Appetitive: Indo-European Linguistics

When I teach grammar and vocabulary, I tend to digress. I always liked to to hear about words in a broader context, but it only interests some of my students. Today, I ran headlong into a discussion about Indo-European linguistics. I talked about the traditional hypothesis concerning the Indo-European homeland and the branching and differentiation of the different branches off of the language tree. It was kind of fun, but it went over the heads of most of my students. I think I really need to be teaching classics...

Reasoning: Reading Euclid

When I was at the Indo-Eurpean Studies conference, I talked to a PhD candidate from Berkeley about new translations of the Ancient Greek mathematicians. We discussed how difficult it is to translate the old mathematicians because they did not have the technical vocabulary now available, but they show some remarkable things in their writings. Since I toyed for a while writing my thesis on one of the Greek mathematicians, I was quite excited about this topic. According to the person I spoke with, however, a lot of the translations are extremely problematic.

On the other hand, reading ancient math is still fascinating. In my number theory class, we read a number of Euclid's proofs [1]. Now, Reading Odyssey, the group that puts on Marathon 2500, is doing a Euclid group. It's free if you have never joined a Reading Odyssey project before. I have been toying with the idea of joining...

I will be posting about the conference and Horace poems in the next few days.

Endnotes

1. We read one of the proofs on talk-like-a-pirate-day and Cerinthus' sister read it in a pirate voice. It was hilarious. This is the same class in which the pineapple incident took place.

Reasoning/Appetitive: Fragments from the Indo-European Studies Conference #2

I have some observations about the people on Fragments of Sulpicia, which may be expanded over the next few days.

There were a number of really interesting talks at the conference. The first one on the avoidance of hiatus in the Rg Veda was especially important for me because the avoidance (or lackthereof) of hiatus in Plato is one of the methods by which scholars attempt to date and order items in the Platonic corpus [1]. The methodology the two presenters used was significantly more advanced than those I have seen for Plato [2] because they used, among other things, some incredible computer software to create what they called a "Rigged Veda" which scrambled the words from the corpus without violating the meter.

Most of the other talks that I enjoyed were on sound-change, which, until this conference, I believed was the primary goal of Indo-European linguistics. These tended also to involve a lot of Greek and Latin, which was nice because I could follow the talks more easily which lead to greater enjoyment.

During the course of the conference, there appeared to be two different emerging factions: one that employed generative linguistics and one that did not. Not having studied linguistics in any formal way, most of the distinction was pointed out to me by Propertius II, although some of it I noticed on my own. Since the conference kindled my interest, I looked up some general textbooks on Indo-European linguistics. The two that seemed to be generally highly reviewed (on Amazon) were Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction and The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World.

Technical fields like this one (especially areas in which I have little prior knowledge) is one of the areas in which Amazon reviews are helpful, although they can be unnecessarily caustic (or laudatory) as well. I am considering at some point soon checking one or both of these out at the local academic library. If anyone has any thoughts, I would love to hear them.

Endnotes

1. I prefer the conception of dramatic date (since almost all of the dramas can be dated by historical references or character sketches). A great source on dramatic date is Zuckert's fantastic book, Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues.
2. Most of my reading on Platonic dating comes from Leonard Brandwood in the Cambridge Companion to Plato (CCO) which analyzes the methodology and Zuckert who is extremely critical of this approach. Brandwood explains that much of the statistical evidence come from sampling (often before the ability to scan entire documents by computer) and those attempting to prove the order that had been previously established.

Reasoning/Appetitive: Fragments from the Indo-European Studies Conference #1

One of the things that I noticed about the presenters at the Indo-European conference was their skilled pronunciation of words. Over the course of the conference, only one person mentioned that their pronunication was not perfect (and it only applied to his Sanskrit and not his Greek) and even those people with thick accents pronounced words impeccably. I was most impressed by the speaker who pronounced fabulous Latin although his own speech was layered with a thick Japanese accent.

This ability was one of the things that really impressed me about the eclectic people who spoke and attended such a conference. Gregory Nagy even displayed both Classical and Homeric Greek pronunciation.

This reminded me that although I was working with Vox Graeca, my pronunciation is not getting significantly better. I also realized that I cannot actually roll my r's. I can essentially do a half-trill with it but I cannot sustain that trill and it's not a real rolled r anyway. I decided I needed to learn because proper pronunciation of Greek requires this rolled r. I looked up a couple of tutorials online: wikihow and eHow. Propertius II warned me that it is possible that I might never be able to do it (lame!) but I will keep trying (although at the moment I sound like an idiot). If anyone has some hints, I would love to hear it.

More fragments from the conference coming over the next few days.

Reasoning: IndoEuropean Language Conference

I may not be around much in the next few days. Properitus II is coming into town and we are going to an Indo-European Studies conference. Gregory Nagy is speaking, which should be pretty awesome, and there are another few talks that look interesting (most of it is too technical for me).

I will post any interesting notes from the conference as I get the chance. Have a nice weekend everyone!