Friday, February 20, 2004

Speaking of languages:

I read today that a fellow Hellenist with apparently way too much time on his hands has translated Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (a.k.a. Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, the trans-Atlantic name change due to a publishing industry which assumes that the average reader in the U.S. is slightly more cerebral than a sea sponge and might not buy a book with the word "philosopher" in its title, no matter how popular it was in Great Britain) into Ancient Greek. Retired Classic teacher Andrew Wilson was commissioned two years ago by the publishing house Bloomsbury to render the beloved children's bestseller/doorstop into the Greek of circa 400 B.C., and at last he has delivered the goods.

I must say I have mixed feelings about such a feat. I'm lukewarm on the whole Harry Potter phenomenon - I've never read any of J. K. Rowling's books, perhaps out of a combination of jealousy of her success and fear that I'd become as addicted to them as the next person on the subway, but mostly because her whimsical sort of fantasy isn't quite my cup of tea. I was interested however to see that Wilson turned to 19th Century katharevousa Greek as a model for translating words like "computer" and "automobile".

The katharevousa or purifying dialect arose as an attempt to rid contemporary spoken Greek of the myriad loan words that had crept in over the centuries from other languages such as Latin, Turkish, and the Western European tongues, while at the same time seeking to revive the features of classical Attic Greek grammar that the modern demotike was believed to have lapsed from terribly. Technically speaking, however, katharevousa was not Ancient Greek, but an archaizing form of Modern Greek; whereas before that the so-called "Atticists" of Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire endeavored to emulate the language of Plato, Isocrates, and Lysias down to the very details.

This made the problem of neologisms very... well... problematic, as the process of coining compound words willy-nilly was not an Attic phenomenon, but a feature of later Ancient Greek (to be fair, Attic Greek does allow for compounds, but they mostly exist in the form of verbs with prepositional prefixes, and even then the rules for forming these compounds were much more rigid than would be the case with later Greek). In lieu of these compounds, Atticists were forced to resort to all manners of circumlocution in order to express concepts or describe items that Greek didn't have the equivalent for circa 400 B.C.

The usual response of a Byzantine author to this challenge was to pick the closest equivalent Attic word that was attested in the surviving literature, a practice which has confused many an amateur medievalist over the years. One example was referring to any of the contemporary races living in the Black Sea region as "Scythians", never mind that there was neither a cultural nor a genetic link between those ancient inhabitants and the latter-day inheritors of their territory; another is an instance where Michael Psellos uses a Classical term for a type of weapon in place of the 11th Century word for wooden axe, leading astray a generation of military historians and historical recreationists alike.

So does this make Wilson's Areios Poter "Ancient Greek", as he claims, or a kind of katharevousa instead? The only way to tell one would be to read the book - a daunting prospect, to say the least. Just to satisfy my curiosity I might want to take a peek at it, but I'd much rather be reading an actual Ancient Greek author than attempting to pick my way through a modern Englishman's attempt at Atticism. But that's just me.

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