Drabkin translation first:

πολλῷ γὰρ πάνυ μέτρῳ διαφέροντα ἀλλήλων δύο βάρη ἅμα ἀφεὶς ἐκ τοῦ αὐτοῦ ὕψους ὄψει ὅτι οὐχ ἕπεται τῇ ἀναλογίᾳ τῶν βαρῶν ἡ ἀναλογία τοῦ χρόνου τῶν κινήσεων, ἀλλὰ πάνυ ἐλαχίστη τις ἡ διαφορὰ κατὰ τοὺς χρόνους γίνεται.
For if you let fall from the same height two weights of which one is many times as heavy as the other, you will see that the ratio of the times required for the motion does not depend on the ratio of the weights, but that the difference in time is a very small one.
[Greek text, H. Vitelli, op. cit., p.683, lines 18-21; translation, Cohen and Drabkin, op. cit., p.220, italics removed, since the whole passage, for obvious reasons, is italicized by Cohen and Drabkin]

Cohen and Drabkin had done no better than identify this passage as on pages 678-684 in Vitelli. G.E.R. Lloyd gave a reference to "683 16 ff" [op. cit., p.160]. I also noticed that Richard Sorabji, in his Preface to PHILOPONUS On Aristotle's Physics 5-8, with SIMPLICIUS On Aristotle on the Void [translated by Paul Lettinck & J.O. Urmson, Cornell University Press, 1994], gives the page of this precise passage as "683, 17-25" [p.ix, note 8]. These references made finding the passage very much easier. My Greek is not good enough that I could understand the text on first look -- I can't sight read Greek -- but the expression δύο βάρη, dúo bárē, "two weights," immediately caught my attention. I knew I was in the right place. The sentence of Philoponus in Greek is more than twice this long, but Cohen and Drabkin use a full stop where I show the comma of the Greek text. I will deal with the rest of the Greek sentence below. It adds materially to the experiment described here.

As it is, we begin with a noun phrase in the dative case, pollō_i gàr pány métrō_i, which contains the post-positioned conjunction gar, "for," as in the statement of Theodora below. The (neuter) noun is métron, μέτρον, meaning "measure, rule," or "size," a word that gives us the modern "meter" and is actually the noun in Aristotle's principle of the "Golden Mean," τὸ χρύσεον μέτρον. The first word in the phrase, pollō_i, is from polýs, πολύς, "many, much, mighty, great," which is polý in the neuter. Pány is "very." So, using a preposition in English for the dative, we can say that the phrase is "in very great measure (or size)." The next word, diaphéronta, is a participle in the neuter plural from the verb diaphérō, διαφέρω, "to differ." So the participle is "[things] that are differing." This is followed by allélōn, in the genitive plural, "from each other." So we have things differing from each other; but what is differing? That is the dúo bárē I have already mentioned, the "two weights." Dúo for "two" is familiar from English use even today. The (neuter) noun is báros, βάρος, of which we get the plural, agreeing with the previous participle. This is a third declension noun, so we get an ēta rather than an alpha ending in the plural. Báros itself is from barýs, "heavy, deep," as in "barytone," which now is a singer with a certain tonic register but originally was any Greek word with a grave accent on the final syllable. So we end up with the long phrase, "two weights, differing from each other in very great measure." This is not the "two weights of which one is many times as heavy as the other" of the translation, but it amounts to the same thing. Since the neuter nominative and accusative are identical, we do not know yet if the "two weights" are the subject or the object of the sentence.

Next comes háma, ἅμα, "at the same time" -- a rather important word that Cohen and Drabkin surprisingly neglect to translate -- and apheís, ἀφείς. This word gave me the biggest headache of the whole passage. The translation of "if you let fall," which leaves out háma, also has the pecularity that there is no word for "if" in Greek. I soon identified the verb as aphíēmi, ἀφίημι, "to let fall," which is the preposition apo, ἀπό, "from" (used in many compounds), combined with the verb híēmi, "send, hurl," ἵημι. I could not find a finite form of the verb to match apheís, ἀφείς. It didn't help that the paradigms all used híēmi, whose forms might have strange permutations in the compound. But Liddell and Scott clearly gave apheís as the aorist active participle [op.cit., p.138]. (As an aorist, the participle expresses aspect rather than tense.)

Ah, that's why there is no "if" in the Greek. The whole phrase is built around the participle, "letting fall at the same time two weights, differing from each other in very great measure." Of course, the word order in Greek is almost exactly the opposite of this: "For in great very measure differing from each other two weights at the same time letting fall..." Sounds a bit like Yoda.

Next we get ek toū autoū hýpsous, "from the same height." The noun is hýpsos, ὕψος, "height," which is another third declension neuter whose genitive here, ὕψους, looks a little unusual (an Attic contraction of -eos to -ous). Autoū is the genitive of (neuter) autò, ἀυτό, "self, myself" or "the very one, the same." This is familiar from modern languages, where "auto" in English is a word, an abbreviation of "automobile."

There is another context in which we find ὕψος. This is the origin of the idea in aesthetics that we now called the "sublime." The matter is discussed extensively in a separate essay.

We now get to the first finite verb in the sentence, ópsei, "you will see," in the second person plural indicative future. This is from the verb horáō, ὁράω, "to see," whose forms are based on three different roots. Besides the hor- and op- that we see here, there are also forms based on id-, the Indo-European *wid- root that turns up as far afield as the title of the Vedas, [from *woid-, to *vaid-, to ved-]. In Greek we get eīdon, εἶδον, "I saw," oīda, οἶδα, "I have seen" or "I know," and idéa, ἰδέα, "idea" -- a word we still use, thanks to Plato. So, we get the idea that, dropping different weights from the same height at the same time, you will see...what? That's what comes next.

What does come next is the object of an indirect statement: You will see hoti, ὅτι, "that," oukh hépetai tê_i analogía_i tōn barōn hê analogía toū khrónou tōn kinéseōn. It begins with the negation, oukh, of a finite verb, hépetai. This is from hépō, ἕπω, which in the third person singular present middle voice here means "to follow, obey." We have to go down the line a bit to fine a nominative noun for the subject of the sentence. That will be hē analogía, ἡ ἀναλογία, i.e. "the analogy," but here meaning a proportion or ratio. Indeed, Latin ratio simply translates Greek lógos, λόγος, both of which can also mean "reason." See discussion here.

Thus, Philoponus says that "the ratio" toū khrónou tōn kinéseōn, "of the time of the motions," does not follow what is in the noun phrase in the dative that came after the verb, which was tē_i analogía_i tōn barōn, "the ratio of the weights." "Motion" is kinésis, κινήσις, which we get in modern words like "kinesiology," the anatomical study of movement in the body. So, when we drop the weights at the same time, we see that the time of the motions is not proportional to the weights, despite what Aristotle had asserted. So he was wrong.

Having said what we don't see, Philoponus then says what we do: Allà pány elakhístē tis hē diaphorà katà toùs khrónous gínetai. "But [allá] the difference according to the times [hē diaphorà katà toùs khrónous] is [gínetai] some/a [tis] very [pány] (the [hē]) smallest [elakhístē] (one)." The verb here, the third person of gínomai, γίνομαι, is a version of gígnomai, γίγνομαι, "to become," which we see below in Theodora's statement. So when we drop the weights, the difference, διαφορά, in the times of their fall is, what shall we say? One of the smallest. This makes it sound like Philoponus thought there was a difference in the time of the fall of the weights, just not what Aristotle had said. However, we know from the following passage, which continues this sentence, that Philoponus actually observed no difference, and says so. He does not draw Galileo's conclusion from this, and so does not advance physics as far as Galileo will do later; but he does do Galileo's experimental job for him, as the later Italian seems to have known.

Putting the whole passage together and smoothing it out some, we may get:

For letting fall at the same time two weights from the same height, differing from each other in very great measure, the ratio of the time of the motions does not follow the ratio of the weights, but the difference of the times is the very smallest.

This agrees in sense with the translation of Cohen and Drabkin well enough, despite their overlooking háma, ἅμα, that I cannot accuse them of a mistranslation. As it happens, G.E.R. Lloyd has noticed the omission of "at the same time" and inserted it into his own slightly more literal rendering:

For if you let fall at the same time from the same height two weights that differ greatly, you will see that the ratio of the times of the motions does not correspond to the ratio of the weights, but that the difference in the times is a very small one... [op. cit. p.160]

This sentence of Philoponus continues as follows, with a striking, Galilean addition to his observed results. Curiously, G.E.R. Lloyd neither quotes this part of the text nor discusses it, despite the different light it throws on the previous part of the passage.

ὡς εἰ μὴ πολλῷ πάνυ μέτρῳ διαφέροιεν ἀλλήλων τὰ βάρη, ἀλλ᾽ οἷον τὸ μὲν διπλάσιον εἴη τὸ δὲ ἥμισυ, οὐδὲ διαφοράν τινα σχήσουσιν τὁ χρόνοι τῶν κινήσεων, ἤ, εἰ καὶ σχήσουσιν, οὐκ αἰσθητὴν ἕξουσι, καίτοι τῶν βαρῶν οὐ τοιαύτην ἐχόντων τὴν διαφοράν, ἀλλὰ διπλασίῳ λόγῳ ἔχοντος τοῦ ἑτέρου πρὸς τὸ ἕτερον.
And so, if the difference in the weights is not considerable, that is, if one is, let us say, double the other, there will be no difference, or else an imperceptible difference, in time, though the difference in weight is by no means negligible, with one body weighing twice as much as the other.
[Morris R. Cohen and I.E. Drabkin, op.cit., p.220; Greek text, H. Vitelli, op. cit., p.683, lines 21-25]

The passage begins with hōs ei mè pollō_i pánu métrō_i diaphéroien allélōn tà bárē. The phrase pollō_i pánu métrō_i is familiar from the first part of the sentence above, "in very great measure," but now we have it prefixed with a negative, mé. Unlike the translation of Cohen and Drabkin, the subject of the clause here is tà bárē," the weights," not the "difference." "Difference" turns up as the verb, diaphérō, διαφέρω, which we have seen already, but this time it is in the optative, the third person plural to agree with "weights." "So [hōs] if [ei] the weights are different from each other [allélōn, which we have seen above] in a not very great measure..." We have a logical antecedent here with "if," a "protasis" in Greek, which uses an optative as English would use the (increasingly archaic) subjunctive.

The next clause, also with an optative, slightly restates the stated condition. "But [all'] such that [hoīon] the one [tò mèn] double [dipolásion] be [eíē], the other [tò dè] half [hémisu]..." Cohen and Drabkin have left out the "half" part; but, indeed, of one is double in weight, the other will be half the weight of the first. This clause is an interesting modification of "in not very great measure" of difference, since we might actually think that a weight that is double that of another is a significant difference, and not a small one, as Philoponus presents it. The optative third person singular here, "be," εἴη, eíē, is from εἰμί, eimí, "to be," a very common but very irregular verb in Greek.

Next, we get the clause that is the consequent of the condition and the Galilean heart of this passage. "But not [oudè] a difference [diaphorán tina, in the accusative] will have [skhésousin] the times [οἱ χρόνοι, hoi khrónoi, in the nominative] of the motions [tōn kinéseōn]." Cohen and Drabkin have substituted an impersonal subject, "there will be," for the Greek subject, which is "the times," and they have relegated time to a modifying phrase "in time." They have left out "of the motions" altogether. This does not mutilate the meaning of the sentence, but it is not the way Philoponus puts it: "The times of the motions will not have a difference." Of course, it would be a little more natural to say in English, "The times of the motions will not be different." Because Philoponus put some emphasis on "the times," οἱ χρόνοι, hoi khrónoi, by putting this as a nominative at the dramatic end of the sentence, an emphasis that is lost in the Cohen and Drabkin translation, I have put the expresssion, and all references to time, in blue in this passage.

I say that here is the Galilean heart of this passage because this is the result that Galileo saw and accepted -- that the bodies of different weights fall at the same rate. Philoponus isn't quite sure, and so we get here an Galilean observation without the Galilean inference. Philoponus is only convinced that there is no more than a small difference, not that there is no difference. Yet from what follows, he is obviously intrigued that, indeed, he cannot see a difference, when the weights only differ by the specified double/half. This is the uncertainty that will hang fire for a millennium. It will require, not a different experiment, but a different conception: Inertia. Philoponus, who meanwhile has altered Greek mechanics with the concept of the impetus, is not ready for the next conceptual leap.

The last three clauses of the sentence exhibit the uneasiness, uncertainty, or perplexity of Philoponus at his result. "Or [é], even if [ei kaì] they will have [skhésousin] (a difference), it will be (/have) [héksousi] not perceptible [ouk aisthētèn]." Here we get the Philoponan doubt with the Galilean observation: Even if there is a difference in the times, I don't see it. I have transposed the verb here, in this case from ἕξω, héksō, "will have," which in the Greek text is at the end of the clause.

Thus, Philoponus has gone through three stages of reaction to his experiment: (1) there is no more than a very small difference in times when the weights are dropped, and certainly nothing like the ratios of time to weight that Aristotle posited; (2) if the weights are not that different, as when one is twice the other, there will be no difference in the times at all; or (3) even if there is a difference in the times, it is not visible. The whole sentence finishes with two final clauses, which do no more than reiterate the conditions of the experiment. I think that the various observations on the results, and the following repetition of the conditions, shows that Philoponus is surprised and puzzled by what happens in the experiment. As well he might be. He knew that in refuting Aristotle he would usher in a brave new world of physics, but he could not say just what that would be or how far it would go.

The last two clauses are both "genitive absolutes," which means they are modifying clauses that have a noun and a participle in the genitive case which effectively function as noun and verb. The first clause, with this functional transformation, would translate thus: "...even though [kaítoi] the weights [tōn barōn, genitive plural] not [ou] such [toiaútēn] have [ekhóntōn, genitive plural participle] the difference [tèn diaphorán]." Because of the difficulty I have with the translation here, I have left this in the awkward word order of the Greek. Cohen and Drabkin translate this, "though the difference in weight is by no means negligible." But there are no words here for "by no means" or "negligible."

The crux of the clause is in toiaútēn, from τοιοῦτος, toioūtos, which combines τοι, toi, a strengthening particle (seen with "and" at the beginning of the clause), with οὗτος, hoūtos, "this." Liddell and Scott define this as "a stronger form of τοῖος, such as this" [p.811]. With no word for "negligible," we must rely on the agreement of toiaútēn, in the accusative, with "the difference." I think about the best I can do is, "...even though the weights do not have such difference."

If this is right, it leaves us needing to ask, "What difference?" Such as what? It must be a difference we have seen already. The difference in the weights is not such a difference as.... which difference? We have several differences in this passage. Initially, we have two weights that differ "in very great measure"; next we have two times, whose difference is "the very smallest"; next we have two weights that differ in "not very great measure," but whose ratio is 2:1; and finally a difference in times, which certainly looks like zero. So talking about the most recent weights, which will be cited again in the next clause, what is the antecedent to a difference that now we are not "such" as? That must be the difference in times, which is zero, that goes with the 2:1 ratio of weights. It may help that the same word in the same form, diaphorán, is used for the times, zero, and the 2:1 weights. If we accept, "...even though the weights do not have such difference," then it is naturally to begin the next clause with "but," to contrast the 2:1 ratio of the weights with the zero difference of the time.

While I am uneasy about the meaning of this clause, because of the ambiguity of toiaútēn, I am more comfortable with a translation that is more literal, even if obscure, than with supplying vocabulary that doesn't exist in the original, as do Cohen and Drabkin. Indeed, I am not sure that Cohen and Drabkin's translation here is even consistent with the sense of the passage. They say, "though the difference in weight is by no means negligible," which seems to stand awkwardly with their own translation of Philoponus saying, "if the difference in the weights is not considerable." But if the difference in weights is "not considerable," or, more literally, is "in a not very great measure," isn't this rather close in fact to being "negligible"? There is a fine line there, especially when Philoponus actually says only, "not such difference."

The final clause is also a genitive absolute: "...but [allà] (in) double ratio [diplasíò_i lógō_i] has [ékhontos, genitive singular participle] the one (other) [toū hetérou, genitive singular] against [pròs] the other [tò héteron]. So the difference that Philoponus is talking about in the previous clause, which looks like not such as the difference in times, is the double ratio of the weights to each other. But neither of these clauses adds anything substantive to the conditions of the experiment or the observation of the result. I think they are here because they serve to express some surprise or bewilderment of Philoponus with the result.

Allowing for some awkwardness in a more literal translation, the final part of the complete sentence in the text of Philoponus thus might be rendered:

...so, if the weights are different from each other in not very great measure, but such that the one be double, the other half, the times of the motions will not have a difference, or even if they will have, it will be not be perceptible, even though the weights have not such (a) difference, but in double ratio the one has against the other.

Altogether, Philoponus did the experiment of dropping different weights and got something like the result we might expect. It seems like he wasn't sure whether to believe the evidence of his own senses about the result, but he frankly reports what the result is -- no difference, or no perceptible difference, in the times. He was therefore one of the great minds of the Age, and, really, of any age. Similarly, with his impetus theory of motion he altered the terms of Greek physics right down to the time of, indeed, Galileo, who finally could see in this experiment the evidence of a very different kind of law of nature.

Mediaeval Physics: The Scientific Revolution of John Philoponus

Philosophy in Late Antiquity

History of Science

Copyright (c) 2012, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

"The Grammar of Philoponus's Statement," Note

No one ever says, "It is I," or has ever said it, in ordinary spoken English. The grammar martinets don't realize that the "me" here corresponds in meaning and syntax to moi in French, as in C'est moi. Moi is not one of the standard cases, either nominative or accusative, that the martinets expect "I" and "me" to be in English. Instead, moi is something else, variously called a "tonic," "stressed," or "disjunctive" pronoun; but it may really be part of a topic/comment grammar, as opposed to the subject/predicate grammar that is authoritatively imposed on English because of the precedent of Greek and Latin. But English usage, even good English usage, reflects the French topic rather than the Greek/Latin case.

See discussion of this idiom in the review of The Skin I Live In

Return to Text

The Grammar of Theodora's Statement

A noteworthy event early in the reign of the Emperor Justinian was the Nika Revolt in 532. This began in the Hippodrome and was named after the call for victory -- Νίκα Νίκα, Nika! Nika! -- of the chariot racing factions, the Blues and the Greens. The standard Greek word for victory is actually νίκη, níkē; but νίκα, níkā, is the same word in the Doric dialect that Byzantium may have inherited as a colony of the Doric city of Megara. Or, νίκα may not be a noun at all, but the imperative of the verb νικάω, "to conquer, prevail, vanguish," so that the crowd shouts "conquer," or just "win" to their chariot driver. There was considerable unhappiness about the efficiency with which Justinian's officials had been collecting taxes. The revolt and riots, through looting and fire, destroyed a good part of the city, including the old church of Sancta Sophia.

Justinian was ready to flee, until the Empress Theodora, Θεοδώρα, put some spine into him. Excusing herself, a woman, for reminding the men of courage, she is supposed to have said, "the Purple makes the noblest shroud." Unfortunately, like many other famous quotes in history, this is not quite right. According to the historian Procopius, Theodora said:

ἐμὲ γάρ τις καὶ παλαιὸς ἀρέσκει λόγος, ὡς καλὸν ἐντάφιον ἡ βασιλεία ἐστί.
For me, I approve an ancient saying, that "Royalty makes a fine shroud." [Procopius, History of the Wars, I, Book I, xxiv 37-38, translated by H.B. Dewing, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard U. Press, 1914, 2001, p.232-233, translation modified]

So she says, not "the Purple", but "royalty," βασιλεία (basileía). Curiously, Peter Heather decides that he is going to translate βασιλεία, not as "Royalty," but as "Tyranny" [Rome Resurgent, War and Empire in the Age of Justinian, Oxford, 2018, p.113]. No. "Tyranny" would be τυραννίς (tyrannís). Heather seems to think that Procopius is getting in some kind of dig at Theodora, but he should have checked the text first.

See discussion of a word like καλὸν here. See discussion of the difference between βασιλεία and βασίλεια, "queen," here. The word ἐντάφιον (entáphion), "shroud," literally means "in the tomb." In the neuter singular it is "shroud," but otherwise can mean any grave goods or, in the neuter plural, offerings at the tomb. Note that "epitaph," from ἐπιτάφιος, "upon the tomb," now means an inscription on a tomb but originally was funeral orations or even funeral games "upon the tomb."

As it happens, in the same speech, Theodora did say, earlier:

μὴ γὰρ ἂν γενοίμην τῆς ἁλουργίδος ταύτης χωρίς.
May I never be separated from this purple. [p.230-231]

The traditional misquotation thus deftly combines two actual quotations. This is one of the most famous statements ever about the "Purple" -- i.e. the Tyrian Purple, Porphýra, πορφύρα, of Roman Imperial Robes -- although we also have the kind of stone, Porphyry, that was used in association with the Throne, both for statues of the Emperors (such as the group of the Tetrarchy now in Venice) and for structures like the lying-in pavillion for pregnant Empresses, which itself was simply called the Porphýra. Justinian, thus encouraged, or shamed, had the revolt put down.

Theodora's statement gives us a nice example for an analysis of Greek grammar. Procopius, as it happens, was not writing the spoken Greek of his day, but the elevated literary language that, during the Second Sophistic, revived the forms of Attic Greek. Although Procopius himself wrote in a clear and accessible style, his "Atticism" often comes in for modern criticism or derision as being artificial or affected. However, it was because of Atticism that the Classical texts of Plato and Thucydides remained readable to the Mediaeval, and Modern, audience. Studying Classical Greek today still means learning the language of Plato, Thucydides, and, as it happens, Procopius -- although it has been rare that students of Classical Greek are exposed to the Greek of the period of Procopius or later. The hostility and derision for "Atticism" is perhaps due in equal measures to contempt for "Byzantium," i.e. Mediaeval Romania, and a lack of understanding, with disdain, for the existence and active use of Classical languages. Unlike Classical Greek or Latin in modern usage, Procopius' Attic Greek was still an "active" Classical language, productive of literature, rather than more a "passive" Classical language, which is merely read -- mostly the case with Latin today, as it is with Coptic, the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.

Theodora's statement, μὴ γὰρ ἂν γενοίμην τῆς ἁλουργίδος ταύτης χωρίς, transcribes as mē gàr àn genoímēn tēs halourgídos taútēs khōrís. I use the circūmflex accent here to indicate either the long vowels, eta and omega, the circumflex accent, or both. This is a little confusing; but, even without knowledge of the Greek alphabet, it can be compared to the Greek text. There are always awkward compromises in the effort to accurately transcribe Greek words. The Greek text also contains "breathings," which look like apostrophes, one for simple vowels (the "smooth" breathing), the other for the letter "h" (the "rough" breathing), a sound that does not exist in Ionic or Modern Greek but is written because of its presence in other ancient dialects, such as Attic. The letter "r" at the beginning of words or when doubled takes a rough breathing -- written rh or rrh -- as in Ῥωμανία, Rhōmanía, Romania, the proper name of the Roman Empire.

In trying to understand the grammar of this sentence myself, I was at first stumped by the verb, which here is γενοίμην, genoímēn. I finally realised that this is a form of the verb γίγνομαι, gígnomai, which means "to become." There are a number of irregularities involved in getting to the properly inflected form. In Greek, the citation form of a verb is always in the 1st person singular; so gígnomai actually means "I become." Also, this citation form actually uses a middle/passive ending, which is characteristic of the "deponent" class of verbs, which may have an active sense but don't use active endings. Latin also has deponent verbs. I say "middle/passive" because Greek has three voices, (1) active, "I picked up the Buddha," (2) passive, "I was picked up by the Buddha," and (3) middle, "I picked up myself" -- action by and upon the subject or on its behalf. In Greek, middle and passive forms are usually but not always identical.

There are several verb forms in Greek used for a past tense. I have discussed the semantics and metaphysics of tense and aspect elsewhere. The form of genoímēn is the aorist; but the verb gígnomai has an aorist in a kind of irregular form called a "Second Aorist," which has its own endings. The citation form of the Second Aorist of gígnomai, 1st person singular again, is ἐγενόμην, egenómen, "I became." In this case, however, genoímēn is not a past sense, because it is not in the Indicative mood.

Greek verbs have several moods -- indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative, participle, and infinitive. The Optative expresses a wish, as I have discussed elsewhere. Genoímēn is the aorist optative; and in the Optative, the aorist indicates aspect rather than tense. So genoímēn is not fixed in time, but it does indicate the aspect of a simple action, "I wish to become." This verb, however, is coupled in its sense with the word at the end of the sentence, χωρίς, khōrís, "separately, asunder, apart." So the sense of the verb and its adverb is "I wish to become apart," or "I wish to be separated."

Theodora, however, does not wish to be separated from anything here. We get a negation at the beginning of the sentence, among three words, μὴ γὰρ ἂν, mē gàr àn. Gàr, although it comes second in the sentence, is the conjunction "for," which may be used more in Greek than it is now in English, and characteristically comes second in a sentence. The first word in the sentence, mē is a negative; but it is not the ordinary word for "not," which is οὐ, ou. Mē tends to go with things that are not actual, and so is used with imperatives, optatives, and in conditional sentences. So μὴ γενοίμην χωρίς, mē genoímēn khōrís, means "May I not be separated." The third word at the beginning of the sentence, án, is a particle that is used in conditional sentences. This usually marks the apodosis, or the consequent, of a conditional sentence, as "if" marks the protasis, the antecedent, of the conditional. English uses "if," of course, but does not have the equivalent of án, which is thus untranslatable.

Án might naturally be expected to follow a verb, but it can also follow a negative, as in this case. With optative verbs, we get what are called "future less vivid conditions." In this case however, there is no protasis. As Chase and Phillips say in their A New Introduction to Greek [Harvard, 1941, 1965], "The apodosis of a future less vivid condition may be used independently of its protasis to express a possibility" [p.88]. That is what we have here, although with the negative we could say that it expresses an impossibility. This allows for various translations. "May I not be separated," "I cannot possibly be separated," etc. The sense can be strong enough that the Loeb translator uses "never" -- "May I never be separated..." -- even though there is no word for "never" in the Greek text.

But if Theodora will not be separated, it must be from something. χωρίς, khōrís, as a preposition with a genitive can mean "separate from." So our noun phrase will be in the Genitive case, which is used in Greek instead of using prepositions like "of" and "from" as we find in English -- although English actually still has a genitive (-'s), but it is only used for possession, as in "George's dinner." In the nominative case, which is the citation form, used for the subject of sentences, our noun phrase is ἡ ἁλουργὶς αὕτη, hē halourgìs haútē. This is three words, the article "the," hē, the noun halourgís, ἁλουργίς, which is "the Purple," specifically a purple robe, and the demonstrative "this," haútē. English does not double up an article with a demonstrative, with something like "the Purple this." Greek does not need to do it, but we get both in this case for emphasis. The article and demonstrative both agree in gender and number of with the singular, feminine halourgís.

Finally, we get the noun phrase in the genitive, tēs halourgídos taútēs, "of this Purple," which in the context with the conjunction, the verb, the negative, and khōrís, would give us a translation "For I cannot possibly be separated from this Purple." There is no word here for "I," which would be égō. The verb already tells us the person and number, although the pronoun could be used for emphasis.

To understand μὴ γὰρ ἂν γενοίμην τῆς ἁλουργίδος ταύτης χωρίς, "May I never be separated from this purple," in the Greek alphabet, see the following section, on The Pronunciation of Greek.

What if we wanted Theodora to say what she is commonly reported as saying, that "The Purple is a fine shroud"? We can do that: καλὸν ἐντάφιον ἡ ἁλουργὶς ἐστί. There we go, combining the two actual statements. But what if we think that ἁλουργὶς is too obscure a term? We could say instead, καλὸν ἐντάφιον ἡ πορφύρα ἐστί. Here we actually have ἡ πορφύρα, what is literally "the purple."

Rome and Romania

Copyright (c) 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

Οὐ γὰρ ἐπίδειξιν καλλιγραφίας ἢ φάσεως ἠττικισμένης καὶ τὸ διηρμένον διογκούσης καὶ ὑψηλὸν ποιῆσαι ἐσπούδασα, ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον διὰ κιονῆς καὶ καθωμιλημένης ἀπαγγελίας διδάξαι σοι ἔσπευσα, ἅπερ οἴομαι δεῖν σε μὴ ἀγνοεῖν, καὶ ἃ τὴν ἐκ μακρᾶς ἐμπειρίας σύνεσίν τε καὶ φρόνησιν εὐμαρῶς σοι δύναται προξενεῖν.
For I have not been studious to make a display of fine writing or of an Atticizing style, swollen with the sublime and lofty, but rather have been eager by means of every-day and conversational narrative to teach you those things of which I think you should not be ignorant, and which may without difficulty provide that intelligence and prudence which are the fruit of long experience.
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913-959 AD), De Administrando Imperio, Greek text edited by Gy. Moravcsik, English translation by Romilly J.H. Jenkins [Dumbarton Oaks Texts, 1967, 2008, p.49, color added]

The Grammar of Constantine VII's Statement

At various places at this website I have featured a quotation from the De Administrando Imperio of the Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus:

πάνδεινα κακὰ πέπονθεν ἡ Ῥωμανία ὑπὸ τῶν Ἀράβων μέχρι τοῦ νῦν.
All terrible evils has Romania suffered from the Arabs even until now [Greek text edited by Gy. Moravcsik, Dumbarton Oaks Texts, 1967, 2008, p.94].

This was itself a quote from The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor [cf. The Chronicle of Theophanes, Anno mundi 6095-6305 (A.D. 602-813), University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, p.61 for the year 678 AD]. The statement was in the context of the disposition of the Mardaïtes, Μαρδαῗται. According to Warren Treadgold, these were "Christian freebooters," i.e. something between bandits and guerrillas, who had been surrounded by the Arab conquest on Mt. Amanus between Syria and Cilicia [A History of the Byzantine State and Society, Stanford University Press, 1997, p.327]. Many of the Mardaïtes had then moved to Mt. Lebanon, where they, the Maronites, other Christian refugees, and escaped slaves began plundering the adjacent territories of the Omayyad Caliph Muʿāwiya. All these people were joined by an actual Roman Army in 677. After defeating an Arab fleet off Lebanon, the Army was landed in Lebanon, joining the Mardaïtes and raiding into the Caliphate. It sounds like Muʿāwiya was embarrassed by this activity.

In 685 Justinian II negotiated a settlement, by which the Mardaïtes and the Roman Army would be withdrawn in exchange for an annual tribute (216,000 solidi and some slaves and horses -- a slave and a horse each day). Theophanes did not consider this a good deal: "The Emperor sent messengers who seized 12,000 Mardaites, mutilating the Roman state... After they were transplanted, Romania has suffered all sorts of evils at the hands of the Arabs up until the present day" [Theophanes, op. cit., p.61]. In other words, at a time of continued Roman reversals and Arab conquests, Justinian II voluntarily withdrew the autonomous forces of a successful counterattack against the heart of Omayyad power, in exchange for some nominal tribute that certainly the Omayyads soon ceased to pay.

The grammar of the statment of Constantine/Theophanes is not as complex as that of Theodora, but it is still of interest, especially considering its role in these pages: It is the only example, for instance, of the noun Ῥωμανία, Romania, being used in the nominative case in De Administrando Imperio.

The sentence begins with a noun phrase of two words, πάνδεινα κακὰ, pándeina kaká, "all terrible evils." Both these words are adjectives in the neuter plural, so there is an assumed neuter noun, "things." Greek noun phrases do not need the presence of an actual noun, as does English. In English however, while "bad" is an adjective, "evil" can be used as an adjective or a noun; so we can use "evils" as a noun and obey English grammar without supplying an understood "things." Pandeina is actually a compound, based on δεινός, deinós, "fearful, terrible," which provides the first element in "dinosaur," "terrible lizard," and πᾶς, pâs, "all." In other quotes at this website, we also see παμβασίλεια, pambasíleia, "all queen," of Constantinople, and πάγκαλον, pánkalon, "all beautiful," used by Socrates. "All terrible" is a vivid coinage, although it is variously rendered in the translations. The word for "bad" or "evil," κακός, kakós, is the first element in "cacophony." The word kaka has some other meanings in other languages (cf. Latin caco, cacare or even the Greek verb κακκάω, kakkáō), which might be equally appropriate in the semantic context here.

πάνδεινα κακά is in the neuter plural, but the case is ambiguous. Nominative and accusative forms are identical in the neuter gender (as in Latin). The sentence thus may begin with the subject, or may begin with the object. We don't know yet. But we find out when we come to the verb, πέπονθεν, péponthen, which comes next. This comes from the verb πάσχω, páskho, which means "to suffer." πάσχω has an irregular Second Aorist and also an irregular Second Perfect, which we see here, πέπονθα, pépontha, "I have suffered." Πέπονθεν is the third person singular form of πέπονθα. So this verb does not agree with the number of "all terrible evils," which is in the plural. So the sentence does not begin with the subject, which now will come after the verb.

The Second Aorist of πάσχω is ἔπαθον, épathon, "I suffered." The (aorist) infinitive of this is παθεῖν, patheīn, "to suffer," from which we get the noun πάθος, páthos, pathos, a word that we still use.

ἡ Ῥωμανία, hē Rhōmanía, "Romania," is now, in the nominative, the subject of the sentence. And we already have a complete sentence, "Romania has suffered all terrible evils," or, to match the Greek word order, "All terrible evils has Romania suffered."

The sentence then ends with two phrases. The first is ὑπὸ τῶν Ἀράβων, hupò tōn Arábōn, "by the Arabs." Hupò basically means "under, beneath," but with the genitive (as here, a genitive plural) it has a major use to indicate the agent of a passive verb. The sentence itself is not in the passive, but the verb, "to suffer," has, of course, a passive meaning. If Romania is suffering all terrible evils, who is responsible for this? The Arabs. It is interesting to find "the Arabs" here. This is how we would now refer to the ethnicity of the Omayyad Caliphs. However, in the Middle Ages in both Greek and Arabic (as used, for instance, by Ibn Khaldun), "Arabs" tends to mean, not all Muslims or even all Arabic speakers, but the nomadic Bedouin who were the original Arabs out in the desert. In Greek, for Muslim enemies, we are later more likely to see Σαρακηνοί, Sarakēnoí, "Saracens." I think that much of the vividness of this sentence is due to the use together of "Romania," which is a neglected name, with "the Arabs," which is quite familiar.

The Question of the "Saracens"

Σαρακηνός, sarakēnós, "Saracen," is itself a word of some interest. While it now looks like some sort of perjorative term for Muslims, and even turns up in Swedish or Old Norse, as Serkland, for the lands of ʾIslām, its use dates from at least the 4th century, long before the existence of Islām.

Now it looks (to me) to be derived from Arabic , shirkah, "partnership, confederation" (from , sharika, "to share"). Indeed, , sharīk (pl. , shurakāʾ), "partner, associate, companion, confederate, ally," appears to translate Latin foederatus, "confederate, allied," and is thus a "calque," a borrowing by translation -- the way Herzog, "duke," in German (Old High German herizoho), translated Greek στρατηλάτης, stratēlatēs, "army" (stratos, OHG heri, "army") "leader" (elaunein, OHG ziohan, "to lead"). Foederatus was, of course, applied to allied barbarian tribes, most familiarly to German groups like the Goths or Franks, but it was also applied to allied Arabs, such as the Ghassanids. Σαρακηνοί, Sarakēnoí, thus meant Arab foederati () and later, long after these relationships had disappeared, was applied to Arabs in general. Whether or not "Saracens" came to have a perjorative meaning, its origin was neutral or even positive and, in the course of time, forgotten.

Equally intriguing is the term from this root that is particularly perjorative in Arabic, namely , shirk, which means "polytheism, idolatry." This is one of the worst things possible in Islamic Law, and warrants death. One wonders if it derives from a recollection of pre-Islamic, and pre-Christian, foederati. While it did not apply later to the Ghassanids (as Christians), it did apply to their enemies, the clients of the Persians, the pagan Lakhmids. So ironically, Σαρακηνός in Greek and , ʾahlu sh-shirk, "the people of shirk, polytheists, adolators," in Arabic end up being applied, mutatis mutandis, to people who are religious enemies, using what in origin are the same words. Just as there was no principle for Christians to tolerate Saracens, Muslims were actually prohibited from tolerating polytheists. In ʾIslām, on the other hand, Muslims were supposed to tolerate submissive Jews and Christians, the , ʾahlu l-kitāb, "people of the Book." This has now come to be rejected by Jihadists.

Unfortunately, my entire etymology of "Saracen" here may be falsified by uses of the word, not only before the advent of ʾIslām, but even before the Roman system of foederati developed with Arab tribes. The Σαρακηνοί are listed by some early authors as a tribe themselves, leaving the etymology almost entirely to speculation. Perhaps I will be one of those people whose own theory is just so logical and satisfying that they will ignore contrary evidence. There actually doesn't seem to be a satisfying alternative. But there is an etymology. Why should it look like what it does?

As it happens, my argument may be valid because, according to Anthony Kaldellis, Roman writers were unfamiliar with actual Arab tribes. The names we use, even for the Ghassanids, derive from later Arab sources. Thus, Σαρακηνοί would not refer to a real tribe but, from the Roman point of view, could be collected under the rubric "allies," سُرَكَاء, shurakāʾ.

The last phrase is μέχρι τοῦ νῦν, mékhri toū nūn, "even until now." Mékhri is an adverb, used as a preposition with the genitive, "even so far, even to, as far as." Nūn, "now," is an indeclinable adverb, but it is made a noun by being used with a genitive article, toū, "of the," to go with mékhri as a preposition. So the meaning is clear, although it can be variously translated.

Thus, πάνδεινα κακὰ πέπονθεν ἡ Ῥωμανία ὑπὸ τῶν Ἀράβων μέχρι τοῦ νῦν can be translated in various ways. But the sense of the sentence is pretty clear, and the language, originally that of Theophanes Confessor, repeated by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, is sharp, direct, and vivid. What it says reminds us, on the one hand, of the existence of Romania, which Classicists and Byzantinists seem to cooperate in obscuring, and of the Arab Conquest, at which politically correct opinion now winks, in the project of presenting Muslims as the eternally aggrieved victims of the oppressive West -- the anti-American apologetic for Islamic Terrorism. No, we could easily say that the πάνδεινα κακὰ of the 7th century simply continued on 9/11.

Rome and Romania

The Grammar of Philoponus's Statement

Copyright (c) 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

Dialects of Greek

Οὐ γὰρ ἐπίδειξιν καλλιγραφίας ἢ φάσεως ἠττικισμένης καὶ τὸ διηρμένον διογκούσης καὶ ὑψηλὸν ποιῆσαι ἐσπούδασα, ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον διὰ κιονῆς καὶ καθωμιλημένης ἀπαγγελίας διδάξαι σοι ἔσπευσα, ἅπερ οἴομαι δεῖν σε μὴ ἀγνοεῖν, καὶ ἃ τὴν ἐκ μακρᾶς ἐμπειρίας σύνεσίν τε καὶ φρόνησιν εὐμαρῶς σοι δύναται προξενεῖν.
For I have not been studious to make a display of fine writing or of an Atticizing style, swollen with the sublime and lofty, but rather have been eager by means of every-day and conversational narrative to teach you those things of which I think you should not be ignorant, and which may without difficulty provide that intelligence and prudence which are the fruit of long experience.
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913-959 AD), De Administrando Imperio, Greek text edited by Gy. Moravcsik, English translation by Romilly J.H. Jenkins [Dumbarton Oaks Texts, 1967, 2008, p.49, color added]

Classical Greek was one language, but it consisted of a number of dialects. These are shown on the accompanying map. The principal divisions are between Aeolic, Ionic, and Doric. Doric is mainly in the south, from the Peloponnesus down to Crete and up to Rhodes. Aeolic is in the northeast, and Ionic across the center, from Attica to the area on the mainland of Asia actually called "Ionia," with colonized areas up in the north.

More closely related to Doric is North- western Greek, which stretches from the north side of the Peloponnesus into the mountains north of the Gulf of Corinth. The light blue area shows where we get a mixture of Doric and Northwestern. Very significant areas, Thessaly and Boeotia, see mixture and interpenetration of Aeolic and Northwestern. These are shown in brick red.

The Ionic dialect of Athens, Attic, is distinctive. Attic Greek is the language of the bulk of Golden Age Greek literature, and it is what students study when they begin to study Classical Greek. The word for "day" in Attic is ἡμέρα, hēméra. This contrasts with ἁμέρα, haméra, in Doric and ἠμέρη, ēmérē, in the Ionic of Ionia -- the loss of "H" in Ionic is why the letter "H" came to be used for a vowel (ēta), and the device of "breathings" came to be used to indicate "h," or lack of it, in other dialects. Attic is also different from the rest of Ionic in having "tt" for "ss" -- as in θάλαττα, thálatta, for θάλασσα, thálassa, "sea" (see "The Fagility of Thalassocracy"), or γλῶττα, glôtta, for γλῶσσα, glôssa, "tongue, language."

Recent dialect maps for Greek may now show the Northwestern dialects extending up into Epirus, as we see on the Wikipedia map at right. This is the result of judgments that the Epirots were Greek and spoke a dialect of Greek. This is based on evidence that inscriptions in Epirus were in Greek and also on Greek nationalistic claims that ethnic Greeks always occupied areas, like Eprius, that are now part of modern Greece.

However, on the 19th century ethnographic map below left, we see that Albanians overwhelmingly occupied, not just Albania, but Eprius also, down to the Ambracian Gulf. The presence of Greek rather than Albanian inscriptions is likely due to the fact that Albanian was not a written language until the 13th century and the oldest example is from 1462. Literacy in the whole area, in ancient times, whatever one's ethnicity, meant using Greek. We also see that Vlach, derived from Latin, i.e. modern Romanian, is not attested as a written language until 1521.

Similar confusions and claims involve the ancient Macedonians, where, as in Epirus, we can accept a Hellenized aristocracy -- no one needs to call themselves Φιλέλλην, "Greek loving," as one of the Macedonian Kings does, if they are already Greek. On the Wikipedia dialect map, however, Greek is not shown spoken in Macedonia. On the ethnographic map, we see that the Slavic language "Macedonian," which may even be a dialect of Bulgarian, was spoken down quite close to the city of Thessalonica, with a fair number of Turkish speakers also in the area. Turkish is now gone, and Macedonian has been pushed back to what is now the international border. Greece still worries, rather absurdly, that the Macedonians make claims against Greece -- partially based on the (equally absurd) notion that the Macedonians have something to do with the ancient Macedonians, whose own ethnic affinities are entirely lost -- but were certainly not Slavic. Another aspect of ethnic tensions in the area is that anti-Greek riots (also directed against Armenians and Jews), the "İstanbul Pogrom," September 1955, were sparked in response a bombing of the Turkish consulate in Thessalonica, a building that was also the birthplace of Kemal Atatürk -- even though the bombing was later discovered to have done by a Turk.

No one can dispute that the Albanians are essentially autochthonous. Thus, I suspect that the motivation for classifying the Epriots as Greek is essentially modern Greek nationalism, just as Serbia wants to deny the legitimacy of the Albanian presence in Kosovo. If there are few Albanians in Eprius now (or Vlachs, who are black on the map), it is because they were expelled, principally in the "ethnic cleansing" that followed World War I -- in which, to be sure, Greeks were the principal victims, being expelled from Anatolia, Thrace, and Constantinople, where they had lived since ancient times. But, the Greeks did this too: Red areas on the map are Turkish speakers; and none are left.

Back to our dialect map above, the Greeks believed that the Ionians had long lived where they did but that the Dorians had arrived rather late. Indeed, another Greek dialect, not shown on the map, is "Epic" Greek, the language of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Epic Greek is more like Ionic and Aeolic than the other dialects. Classical Greek culture, including philosophy, began in Ionia, whose name became the word for "Greek" in all the languages to the East, e.g. ʾal-Yūnān, , is "the Greeks" in Modern Arabic. Of the various versions of the Greek alphabet, the one from Ionia (which characteristically writes X for khi rather than ksi) became standard for later forms of Greek.

Even more intriguing is a dialect isolated in the heart of the Peloponnesus, Arcadian. Surrounded by Doric and Northwestern, Arcadian is nevertheless similar to Cypriot, the dialect of Greek spoken in Cyprus. This suggests that Arcadian was the original language of the south of Greece, overrun and isolated by the Doric invasion, with the Cypriots either as a now isolated outlier or as actual refugees from the West. On Cyprus the Greeks also used a unique syllabary to write their language. This turns out have similarities to the Linear A and Linear B scripts that were used to write the language of Minoan Crete and then Mycenaean Greek, a dialect of Greek that itself appears to be the closest to Arcadian and Cypriot. The Cypriots apparently have therefore preserved, uniquely, the writing system of their Mycenaean ancestors. Thus, the Greek word for "king," βασιλεύς, would be written in Cypriot, with extra vowels allowed to write all the consonants of the Greek word (i.e. "se" for "s") and without distinguishing between voiced and unvoiced letters (such as using "p" for "b"). The Japanese kana syllabaries have some similarities to this. Also not distinguishing between voiced and unvoiced, kana supplies diacritics to mark the difference, for instance between katakana and , where the form of the character is not unlike the Cypriot "pa." Cypriot and kana thus both economized on the number of syllable characters needed. Also noteworthy in Cypriot is the presence of a nearly complete set of syllables for the consonant "w," which was later lost from Attic, Ionic, and most other dialects of Greek, although its alphabetic form is preserved in the "F" of the Latin Alphabet.

Arcadian and Cypriot thus date back to the days of the twilight of the Minoan civilization. The affinities of the Minoan language itself, written in the Linear A script, have not been identified with any certainty, although I now see a recent assertion that it was Luvian, an Indo-European language from an early stratum of settlement in Anatolia [cf. David Abulafia, The Great Sea, A Human History of the Mediterranean, Oxford, 2011, p.27]. I would have expected that it would be a non-Indo-European language, perhaps with affinities to Etruscan or Basque. As Crete declined, evidently after the eruption of the great volcano on the island of Thera (c.1500 BC), the Greeks gradually took over; but a smooth transition from Mycenaean Greece to later times was disrupted by the Doric invasion. Writing was lost (outside of Cyprus) and the Greek Dark Age followed until the Phoenician alphabet was borrowed around 800 BC.

In the Hellenistic Age, all the dialects of Greek began to be replaced by the Κοινή, koinḗ or "common" dialect, which was principally Ionic with some Attic touches. This is the language of the New Testament. In later centuries, during the Second Sophistic, writers, to demonstrate their erudition, would use forms that had only existed in Attic, "Atticisms" -- sometimes even false Atticisms. Many regard this as an affectation, but the Second Sophistic established Attic Greek as the most prestigious language for education and literature, right down to the present; and it meant that Classical literature not only was easily read during the Middle Ages, but that the literature was continued and cultivated for many centuries. Classicists either despise this or are simply ignorant of it.

Students of Greek are often not exposed to Mediaeval Greek literature, not even remarkable works like those of Anna Comnena, even though they could read them easily. Thus, although Classicists perpetuate the heritage of the Second Sophistic, which is why students are taught the Attic dialect in the first place, they also contribute to the eclipse of Mediaeval Romania in both popular and learned discourse. They may end up even unaware of Mediaeval Greek literature, reading Herodotus and Thucydides but insensible that the most prolific Greek historian was Procopius, who lived in the Age of Justinian. At the same time, scholars who sneer at Mediaeval Greek and its Atticism also manage airs of superiority when it comes to the Κοινή Greek of the New Testament -- although it is nothing like the contempt that Edward Gibbon shows for the spoken Greek of the Middle Ages. Their attitudes are really self-contradictory. A similar phenomenon occurs in regard to the Sanskrit used by Buddhism, which diverges from the Classical language.

In the epigraph to this essay, we find the scholar Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus announcing that his great work, De Administrando Imperio, will not be in Attic Greek, but in more like the plain (Κοινή) Greek of his time. The student of the Classics may not detect that much difference, apart from some of the vocabulary. It is items of his vocabulary that are of interest in these pages. Thus his term for "fine writing," καλλιγραφία, is a compound of "beauty," κάλλος, and "writing," γραφή. See the discussion of terms for beauty. His term for "sublime," ὑψηλός, leads us back to the general discussion of the sublime, τὸ ὕψος. Finally, Constantine speaks of the prudence, φρόνησις, that he wishes his son (who will be the Emperor Romanus II) to acquire. For this, see the essay here on prudence and wisdom.

Although the Κοινή was spoken all around the Eastern Mediterranean world for centuries, which is why the New Testament is in it, Modern Greek is the only modern language descended from Classical Greek. Most of the phonetic changes that distinguish Modern Greek from Ancient had already happened in the Middle Ages.

The Grammar of Theodora's Statement

The Grammar of Constantine VII's Statement

The Pronunciation of Greek

Greek, Sanskrit, and Closely Related Languages

Tense and Aspect in Greek

Preston and Child quote Aeschylus

What we tend to get in practice, then, is an artificial "academic" pronunciation of Classical Greek -- not unlike Erasmus himself, who did not use his own "Erasmian" pronunciation. The pronunciation of phi, khi, and theta is borrowed from Modern Greek, and the accents are used to indicate stress, as in Modern Greek also. Modern European languages rarely use all three of the fricatives, but English speakers with slight familiarity with German (or the other way around) can handle them.

Copyright (c) 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

The Pronunciation of Greek

The pronunciation of Classical Greek poses some challenges for the modern student and scholar. This difficulty does not occur to Modern Greeks, who simply pronounce the ancient language with the values of the modern one. This is reasonable enough, since Classical words borrowed into the modern language, or already present, are going to be pronounced in the modern way. This is the case in all modern languages that use borrowed Greek words. Also, it is their language and their alphabet, so they see no point in learning to pronounce the alphabet and the Classical language any differently. What often goes along with this, however, is something more problematic: the claim that the ancient language actually was pronounced in the same way as the modern.

A Greek acquaintance of mine once said, "We should know." To that the response might be, "How? Are you 2000 years old?" Or, if the argument is to be that the ancient pronunciation obviously was faithfully passed down as it had always been, one might respond, "Have you never played 'telephone'?" On the other hand, as with other proprietary claims of control over what is said about national or ethnic groups, concerning their culture, language, religion, history, etc., the Greek assertion may claim legitimacy on the simple and perhaps self-evident principle that non-Greeks have no moral right to contradict it. This would be one of the many unfortunate and dangerous manifestations of contemporary political correctness, which has corrupted various areas of scholarship and even science [note].

In fact, as the grammar and vocabulary of Modern Greek have manifestly changed from Classical Greek, there are many ways in which the pronuniciation clearly has changed also -- otherwise one might reasonably wonder why three vowels (ēta, iota, & ypsilon) and three diphthongs ("ei," "oi," & "ui") are pronounced exactly the same (i.e. identical to iota), despite being written differently.

For example, the classic illustration of Greek Ablaut is the verb leípō, "to leave," whose relevant principle parts are: λείπω, ἔλιπον, λέλοιπα -- leípō, élipon, léloipa. Here the Ablaut grades in the root involve an alternation of ει in the present, ι in the aorist, and οι in the perfect, an alternation that appears to reflect the basic temporal aspect semantics of the verb system (imperfect, aorist, perfect -- respectively) and which survives in the cognate "strong verbs" of Germanic languages, like "sing, sang, sung" in English (with "song" for the noun). We must notice, however, that with Modern Greek pronunciation, ει, ι, and οι are all now pronounced the same and the variation in the roots is entirely lost.

If ει and οι were always pronounced like ι, then the whole system of Ablaut was meaningless and useless, and it is inexplicable how it could ever have arisen in the first place -- especially when we reflect that this happened prior to literacy, when it cannot just have been some sort of game played with the written language. I would say that an understanding of Classical Greek pronunciation that does not distinguish the three Ablaut grades must be wrong.

A similar erasure of differences we see in the elimination from Modern Greek orthography of all the breathings and accents, except the one acute accent. This tacitly conceded that the rough breathing, an "h" (or an aspirated "r"), and the meaning of the grave and circumflex accents no longer exist in Modern Greek. Thus, Ῥωμαῖος, Rhōmaîos, "Roman," is now written Ρωμαίος, Rōmaíos.

This was one of the reforms that began with the adoption of Demotic, i.e. spoken Modern Greek, as the official language of Greece. That set off riots in 1976, perhaps because it was evidence that the pronunciation of Greek had indeed changed over the centuries. The breathings and multiple accents, however, were not eliminated until 1982, resulting in a "monotonic" writing, with only one accent. My handsome 201 Modern Greek Verbs, of 1980 [Vassilios Christides, Barron's Educational Series], still has all the breathings and accents.

Sanskrit experienced something like what happened to Greek Ablaut. In all Indo-Iranian languages, Proto-Indo-European "e" and "o" both became "a." Thus, the Ablaut grades "ei" and "oi" both became "ai," which reduced to . Unlike Modern Greek, however, this would never be confused with .

The strangeness of Greek pronunciation in comparison to its spelling began to strike Renaissance Humanists as peculiar as early as 1486, when Antonio of Lebrixa began a critique of the received pronunciation. The great Venetian printer of Greek books, Aldus Manutius, made an observation that now seems silly, but struck contemporaries as revealing. We all know (of course) that sheep say "baa baa." Manutius saw that the Greeks wrote bē bē but that this had come to be pronounced vī vī. He didn't think that could be right.

As it happens, of course, the rendering of the vocalizations of animals is wildly different in different languages, so the observation of Manutius doesn't really prove anything about Classical Greek. Nevertheless, it was part of a larger critical process, which culminated in the 16th century and is conspicuously associated with a work of Erasmus in 1528, De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione, "Concerning the correct pronunciation of Latin and Greek" ["The history of the pronunciation of Greek," The Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek, James Morwood, Oxford U. Press, 2001, p.7]. The corrected pronunciation thus became the "Erasmian" pronunciation.

Change happens to all languages. The student of Modern English will be puzzled by the spelling of words like "light" and "daughter," until informed that "gh" was pronounced in Middle English and then became silent. Most speakers of Modern English are not even going to know what the value of "gh" was (it was like the "ch" in German). Confronted with Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "leoht" for "light" and "dohtor" for "daughter," the modern speaker is not going to know where to begin. A little knowledge of the history of English, however, and the words Licht and Tochter in German, or even دُخْتَر, doḫtær, in Persian, will not seem so strange.

Similarly, with what is actually known about the pronunciation of Classical Greek, the modern student or scholar will be brought up short by several features of the language [cf. The Pronunciation and Reading of Ancient Greek: A Practical Guide, by Stephen G. Daitz, Jeffrey Norton Publishers, 1981, 1984, Audio Forum, 2003; or "Ancient Greek Pronunciation," Greek Grammar, by Herbert Weir Smyth, revised by Gordon M. Messing, Harvard University Press, 1966, pp.12-14].

First among these features may be the difference beween the letters pi and phi, kappa and khi, and tau and theta. While the phonetic difference in Modern Greek, and in what we tend to see in borrowings into English, is between stops and fricatives (i.e. the vocal tract does not close completely in Modern phi, khi, and theta), the Classical contrast is between aspirated and unaspirated stops. This means that phi and pi are pronounced alike, except that breath (aspiration) accompanies phi and does not accompany pi. This is why phi was written "ph" in Latin, and not "f."

Major modern European languages -- particularly the group including English, French, and German, which form a kind of Sprachbund, which means they share some key features that do not owe to their origin but are shared among them -- do not make a phonemic contrast between aspirated and unaspirated stops -- i.e. the sounds do not need to be written with different letters. These sounds, however, can occur as allophones, or different pronunciations of the same letter in different environments. Thus, pi is the "p" in "spot," phi is the "p" in "pot," kappa is the "k" in "skit," khi is the "k" in "kit," tau is the "t" in "stop," and theta is the "t" in "top." If you hold your hand in front of your mouth, you will not detect your breath with "spot," "skit," and "stop," unlike the other words. This is sometimes explained with examples such as that "th" (Greek θ, Sanskrit थ) is like the "t" as pronounced in the expression "hothouse"; but that is inappropriate and deceptive: the "h" is in a different syllable, and we know the difference.

What is the modern student to do? What language would help learn a phonemic contrast between aspirates and unaspirates? Well, there are many. The accessible modern languages in which this contrast is significant would be Hindi-Urdu and Chinese. It may seem like a lot to study such languages just to learn how to pronounce Greek, but one actually would not need to study them in very great depth just to get the hang of the pronunciation.

The pronunciation of Hindi and Urdu is the most significant, since they inherit their aspirate/unaspirate contrast from Sanskrit, which is closely related to Greek and possesses many of its features. Studying Sanskrit itself, however, will not help the student very much with pronunciation, since those best able to pronounce it properly are those who already know how to pronounce Hindi, Urdu, or related languages (with a couple of modifications).

As it happens, the Coptic language, the Mediaeval and Modern descendant of Ancient Egyptian, also contrasted unaspirated with aspirated stops. When Egyptian Christians began to write Coptic in the Greek alphabet, since Greek had the appropriate letters, Coptic used them. But we also get interesting variations. Coptic preserved a letter for "h" from earlier Egyptian writing, since Greek did not have a separate letter for that sound -- the "H" that ended up in Latin, although originally used in Greek for that consonant, later was used to write the vowel ēta in the Ionic alphabet that eventually became universal. Thus, we get alternative writings in Coptic, where phi may be used, or a scribe may have written Greek pi followed by the Coptic "h" -- ⲡ_Ϩ -- just as phi is written in Latin. This may indicate the phi was already becoming a fricative rather than an aspirate in that period, or the scribes may have just played with writings that they knew were equivalent.

Less ambiguous than the evidence of Coptic is that from Armenian. The Eastern dialect of Armenian retains the distinctions that existed in Classical Armenian, and these correspond to what we see in the stops of Classical Greek, i.e. phonemic differences between voiced, unaspirated, and aspirated -- while in Western Armenian the voiced series has become aspirated, and the unvoiced/unaspirated series has become voiced. I knew a woman in Beirut whose surname was "Aprahamian," but that was just the Western pronunciation of Eastern "Abrahamian." The phonetic values of the Armenian alphabet thus provide evidence for the pronunciation of Greek itself in the age of St. Mesrop, who created the alphabet in the 5th century.

The Armenian alphabet roughly maintains Greek alphabetical order, and so even where the letters look very different, they can be confidently matched with their Greek counterparts and originals. Where in Modern Greek all the voiced and aspirated stops have become fricatives, the Armenian alphabet retains their character as stops, even in the sound changes that affect Western Armenian. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, the Greek phi, which by then had become an f, was borrowed as such and placed at the end of the Armenian alphabet, ֆ, probably just to transcribe contemporary Greek words.

A similar addition was made to the Cyrillic alphabet, of the Greek letter theta, although it was then actually pronounced f itself -- i.e. we get "Fyodor," Фёдор, for "Theodore" -- with an older spelling as Ѳёдор that preserves the theta. The Armenian "f," Ֆ, is heavily modified in form, since the Greek phi is already obviously used as the aspirated stop. Since Cyrillic obviously uses the phi for f, we may opine that the pronunciation of the Greek letter had changed in the days between St. Mesrop (5th century) and St. Cyril (9th century).

Another striking characteristic of Classical Greek phonology is its tone accent. This means that every word, except for some pronouns, particles, etc. -- "proclitics" and "enclitics" depend on the accent of the following or preceding words, respectively -- has a characteristic change in tone on one of its syllables. The accents that are familiar from many modern European languages, and are used for various purposes in them (stress in Spanish and Italian; vowel quality in French), were originally created in the Hellenistic Age to write Greek tones to make learning the language easier for foreigners. The "ácute" accent is thus a rising tone; the "gràve," a falling tone; and the "circûmflex," rising and falling (only used on long vowels). A word that ends with a grave accent is called a "barytone" ("heavy tone"), a word that is still used in music.

So where does one go to get the hang of this business? Well, there is only one simple choice: Chinese. Chinese has a tone on every syllable, except that in multisyllabic words some tones may be dropped. As it happens, however, there is a more ambitious alternative. Lithuanian is the last Indo-European language that has retained a tone accent. Your local Community College, however, is not likely to offer Lithuanian. Sanskrit retains evidence of its original use of tone, but these have disappeared from the modern Indian languages.

This is why I began here by saying that Classical Greek poses some challenges for the modern student and scholar. Few people taking Classical language and literature classes are going to want to supplement their studies with courses in Chinese, Hindi, or Lithuanian -- although with Chinese you get a two-fer, both unaspirated stops and tones. Greek is difficult enough without added responsibilities for other difficult languages. Such a curriculum, however, might actually be expected of someone in Linguistics.

It is then helpful, however, to ignore other Modern Greek values. Thus, beta, gamma, and delta, which become voiced fricatives in Modern Greek (or even the semivowel "y" before e's and i's for gamma -- which we see in a Modern Greek form of the name "John" -- Γιάννης, as opposed to Biblical Ἰωάννης), are retained as voiced stops, "b," "g," and "d." This matches up with familiar borrowings through Latin. Thus, we read biblíon, for "book," βιβλίον, rather than Modern Greek vivlío.

The "academic" pronunciation of Classical Greek can be inspected on pages 1 and 2 of A New Introduction to Greek, by Alston Hurd Chase and Henry Phillips, Jr. [Harvard University Press, 1941, 1961]. This is "Chase and Phillips," the book that was used in my first Greek class in 1967, and it remains a classic of the type. The recommended pronunciation is as I describe. However, we are not cautioned about the artificiality of this, that it corrsponds to the actual pronunication of Greek in no period of its history. Indeed, Chase and Phillips tell us about the letter χ, that "chi, pronounced like the ch in German machen, or, less correctly, like the ch in chorus." Unfortunately, the "ch in chorus" is more, not less, like the Classical pronunciation. So we wonder what Chase and Phillips actually knew about the history of Greek pronunciation.

In that respect, the Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek, by James Morwood [Oxford, 2001], is much superior in its discussion of pronunciation [pp.1-8], but then it contains different annoyances, such as the relegation of any mention of the dual number to an appendix [pp.232-233]. The systematic paradigms in Chase and Phillips [pp.158-186] are clear, beautiful, and convenient as those in the Oxford Grammar are not.

Finally, we might note that the "academic" pronunciation, for all its artificially, really contains only one major concession to modern habits, in comparison to Modern Greek, which is the treatment of the distinction between aspirated and unaspirated stops. Getting this right would be a major challenge for anyone only speaking modern European languages, and even the Oxford Grammar doesn't quite get it right, saying that the aspirates are "emphatically pronounced." No, not unless the "p" in "pot" is "emphatically pronounced." It isn't. But there is a tradition, both in Classics and with Sanskrit, of explaining the aspirated "k" (Greek χ, Sanskrit ख), for instance, as like the combination in the word "rock-hard." That is deceptive, as we have seen, since the "k," which actually is aspirated in "rock," is in a different syllable from the following "h." This is not helpful. Indeed, in the 1955 Bill Haley & His Comets song, "Rock Around the Clock," "rock" ends with an aspirated "k," but "around" is neither written nor prounced with an "h."

The Greek letters gamma, γ, theta, θ, and khi, χ, are actually used in modern phonetic pronunciation alphabets (such as the IPA, the "International Pronunciation Alphabet") to represent their sounds as found in Modern Greek (as seen in the accompanying diagram of the Greek alphabets). This is because modern languages written or transcribed in the Latin alphabet must use digraphs to represent these sounds -- gh, th, and kh, respectively. A universal phonetic alphabet does not want the possibile confusion that such digraphs can produce (e.g. confusing fricatives with aspirates, or gh with the unvoiced fricative of Middle English), but one letter will be preferred. Since Modern Greek has all those sounds, the letters of the Greek alphabet get used [cf. Phonetic Symbol Guide, Geoffrey K. Pullum and William A. Ladusaw, University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp.62,151,167].

The vowels pose other challenges. First of all, "long" vowels in Classical Greek are literally longer, in quantity, than "short" vowels. They take longer to say. "Long" and "short" vowels in English mean differences in quality, not in quantity. Academic Greek will tend to ignore this characteristic. Many languages, however, can be studied for one to become accustomed to the difference, including Hindi, Arabic, and Japanese.

We also in effect have "long," "geminated," or simply doubled consonants. In Latin we might note the difference between annus and anus. Annus is "year," and anus is, well, "anus." You might want to be careful in distinguishing those. With long vowels, komon in Japanese (顧問) is "advisor," while kōmon (肛門) is, well, also "anus" (among other things, depending on the characters). Graduate students take note: Your advisor may be an asshole, but you don't want to accidentally call him/her that.

There apparently were also quality differences among Greek vowels, but it is not always what one expects. Thus, it is agreed by scholars that the quality of the epsilon, the short Greek "e," was like the English "ay" in "day," while the quality of ēta, the long "e," was like the English "e" in "pet." This is the opposite of what one expects from modern languages, like Italian, let alone from the short English "e." It is very hard to get used to this, and I must say that I've always given epsilon and ēta the Italian values.

Another minor challenge is the ypsilon. While starting as a regular "u" in early Greek and in some dialects, this had become a front vowel in Attic Greek and elsewhere, like the French "u" or the German "ü" -- the "u" with an umlaut. This is why Latin simply borrowed the letter "y" from Greek rather than writing Greek ypsilons as u's. The modern student will not need to go further than French or German to get this right, but monolingual speakers of English will find it peculiar and unnatural. In Modern Greek, of course, ypsilon is pronounced like iota.

Did Greek then not have the sound "u"? Well, it did, but it was written as the digraph ου, ou, with omicron and ypsilon. This device has an interesting future. Since the French "u" has also become ü, a proper u in French gets written "ou" ("rouge," "Bourbon"). Perhaps from French influence, a long "u" in both Dutch and English came to be written "ou" also. But then English had the "great English vowel shift," and English "ou" came to be pronounced "aw." So words like "pound," which were originally pūnd in Middle English (Pfund in German), came to be pronounced pawnd in Modern English. In French, "ou" is also used to write the semi-vowel "w," as in "oui" (wī). With exquisite parallelism, Coptic uses "ou" both as a vowel and a semi-vowel in exactly the same way as French -- with, of course, the same Greek antecedent.

A curious consequence of Greek orthography is that in both Armenian and Old Church Slavonic (like Coptic), neither of which had the history of phonetic change found in Greek or French, the long "u" is written as a digraph, ու (ow) and ѹ respectively. The latter was reduced to у in subsequent Cyrillic alphabets. Meanwhile, however, there was a unique ligature used both in Greek and Cyrillic: ȣ (). We see this in old Cyrillic versions of the name of România, or its language, and it can still be seen in some archaic texts or inscriptions of Greek, which modern students of Greek may find bewildering.

The use of the umlaut in German has a connection back to Greek. Thus, the Greek diphthongs αι, ai and οι, oi (pronounced like epsilon and iota, respectively, in Modern Greek), were transcribed as "ae" and "oe" into Latin, which had the same pronunciation. In English, there are actually ligatures that exist for these combinations, mainly used in archaic spelling. Thus one may see the words "æon" ("aeon"), "phænomenon" ("phaenomenon"), "œconomy" ("oeconomy"), and "diarrhœa" ("diarrhoea"). Both diphthongs now tend to be rendered, and pronounced, as just "e" in recent English, e.g. "eon," "phenomenon," "economy," and "diarrhea."

In German, however, we have the nice touch that Latin "ae" and "oe" are usually rendered "ä" and "ö," with the umlauts -- in Äon, Phänomen, Ökonomie, and Diarrhöe. This was not always done, which is why we see the name of the great German writer as "Goethe," when now this might rather be written "Göte." The name of the mathematician Kurt Gödel is also sometimes seen as "Goedel." While the German "ä" is simply pronounced like the English "ay" in "day," "ö" is a fronted "o" which is also found in French but is very awkward for English speakers. In a name like "Gödel," it usually comes out like an er. I gave up trying to pronounce it the right way in conversations with philosophers because they didn't recognize who I was talking about. "Oh, you mean Gerdel!"

As it happens, on October 14, 2018, on the Mark Levin show, "Life, Liberty & Levin," distinguished economist George Gilder mentioned Kurt Gödel and pronounced his name correctly! I don't think I had ever seen this happen on television, or in a philosophy department, before -- except with the correct pronunciation by my colleague Harold Ravitch at Los Angeles Valley College. Of course, modern education, for all its babel about "diversity" and "multiculturalism," isn't very interested in the actual languages of other cultures, which goes along with the decline of language teaching in current schools. This can occasion complaint from anyone genuinely interested in languages, but that falls well below the radar of present political obsessions.

Another Greek diphthong has a noteworthy history. If we follow the glide from the epsilon to the iota in the ει, ei, combination, we get something like the "ay" in English "day," and for the same reason -- it will sound much like η, ēta. Indeed, this seems to have been the Classical Attic pronunciation; and, later on, we often find ēta before vowels instead of ει.

However, from a very early date "ei" is always transcribed into Latin as "i," which is the Modern Greek pronunciation. We see this in some conspicuous names. Eirēnē, Εἰρήνη, is "peace" in Greek, and becomes a common woman's name, including some significant Roman Empresses. In Latin, however, we always see the name as "Irene."

Similarly, several Persian Kings were called Dareîos, Δαρεῖος, in Greek, more familiar from Latin as "Darius." The philosopher Hēpákleitos, Ἡράκλειτος, is "Heraclitus" in Latin. We also see this with the Roman Emperor Heraclius, who was Hērákleios, Ἡράκλειος, in Greek. As Latin assimilates the diphthong to "i," we get the opposite when St. Wulfila used "ei" specifically to write a long "i" in his alphabet for Gothic.

The Attic pronunciation of ει was later sometimes preserved before vowels. Thus, we find the name of the city of Alexandria, Ἀλεξάνδρεια, rendered, not as we use it now, with an "i," but as Latin Alexandrea. This alternative gradually died out.

These cases demonstate two points. (1) Latin transcriptions represent Latin pronunciation and only do something different (as with "ph" or the borrowing of "y" and "z") when there is no Latin equivalent to the Greek sound. And (2) since Latin does this, we have evidence both for the change in the pronunciation of "ei" (if it was originally the glide -- or the root in λείπω and ἔλιπον might always have been pronounced the same) and for the absence of change in the ancient pronunciation of other vowels and consonsants. The modern pronunciation of Greek begins to emerge in the Middle Ages -- where, for instance, we see beta used in the Cyrillic alphabet to write "v" in the 9th century. An additional letter is invented to write "b."

For our "academic" pronunciation of Greek, ει can be challenging. It turns out that at different periods and places, it seems to have been pronounced differently sometimes even in the same words, and its general occurrence as an actual diphthong may have died out quite early. These complications make no sense to observe when Classical Greek isn't a spoken language anyway. And if we are going to speak it to Modern Greeks, then common sense and good manners dictate using the modern pronunciation.

The temptation for many scholars is to go ahead and render ει generally as ι, in part because that was already the pronuncation during the Roman period. However, this prevents us from distinguishing the Ablaut between λείπω and ἔλιπον. I think our principle ought to be to maintain a pronunciation that enables us to keep such distinctions, since the whole purpose of the artificial "academic" pronunciation is to make distinctions that highlight features in the ancient language. And pronouncing η for ει enables us to do that with minimal violence.

At right we see a table of alphabets [cf. Greek Inscriptions, Reading the Past, by B.F. Cook, University of California Press/British Museum, 1987, pp.8-11]. The Greek alphabet, of course, was borrowed from the Phoenician, versions of which may still be seen in Hebrew and Arabic (this is not the standard Arabic alphabetical order but is remembered when the letters are used as numerals). The great innovation was for Greek to take the signs for several consonsants that did not exist in Greek and to use them for vowels.

An interesting case is the Phoenician "w," which was initially preserved in Greek to write the same sound. Before the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet, we see the sound in Linear B tables in wánax, "lord," which was used for gods and rulers -- as ánax, ἄναξ, is still a title for Homeric heroes in the Epics and later literature, when the "w" has been lost (or perhaps not). Also, "w" continued in some Greek dialects, after being lost early in Ionic and Aeolic. Thus, there are still Classical inscriptions showing aiweí for aeí, "always," kalwós for kalós, "beautiful," klawís, "key" (Latin clavis), etc. [Greek Grammar, by Herbert Weir Smyth, 1915, reprinted, Benediction Classics, 2010, p.9]. The most significant root with "w" might have been wid, which has many Indo-European cognates and figures in the verb eīdon, "I saw," and the noun idéa, a word we still use.

The vowel to which the semi-vowel "w" would be the most closely related, "u," was added as an extra letter, ypsilon, and the end of the alphabet. However, "w" then dropped out of Greek pronunciation. The letter, called "digmma," was preserved as a number but otherwise disappeared from Greek usage. One version of the Greek alphabet, meanwhile, had been adopted by the Etruscans, who pronounced the letter v or f. It ended up used as "f" in Latin, as we still use it. The Etruscans also pronounced gamma as k, which became the Latin pronunciation of "c." Since Latin actually did have a g, they modified the "c" to represent that sound also. The Phoenician "q" was used early by Greek as an equivalent for "k," and this curious custom, forgotten in Greece, was perpetuated by Latin, where it is always used when followed by a "u."

Since it sounded to the Greeks like Phoenician had three different letters identical to s, they didn't know quite what to do with all of them. The first "s" in the alphabet, the proper "s" in Hebrew () and Arabic (), was used by the largely eastern or "blue" Greek alphabets to write "ks." The "red" alphabets didn't use it. The last "s," which is sh in Arabic () and as an alternative in Hebrew (the letter writes both sin/śin, , and shin/šin, ), was adopted as the "s," sigma, by some red alphabets and some blue, but became standard because of its use in Ionia.

The second "s" in the Phoenician alphabet (Hebrew ; Arabic -- an "emphatic" sound, ṣād in Arabic, whose ancient pronunciation is disputed; but it is "ts" in Modern Hebrew), called san or sampi by the Greeks, was used by some red and some blue alphabets but dropped out of usage and was forgotten, except as a numeral (where it was put at the end of the alphabet).

The key distinction between the red and blue alphabets, however, is the use of the letter χ, khi, which was added to the Phoenician alphabet. This is the aspirated stop in the blue alphabets but is the letter used for "ks" in the red alphabets. The red alphabets passed this "ks" along to Etruscan and Latin, which is why we write "X" now for the "ks" sound. When the alphabet of Ionia (or Miletus) was adopted at Athens in 403/402 (the year of the Archon Eukleides), this was the beginning of the end for the variety of local Greek alphabets.

While a common and universal dialect of Greek developed in the Hellenistic Age, the Κοινή, Koinḗ ("common," as we might expect), by the time of the Roman Second Sophistic writers were beginning to revive the forms of Attic Greek, which of course was the language of most of the literature from the Golden Age of Greece.

This form of "Atticism" is usually regarded, by the bien pensants, as a decadent affectation -- by scholars who, of course, have first of all studied Attic themselves when they began to learn Greek and then, if they are not New Testament scholars, laugh at the corrupt Koinḗ of that text.

The desire to preserve the earlier Classical language continued through the Middle Ages, as it continues to draw a strange sort of sneering or hauty disapproval from scholars who, treasuring their own pure knowledge (which, of course, they only possess because of the work of the "Byzantine" scholars), seem to think that Mediaeval writers should have accepted their own miserable decadence and worthlessness and just given themselves over to the vulgar contemporary spoken language, which Gibbon called "gross and barbarous" -- i.e. the language that was already much like Modern Greek. Fortunately, this is not what Procopius or Anna Comnena thought they should do.

As spoken Greek continued to change under the rule of the Ottomans, in 1796 Nikephoros Theotokis began his own project of reviving Classical forms and "purifying" the spoken language. This is an urge that has gripped grammarians of many modern languages, including French, German, Hungarian, and Turkish.

The rather artificial language that he created became the Καθαρεύουσα, Katharévousa, which was actually the official language of Greece until 1976. Katharévousa came to be discredited in part because of its vigorous promotion by the military dictators who ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. Nevertheless, when the new Republic dropped official Katharevousa, this resulted in demonstrations, if not riots -- a reaction that now looks positively sensible compared to the riots of parasitic public employees and anarchists in recent Greek history. On the other hand, when breathings and unnecessary accents were dropped in 1982, school children were jubilant.

Now the spoken language, the Demotic (Δημοτική, Dēmotiké, Dīmotikí), is official, but it has nevertheless been influenced by the Katharevousa and continues, as we might imagine, under the influence of desires to eliminate foreign (especially Turkish) words. We have also seen the Demotic urge creep back towards ahistorical alterations of literary Mediaeval Greek, which continued the Attic dialect of Greek. Nevertheless, since Greek schools continue to teach Classical Greek for nationalistic reasons, it is not surprising if Attic forms continue to influence the Modern language -- all with Modern pronunciation, of course.

The Grammar of Philoponus's Statement

The Grammar of Theodora's Statement

The Grammar of Constantine VII's Statement

Dialects of Greek

Greek, Sanskrit, and Closely Related Languages

Tense and Aspect in Greek

Preston and Child quote Aeschylus

Ethnic Nationalist Ideologies

The Pronunciation of Greek, Note

There is also a history behind the attitude. The hostility of the Latin West for Mediaeval Romania is often vividly remembered. Indeed, the unfamiliarity of the expression "Mediaeval Romania" reflects that, since modern Classicists and even Byzantinists avoid and even suppress the name of the Mediaeval Roman Empire, i.e. Romania, Ῥωμανία, because of the ideology of denying that the "Byzantine" Empire was in fact still the Roman Empire.

Ironically, the Popes and German Emperors who initiated this ideology and its hostility were still calling the Empire, "Romania," even as they denied that the Ῥωμαῖοι were properly Romans. With the Renaissance, the word "Byzantine" was introduced as a way of avoiding all terminology that sounded Roman. With further irony, Modern Greeks themselves often seem to have forgotten "Romania," and now use "Byzantine" like the Westerners. Their own ideology is sometimes to deny the Romanity of the Mediaeval Romans in favor of Greek identity. This tendency can already be seen with some writers, like Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Λαόνικος Χαλκοκονδύλης (c.1430-c.1470), in the last days of Romania -- but many Greeks were still calling themselves Ῥωμαῖοι in the 20th century.

All that is before we even get to recollection of the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Modern Americans, who benefit from the ignorance promoted by "public education," usually will have no sense that the betrayal and destruction of the Fourth Crusade might still be a vivid memory for others, like Modern Greeks. But where the modern bien pensants like to flagellate themselves over what the Crusades did to the poor, innocent, peaceful Muslims, the Fourth Crusade is such as ought evoke a proper guilt among all Christians, even the ones aware that the Crusades were originally provoked by the Turkish invasion and conquest of Christian lands in 1071.

The upshot of this is the reasonable result that Modern Greeks have some grounds to resent being told things about their language and history by people whose ancestors destroyed much of the civilization of Constantinople. This doesn't excuse irrational claims about Greek pronunciation, but the background of it all makes the feelings understandable. However, there is also the odd circumstance that Greece seems to be the most anti-American Christian country in the world. More than one factor may contribute to that, but considering that the United States has few direct dealings with Greece, it would strike many as puzzling. Since Greece is followed in hostility by Serbia, which was bombed by Bill Clinton, that may provide a clue.

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Tyrants and Kings of Syracuse

Cleander Tyrant,
Gela, 505-498

Hippocrates 498-491

Gelon I Gela, 491-485;
Syracuse, 485-478

Heiron I Gela, 485-466;
Syracuse, 478-466

Thrasybulus 466-465, deposed

Democracy, 465-405;
Athenian Siege, 415-413;
War with Carthage, 409-405

Dionysius I 405-367

War with Carthage, 396-392;
Plato's 1st visit, c.388

Dionysius II 367-357,
347-344, deposed

Plato's 2nd visit, c.366;
Plato's 3rd visit, 360

Dion 357-354, d.351

Callippus 354-353, d.351

Hipparinus 353-351

Nysaeus 351-347, deposed

Timoleon 344-337, deposed

Democracy, 337-317

Agathocles Tyrant, 317-304;
King, 304-289

Democracy, 289-270

Hieron II 270-215

First Punic War, 264-241;
Second Punic War, 218-201

Gelon II coregent, c.216

Hieronymus 215-214

Roman siege and
conquest, 213-212

Syracuse, Συράκουσαι, was the greatest Greek city in Sicily, the scene of a number of epic events in Greek history. The first with distant historical effects was the attempt of the Athenians to take the city in 415-413. This was an episode in the Peloponnesian War (431-404) between Athens and Sparta. The first phase of the War, the Archidamian War, had ended in 421. The attack on Syracuse was an attempt to restart the war by taking out an ally of Sparta, as proposed by Alcibiades (d.404). The catastrophic failure of the siege, and the destruction of the Athenian army and fleet, began the second phase, the Decelean War, 413-404, much to the disadvantage and ultimate defeat of Athens.

Cleander	Tyrant, Gela, 505-498
Hippocrates	498-491
Gelon I	Gela, 491-485; Syracuse, 485-478
Heiron I	Gela, 485-466; Syracuse, 478-466
Thrasybulus	466-465, deposed
Democracy, 465-405; Athenian Siege, 415-413; War with Carthage, 409-405
Dionysius I	405-367
War with Carthage, 396-392; Plato's 1st visit, c.388
Dionysius II	367-357, 347-344, deposed
Plato's 2nd visit, c.366; Plato's 3rd visit, 360
Dion	357-354, d.351
Callippus	354-353, d.351
Hipparinus	353-351
Nysaeus	351-347, deposed
Timoleon	344-337, deposed
Democracy, 337-317
Agathocles	Tyrant, 317-304; King, 304-289
Democracy, 289-270
Hieron II	270-215
First Punic War, 264-241; Second Punic War, 218-201
Gelon II	coregent, c.216
Hieronymus	215-214
Roman siege and conquest, 213-212

The map is from the Atlas of Classical History, edited by Richard J.A. Talbert [Routledge, 1985, 1989, p.39]. It shows details of the Athenian siege, with the walls later added by the great Tyrant Dionysius I.

Around 388 a Greek visitor arrived at the court of Dionysius, the philosopher Plato (c.429-347). Plato got involved in trying to educate the son of the tyrant, who would shortly become Dionysius II, in philosophy and responsible statesmanship. Plato returned a couple of times as part of the effort, but it didn't turn out very well. Plato's friend Dion, who launched a coup against the tyrant, was killed and Plato was left with a very bad impression of the whole business -- "But the requests of tyrants are coupled, as we know, with compulsory powers," as Plato says in Epistle VII, written to Dion's friends. This helped confirm Plato in his determination to stay out of Athenian politics.

Associated with Dionysius II we also have the story of Damocles, whom Dionysius had sit under a suspended sword to show him that a tyrant lived in constant apprehension of assassination.

The fate of Syracuse would ultimately be settled by Rome. King Hieron II successfully navagated the First Punic War and the beginning of the Second. After his death, however, with Hannibal looking like a winner, Syracuse went over to Carthage. This was a bad idea, and after a heroic siege, Syracuse became a Roman possession. A sad and ugly episode occurred when M. Claudius Marcellus took the city in 212. Archimedes, Ἀρχιμήδης (287-212), probably the greatest mathematician of antiquity (often said to have nearly invented calculus), had used his powers of invention to create engines that helped withstand the Roman siege for three years. Before the city fell, Marcellus instructed his men to respect Archimedes, but the great man was killed, for various legendary reasons, when a Roman soldier found him.

Curiously, Archimedes has a place in the history of California. Hieron was suspicious that a crown he had ordered was not made with the pure gold he had provided, but that some of the gold had been replaced. The weight of the crown was what it was supposed to be, so Hieron ordered Archimedes to figure out a test that could be performed on the finished object. Any base metal used would have a different density than the gold, so if the volume of the crown could be determined, this would show whether it was pure gold. Unfortunately, the crown, if it was like Greek royal crowns, was a construction of gold leaves, whose density could not be determined from a direct measurement of the volume. The story is that Archimedes, relaxing in the bath, realized that the density of the crown could be determined, like Archimedes in his bath, by submerging it in water, which would displace an amount of water equal to its volume.

Archimedes leaped out of the bath and ran down the street naked, shouting Eureka, Εὕρηκα (actually heúrēka, as in "heuristic"), "I have found [it]." "Eureka" is now the motto of the State of California, shown on the Great Seal of the State just above the goddess Athena (of all people). The relevance of the expression to California history is certainly because of the Gold Rush and the many years of gold mining that followed. The density of the gold does not seem to have been an issue, except perhaps for the gold coins minted at the United States Mint in San Francisco.

Carson Mansion, Eureka, Caifornia, 1886

Eureka is also the name of a city in Northern California, which originally has its streets laid out in a very rational, Greek grid, with numbered East-West streets, 1st through 18th, North to South, and lettered North-South streets, A through Y, West to East, with a marvelous harbor behind some barrier islands.


Carson Mansion, Eureka, Caifornia, 1886

At right is the signature Carson Mansion in Eureka, the work of lumber baron William Carson (1825-1912). Carson arrived for the Gold Rush in 1849 but then decided there would be more money in wood, as there was.

The list of tyrants and kings is from the Oxford Dynasties of the World by John E. Morby [Oxford University Press, 1989, 2002, p.94].

Hellenistic Index