The problem with Attic Greek is that it's ARCANE, contrived and PRETENTIOUS.
I learned German for some years, and my teacher were from the South (of Germany --: Wolfgang Jung -- my other teacher Helmut Papier was ALSO from the South). Therefore they wanted to instil on me that horrid, vulgar, pronunciation of 'sp' as in Speranza to sound as if it were written:
sh-peranza
---
I mean, why would one want to learn such atrocity?
Similarly with modern Greek. Apparently, the rather soft and posh and aristocratic sound in
'theos' (God)
is turned into that rather vulgar consonant, 'z'!
----
Must say "SperanZa" features that consonant. That's why a good friend of mine calls me "Sperm" rather, to avoid the latter part of my surname.
In Italian, the 'z' letter is a Greek hybrid, out of the 'z' of Greek.
But the 'z' in Italian (which we associate with bad things -- e.g. 'zingaro') is NOT the Greek 'z'. The Italian 'z' is originally a 'ts' thing. (In the case of "Speranza", it would be 'sperantia').
But back to Greek.
Grice must have pronounced the Greek properly Attic:
'theos esti makros'
-- "God is a big thing").
But you go to Athens today and either they are all atheists, or they corrupted their hellenic beauty beyond recognition!
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Z's are in greek, but also gothic (then it's still an issue with some linguini-ists how much gothic--ie early germanic-- derived from greek, or directly from IE, or even sanskrit. theta's in gth. as well as grk. Odd.). Slightly ex-zotic in spanish as well--mujerzuelta, zozobra, perezoso, Zorro!. Probably the northern barbarian/goths corrupting latin (also influence of arabic...almuerzo)
ReplyDeleteYes, the 'z' is a bother.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we could speak of "Grizuela".
J's insta-philology:
ReplyDeleteI suspect the germanic tongue, ie early gothic was ...an invention of some clever scribes, probably northerners ala Jerome who had studied greek and offered a rough transliteration of primitive germanic sounds--geschicktaheit!-- into a vaguely latinate lexicon. But the gth. declension (and cases), which becomes german actually closer to IE supposedly than latin/romance. So there's probably some...sapir-whorf like issue there. Or not. At any rate the casing and articles seem a bit.....odd. Pantheistic even. That's the case with greek and latin as well--many of the common words are actually mythical in origin: in 6 cent. BC or so, when a greek said sky (like Ouranon...), he meant like sky-gods. Maybe ...Charles Fort issue there.
But note that I was referring to the 'th' of "God" (theos). I would imagine Grice would have pronounced that as
ReplyDelete/theos/, where 'th' is the International Phonetic Association sign.
The French, naturally, are unable to pronounce that, and say, 'zank you'.
So, I was submitting that the Hellenes, possibly via Turkish influence, became unable to pronounce the 'th', and turned it into a 'z', as I THINK is the pronunciation of 'theos' (God) in Greek today.
In any case, there must be other corruptions, too! And I hope Grice did not pick them up!
(He was in Italy and Grice as an undergraduate in Oxford, but found the lack of cricket inhilaratingly incruciating.
Well, the th -> d, right? Theos/Deus/Dios. As in Ronnie James. Actually I actually sympathize with ...latinate types who shake their heads when hearing "GOTT" (God) for Dios (Deus). They burnt people at the stake for that, until Marty Luther arrived with some prussian back up.
ReplyDeleteSperanza, prob. from Esperanza (Hope in spanglish...close in italiano)
Well, yes -- Speranza is supposed to be Provencal, from what I read in Elton, "The Latin language" (as I recall). All words ending in -anza are supposed to be Provencal! Imagine Grice turning in his grave over that! (How can all words with a specific suffix can originate from the same place REGARDLESS of their meaning!). The verb is 'spero' in Latin, I wait. One of my mottos, is:
ReplyDeleteAs I breathe, I wait.
Or as I wait, I breathe. I forget
"Cum spiro spero" Cum spero spiro.
But in any case, the -antia thing (sperantia) then derives from the verb with some very odd suffix which is neuter plural and with a sense of passive and deontic meaning to it: Things to be hoped for, which is what Hope is all about, anyway. There is a Street in London called "Speranza". I wrote to the board, claiming it -- they wrote back: This was called Hope Street but changed to Speranza when Garibaldi visited. Ah well.
Now, the deus apparently is NOT cognate with theos, if you can believe that!
The Theos of the Greeks possibly has no cognate.
The "Deus" of the Latins reappears in Ju-piter, meaning Deus-pater.
And it is cognate, rather, with TUES-day.
So, I would think that the 'th' of theos in Classical Greek gets pronounced differently, but not as a 'd' proper.
Note that the Greek words in 'th-' that did make it to Italian became plain "t-" rather than 'd'. Theatre. Theatron in Greek becomes Teatro in Latin. The Latins were unable to aspirate things like t into th, or p into ph, or k into kh. So philosophia became filosofia in Italian. Pretty vulgar, but there's nothing much we can do about it now!
My Greek teachers always forced me to aspirate the 'philosophia' NOT to make it sound like a 'f'. How they succeeded, I don't know. Note that in the International Phonetic Alphabet,
philosophia becomes /filosofia/. It's not like 'ph' gets a different phoneme. But in Greek apparently it did. It was like a p followed by a plosive.
Considering the things the Greeks were not so evolved about, their lingo was pretty technical, in parts. Etc.
---- The "Esperanza" of the Spaniards compares with the "Espoir", or "Esperance" of the French. In fact, "Esperance" makes it to the OED as a battle cry used by Shakespeare in his Henry IV, I think. So the French, unlike the Provencals, were unable to have what is called an impure sigma, sp-eranza, and they NEEDED an epenthesis, hence the need for the e-sp-er-ance. I'm not surprised the Spaniards found 'sp-' difficult to pronounce. They also find arithmetic pretty complex! (But I love them, on the whole!)
We should be aware of false cognates (like spiro spero related...I breath, I hope, I cum, er I am???), but "spero" pretty certainly is root for sp. "esperanza" (or espero que).
ReplyDeleteNow, as far as historia goes, certainly spaniards are no worse than most of europa. The spanish moors preserved greek philosophy, mathematics, science as it was at the time. More geniuses and scribes were found in 12th century southern spain than Paris. Not saying it was utopia, but the Averroes school quite advanced. The catholics also took much from the moors, and even persians (Avicenna). As you probably know. At the same time...the original, shall we say, rationalist Islam of Avicenna--who praises Aristotle-- has little relation to the sunni sects (perhaps it's...izmali or something). Sort of similar to how protestants have purged the thomistic-aristotelian aspects of christianity. What's the point? Not sure. Whitey no se gusta el tradicion latin, es verdad.
Yes -- false cognates. Yes, 'sperantia' -- or *sperantia, as you find it in books, because it is a hypothetical, unwritten form, is certainly cognate with "spero" or sperare, to wait, to hope -- and NOT with 'spirare', to breathe. Hence the pun.
ReplyDeleteYes, the Spaniards got Aristotle back to Europe -- along with Italy, or something I forget. To think that the metaphysics travelled from Greek to Arabic, and then Latin, and back to Greek is quite a feat.
Spanish philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth century however, got pretty bored. Ortega y Gassett. This is just ONE philosopher, the 'y' being emphatic and NOT meaning 'and'. It's like if a philosopher would be called Peter Smith-and-Jones, but that's Spaniards for ya!
I think I'm going to write a blog post on 'history of the language' to keep some further Gricean comments on thread.
Ortega y Gassett I have only perused a few excerpts of.
ReplyDeleteUnamuno was an interesting chap, quite analytical as well, was a medical student, then sort of Kantian, with reservations--he initially opposed the leftist-republicanos, but finally attacked the royalists-phalange as well, including catolicos. Hated by both leftist collectivists and rightist royals, yr probably doing something correct. Spanish history at times looks a bit... dialectical.
"Del sentimiento trágico de la vida" --quite a profound book, really, with some language-related points as well. Pascal-like.
Alas, I tend to agree with most of your points on language, but I think the best American educators could hope for would be like getting mandatory french or german, latin maybe, as well as the ever present spanglish (there's a return-to-latin movement in some LA-area schools which impresses me slightly. chinese and arabic also becoming more prevalent. Know yr mandarin chinese, and hmong up and down and yr like LA unified admin. potential). Greek's for fancy oxbridgian types...
Yes. Language education is a good thing. In a way, it's bad, though. There are scientific research (conducted by my aunt -- not the psychologist one) according to which her monolingual brain is superior to some bilingual brain. "You cannot think two things at the same time".
ReplyDeleteWhen you study language, the way to go is with the NORMS. This is an acronym used by Trudgill. It means:
nonmobile, older, rural, and male
N O R M
--- THEY know! They have the pure language. If I want to speak good Castillian, I go to Castille and mix with them crowd. I expect them NOT to have ANY idea of French, Latin, Greek, English, or anything. Their "Castillian" will be pure! Same for Sicilian, etc.
Trudgill especialised in Yorkshire. He noted that there was a modal, 'mun', that they were using, these NORMS. There is NO influence of any foreign language. If they are illiterate, it may even be a better thing. In Dorset they found a female, for a change, who was still saying, 'itch', to mean "I" -- cfr. German 'ich'. She died now. But females, Trudgill notes, on the whole, have a class consciousness that make them very inapt for linguistic studies. In Norwich, for example, Trudgill's native town -- he wrote his PhD on this -- the females systematically adopted (for his questionnaires) a language that did not correspond to her class. Whereas the male speakers were ignorant alright.