Thoughts on Antiquity

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages. ed. by Roger D. Woodward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Corrected edition 2008.

As both a glossophile and a student of the ancient world, this is really a dream book. I heartily recommend it to all language-enthusiasts and scholars interested in a glimpse and a starting bibliography for other languages outside their field.

Every book has its problems, though, and this is especially more frequent with multiple authors. Fortunately, the scholars are all top-notch, and one does not have to worry about that. And yet, there’s still some things one can nitpick about. First and foremost, by ancient, the editor limited the languages, in all parts of the world, that were documented well enough for our understanding before the “fall of Rome” in 476 CE. I’ll have more on that later.

I noticed two things early on. First I did not like how the Greek was displayed. This is perhaps because I’m not used to seeing Greek in transliteration that often, and when I do, it’s much simpler than displayed here in IPA (International Phonetics Alphabet). I suppose that makes perfect sense–this book wasn’t tailored for Classicists. And unless the revised edition changed the layout and fonts, I do not see the “inconsistencies of fonts” which Joshua Katz mentioned were “rampant” (perhaps the second edition fixed that problem, but I do not know). The inconsistency in fonts that I did notice, however, was actually that out of all the entries that I looked through so far, his were unique, the only ones employing a transliteration scheme for based on IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), noticeably, adding the ogonek to the omega and eta. Most of the contributors used, I sensed, standard transliteration, for example transliterating πόλεις as póleis, not pólẹs. I could be wrong — I don’t know nearly enough about Avestan phonetics to know whether Mark Hale employed the same thing. (On a side note, it does baffle me a bit how one goes about using exact pronunciation for a dead language, even given W. Allen’s excellent Vox Graeca.)

Lately, I have been digging through Osco-Umbrian, especially the Iguvine Tablets, so naturally I had a look at Rex Wallace’s “Sabellian Languages”. There too I also saw what I thought was a correction to a long-held assumption, that totus in Latin was etymologically related to Oscan touta and thus deutsch and teutones. I quickly looked it up in Etymonline, and of course, according to them totus is of unknown origin. Katz cited The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots as supportive of the relationship. While I don’t have that, I do have The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language with an appendix on IE roots in the back:

teutā-.Tribe… 3. TOTAL, TUTTI; FACTOTUM, TEETOTUM, from Latin tōtus, all, whole, possibly from teutā (? < “of the whole tribe”). [In Pokorny tēu- 1080.]

While Katz does mention those who oppose the view, even the AMH is cautious about citing a positive relationship with any certainty, and Katz does not mention that. I do not have Pokorny, so I do not know off-hand whether he was hesitant as well.

While I’m still discussing Katz, I also have to disagree with his five categories of people who could use this book. There is a sixth option - amateurs. People who love languages, especially ancient ones. Or perhaps a seventh - conlinguists - you know, those guys who for whatever reason like to make up languages (Esperanto, Klingon, Tolkien’s various Elven languages). For amateurs, students, and seasoned scholars alike, this book is useful, and its contributors are top-notch. (I either own or have read about half of these scholars already, with the ones I have not being far outside my field.) And, as Katz has noticed, each entry is fairly detailed.

Although many of the factual errors pointed out by Jared Klein (Jared S. Klein, JAOS 125: 91-97) were corrected in the second edition, I did notice some other problems, but these are confined to conceptual problems rather than factual errors. For one, the dichotomy of “Attic Greek” and “Greek Dialects” is entirely wrongheaded. While Woodard makes it clear that Attic is merely a dialect of Greek, in my opinion he emphasizes the role of Attic too much in Hellenistic (Koine) Greek and does not mention Ionic at all in that entry, instead treating it with “Greek Dialects”. I can hardly see a good justification for separating the two, as if Attic were superior, in a book on languages. If the aim were to study Ancient Greek literature, then it would make sense to have the primary material on Attic. But as a glimpse of languages, it makes more sense to keep it all together. This was done with several other languages, like Coptic (grouped with Ancient Egyptian, as if that were homogeneous), Middle Indic (which includes Pali and the various Prakrits dialects together), and Akkadian and Eblaite (which can be subdivided into Eblaite, Old Akkadian, Old/Middle/Neo-Assyrian and Babylonian, and Peripheral Akkadia; see Huehnergard’s A Grammar of Akkadian, 2nd ed., 2005).

Within “Greek Dialects”, novices to the dialects will also be baffled at how Woodard treats their morphology. When discussing pronouns, for instance, he uses different dialects for various forms. He only gives two different dialects for the accusative, third person, singular. The rest he gives only one dialect. While full morphological charts would be bulky, the trajectory from Proto-Greek to the various dialects is on the rather bare side. Still, if an appendix for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs can be added, surely more could have been given, even if in appendix form, for the sake of such wide variance in the pronouns (etc.) of the Greek “dialects”.

Also, there’s enough Macedonian, in my opinion, to warrant comparison with the rest of the “Greek dialects”, though I suppose that can, and will, be debated.

I guess the biggest—I hesitate to even think the word  “disappointment”—is that there is not enough in there. Until I read Katz’s review, I originally was going to make this a list of languages that should have been included/should be included in a second volume. I still think that more languages which can be discussed imperfectly (the “insufficiently attested languages”; the “undeciphered languages” do have good articles written on them). I now proceed to that list:

Tocharian: While post-dating the 5th century, the language itself did not come into existence ex nihilo. Indeed, some form of it had to have existed before the Fall of Rome. Some would even speculate that it would have been spoken around the time of Ptolemy (the astronomer Ptolemy). And 6th century is just barely over the arbitrary line of “ancient” languages and “non-ancient” languages. Moreover, the isolated status of the language, the only surviving branch of the language, would have made it very valuable for Indo-European studies (and indeed, Tocharian is mentioned a handful of times especially in relation to reconstructing Indo-European).

Old Church Slavonic: As mentioned by Klein, Old Church Slavonic would be the only representative of Slavic languages, and a fairly important one, too. OCS is important especially to ancient Judaism and Christianity (cf. OCS Josephus). However, it may be a bit too late for the collection.

Anglo-Saxon (Old English): While documents in this language do not predate 476 CE, the migration of the Angles and Saxons to Britain probably antedates that. I wouldn’t even argue with a large grouping with Old High German, Old Low German, and Old Frisian for a cross comparison of West Germanic languages. Or is that stretching it a bit?

Primitive/Old Irish: While Old Irish just missed the deadline, Primitive Irish, found on inscriptions, do date before 476 CE, and with the two in conjunction, there seems no reason not to have an entry for them.

Old Turkic: Like Old Church Slavonic, a case cannot be made for antedating the fall of Rome. However, I would now argue that the fall of Rome is too early and arbitrary a date to set for more eastern languages. Thus, I would also include…

Old Japanese on this ground, too (Old Japanese begins in the 8th-9th century).

Old Korean: Unless I am misinformed, I believe that this language actually fits the criteria.

I realize that as a single-volume collection, too much material would make the book unwieldy. Perhaps a second volume can come out which would include not only these languages, but many of the other medieval languages as well: The Cambridge (?) Encyclopedia of the World’s Post-Antiquity and Pre-Modern Languages. If that’s too long, maybe just The World’s Ancient Languages Vol. 2.