CRITICAL Links to KEY PERSEUS/Tufts ancient Greek pages for persons knowledgeable in ancient Greek

CRITICAL Links to KEY PERSEUS/Tufts ancient Greek pages for persons knowledgeable in ancient Greek:

1. Homer, Iliad, Book II, The Catalogue of Ships:



If you are wondering why I have deliberately zeroed in on Book II, the Catalogue of Ships of Homer’s Iliad, as I am sure you are, wonder no more. Only Book  II alone, the Catalogue of Ships of Homer’s Iliad, can provide us with sufficient examples of Homeric grammar with distinctly Mycenaean characteristics, from which we can thereby retrogressively extrapolate numerous examples of grammatical forms in many of the major categories of Homeric Greek to their putative, and in fact, actual, Mycenaean ancestral roots.
 

2. Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox, Overview of Greek Syntax:



is a superb source for the study of ancient Greek grammar. The link is parsed into the major sub-categories of ancient Greek grammar, i.e. nouns, verbs, participles etc. etc., and is thus an extremely valuable and highly practical source for ancient Greek grammar, all but eliminating the necessity of having to buy a hard-copy or e-book publication on ancient Greek grammar. In short, it is a perfectly sound source for ancient Greek grammar aficionados.

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Homer. Iliad, Book II, “The Catalogue of Ships”, Lines 546-580 in Modern English Cf. Anachronistic Translation from 1924

My translation of  Homer. Iliad, Book II, “The Catalogue of Ships”, Lines 546-580 in Modern English: Click to ENLARGE


Compare my translation in twenty-first century English with that of A.T. Murray 90 years ago (1924): Click to ENLARGE:

 
and you can instantly see the glaring discrepancies in the English of these two completely alien translations. Murray's translation from 1924 sounds uncannily like something Alexander Pope might have dryly penned in the eighteenth century! There really was no excuse for this, even in 1924, when people spoke an English very little removed from that we speak today. We can be pretty sure that the poor school children who were obliged to read the Iliad and Odyssey in that translation would probably not want to have anything more to do with either masterpiece for the rest of their lives. And who could have blamed them? But the Georgian mores of that era, still grudgingly hanging on in spite of the roaring twenties, prevailed, and to this day, far too many readers, young and old alike, end up in the ghastly grips of translations such as that one. God forbid! The most galling thing about it all is that The Perseus Digital Library



should know better. They have such a wealth of choice from modern translations, which they could easily have availed themselves of.

In the next post, we will be recommending some quality twenty-first century translations of the Iliad.

Richard

“Amnisos” Ring sold to Sir Arthur Evans on his second day at Knossos ANNOTATED

“Amnisos” Ring sold to Sir Arthur Evans on his second day at Knossos ANNOTATED (Click to ENLARGE):


Here you see the beautiful “Amnisos” Ring sold to Sir Arthur Evans by a local antique dealer on his second day at Knossos, March 24, 1900.  Of course, the original is gold. This is the first time you have ever seen this glorious ring on the Internet ANNOTATED in Linear B, Greek & English. When I refer to the genitive “Aminisoyo” as being Homeric, I do not mean that the Linear B genitive in Mycenaean Linear B is the Homeric genitive, but that it is the Mycenaean genitive, “aminisoyo” of “aminiso” regressively derived from the Homeric genitive, as it would have appeared in the Iliad and/or the Odyssey, even if it did not. What is that supposed to mean? ... simply this, that the most ancient masculine singular genitive, attested over and over in (The Catalogue of Ships) Book II of the Iliad (and sometimes elsewhere) always ends in “oio”, as for instance, with : ἱπποδάμοιο: (Iliad II, l. 23) and with εἰ μὴ Ὀλυμπιάδες Μοῦσαι Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο (Iliad II, l. 491, Catalogue of Ships). NOTE that clicking on the two citations from Book II of the Iliad will lead you to the Study Tool for the genitive in question in the Perseus Catalogue.

If the genitive singular ends in oio  “oio” in these citations from Homer and elsewhere and there exist attested forms of the genitive with the exact same ending in Linear B, then we must conclude that regressive extrapolation of the genitive singular in Linear B is precisely the same as is the archaic masculine genitive singular in Homer's Iliad. As I shall shortly demonstrate with several examples, there are plenty of attested examples of the masculine genitive singular on Linear B tablets. If the regressively extrapolated and the attested examples of the masculine genitive singular are always identical, it necessarily follows that the masculine genitive singular in Linear B is absolutely airtight. The genitive singular masculine in Mycenaean Greek and in Homer is in fact. always identical.

Richard