Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [129]
lopadotemakhoselakhogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiok
arabomelitokatakekhumenokikhlepikossuphophattoperisteralektruono
ptokephalliokinklopeleiolagōiosiraiobaphētraganopterúgōn.
But words ten letters long and more occur in almost every sentence of every text. And proper names, which are themselves very often clearly analysable as compound nouns, are particularly heavyweight.
Together with complexity of individual words went the flexibility of Greek style: within a clause, word order was almost totally free, and so it was largely the endings of the nouns, adjectives and verbs, marking gender, case, number and person, which made clear the relationships between the meanings of words: who did what to whom, what in effect was being said. Here art began to take over from nature: the elaboration of Greek prose style by the sophistaí (’wise-guys’, as professional pundits were known) meant that sentences, especially in fine speaking, tended to become ever longer and more ramified, with artfully balanced clauses, in the so-called léxis katestramménē, ‘constrained style’, so widely admired by Greek audiences.
The language in those centuries BC would have sounded very different from Greek as spoken today. The main reason for this was the fact that it was tonal, each word given a distinctive melody of high and low tones, in a way that is most closely paralleled today by accent in Japanese. The system gradually broke down in the first few centuries AD, but was transmuted rather than disappeared: nowadays Greeks stress the same syllable that used to have high tone.
Overall, it seems to have been the complexities in sound structure, rather than grammar, which pressed hardest on language-learners. Most of the mistakes we find in correspondence from around the turn of the millennium (usually on sheets of papyrus preserved in Egypt) concern spelling: above all, they were already finding it difficult to keep many of the various high vowels and diphthongs apart (i, ei, ē, oi, u). Sure enough, all these distinct sounds have merged as i in the modern language. The noun and verb systems held up remarkably well: they have been simplified to an extent, but to this day the typical Greek noun still has five or six forms, and the verb twenty.*
One feature of the language community up until the second century BC was its disunity. In the second and early first millennia BC, Greek had developed in small communities all over the south of the Balkans and the Aegean islands and coastline; many of these communities were isolated by sea and mountain, and until they began to develop specialised economies, their size must have remained small. The result was a tendency for individual dialects to develop and go off in their own directions, a pattern that was further complicated when a large-scale migration brought the Doric Greeks out of the north and into the centre of the Peloponnese. Greeks remained able to intercommunicate throughout, but until the events of the fifth century BC, individual communities, póleis, as they were called, remained independent; local pride flowered, and with it a self-conscious use of local dialects. Before there was a common external threat, or any power with a military superiority sufficient to submerge their independence, ties among Greeks remained on the level of a sense of shared ancestry and religion. Shared festivals, and a shared literature, reminded them of a common heritage: but the initiative remained with the individual cities, each with their own hinterland of farms, pastures and fisheries.
Typically, when the Greeks of the ancient world looked for knowledge about their own history, they turned to poetry, and particularly to Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey, together with a host of hymns addressed to particular gods, largely defined their conception of the past. More such literature is attributed to Hesiod, who is a less shadowy figure from around 700 BC; but there was great dispute in the ancient world about which was the earlier. Hell