A little more

about the Greeks. My readings about Byzantine scholarship continue. Nigel Wilson's text is a great jumping-off point for additional research on the side, especially when virtually every book he references is in the stacks whose entrance is ten steps away from the Circulation Desk! Today I'm following up on two interesting leads that Scholars of Byzantium offered up: the first concerns the phenomenon of what Photius refers to in his critical writings as "hyperatticism", the act of going too far with making your Greek look and sound like it was written circa 400 B.C. This term comes as a surprise to me (and to Mr. Wilson as well!), since the conventional wisdom in modern scholarship has always been that the Byzantines didn't think there was such a thing as being too Attic, and that that was a chief weakness in their mode of literary expression, that it was no longer in touch with spoken Greek. Photius seems to think otherwise, however; and in some of his stylistic reviews preserved in his Bibliotheca, Amphilochia, and selected letters he goes so far as to proscribe that "good" Greek must strike a balance between the elegance of Atticism and the everyday spoken word. A remarkable thing to say for any era of Greek literature, and something that I believe personally myself. Greek is too rich a language to ignore its ancient vocabulary and older forms of expression entirely. Even if modern Greeks no longer consider the language of Plato and Pericles their ideal, the language they speak every day has been shaped by millennia of continuous usage, its structure and meaning pushed and pulled by forces that are older than Homer himself. The best Greek writers have always been aware of these deep linguistic currents and used them to their advantage to create a literature that resonates in a way that few other nations' can (even the so-called "demotic" authors, who make it a point to eschew the Greek of the past, are participating in the classical tradition, if only to consciously flaunt it!).

The other lead I'm working on right now relates to the so-called "pronunciation question" that plagues the study of Greek to this day. If you've learned your Ancient Greek anywhere in the West, you've probably learned to pronounce it in a manner that is markedly different from the way that Greek is pronounced today in Greece. We call this the Erasmian system of pronunciation after Desiderius Erasmus, who took it upon himself to design a "scientific" scheme for pronouncing Ancient Greek that would avoid the confusion of homophonous vowel sounds that are a hallmark of the modern language. Although it has been tweaked over time in an attempt to make it more "authentic", particularly through the efforts of such works as Allen's Vox Graeca - which is now accepted as gospel in most Classics departments - the Erasmian system still hews closely to its namesake, by and large, and has succeeded in creating a weird diglossy between Western scholars of Greek and Greek scholars of Greek. The Erasmians maintain that since the so-called "vowel shift" that ran many sounds into "ee" (a process also referred to as "ioticization") happened by their estimation in Late Antiquity, that Classical Greek should be pronounced in a manner that restores the "original" vowel sounds; most modernistas counter that the language should be spoken the way it is spoken now for the purposes of cultural, literary, and scholarly continuity, an argument that I find persuasive in and of itself. Erasmianism is nothing more than a latter-day manifestation of hyperatticism, an attempt to overcorrect the language back into something it probably never really was to begin with. Again, there's nothing wrong with trying to understand the past and let it inform us, but the zealousness with with the Erasmian system is defended here in the West is nothing short of dogmatic. And more to the point, the "scientific" method of pronunciation is becoming increasingly indefensible along scientific lines, as epigraphic research - which was largely ignored by Allen in favor of literary sources and analogy from Latin - is showing that Ancient Greeks were making the same spelling mistakes as their modern counterparts as far back as 600 B.C.! How this will all end up is anyone's guess, but I forsee a day when we finally conclude that the Erasmian scheme is more trouble than it's worth and start educating generations of scholars who aren't limited to any one period of the Greek language on account of their system of pronunciation.

To that end, I've been looking at Byzantine lists of homonyms that differ only in accentuation, lists which are said to have been copied more or less in their entirety from Late Classical grammatical references. The odd pairs of words that are only homophonous in the modern pronunciation have traditionally been written off as later interpolations into the text and evidence of the growing iotacization of Greek, but what if they were always there to some degree? Right now I'm using the text of one John Philoponos (his last name roughly translates into something like "masochist"!), whose compilation written in the 9th or 10th Century A.D. is generally agreed to be a copy of ancient author Herodian's list with little innovation on Philoponos' part. I guess the next step would be to see what we have extant of Herodian. Of course since he is also well into the A.D.'s, an Erasmian apologist can always say that his Greek has already undergone the vowel shift as well, but considering how archaising these individuals were by nature, wouldn't they have been hypersensitive to the difference in sound between then and now and proscribed against any such lapse in pronunciation accordingly? Food for thought.