One of the greatest challenges in teaching or studying ancient history is to develop, even to a small degree, an appreciation for the consciousness of those who lived in ancient times. They simply didn't mean the same things we mean when they used (in their ancient languages) words like the words we use now.
Take any modern abstract word, as my dear friend Owen Barfield pointed out, and you will find an earlier concrete meaning. "Spirit," for example, which means hardly anything anymore (that is, it means lots of different things to lots of different people and is, consequently, difficult to use with meaning), used to refer to "breath." So the ancients had a concrete, literal consciousness where we have an abstract one.
But that's too easy. Take any modern concrete word, and you will find an earlier symbolic or metaphorical meaning. "Heart," for example, refers to a muscular chest organ, and, more strongly in the past, to qualities associated with heart--sympathy or courage, for example. So the ancients had a symbolic consciousness where we have a literal one.
This reversal is also too easy. Because it's not as if they weren't fully aware--even more aware than we are, as herdsmen, warriors and butchers--of the concrete meaning of heart, as well. So, in ancient times, the symbolic and literal meanings of words were more closely related than they are now. "Heart" meant simultaneously the organ and its associated qualities.
Now, we attach somewhat less meaning to each of our many words but speak our meaning more clearly. We are rarely confused, we are rarely required to examine our sense of ambiguity, when we hear the word "heart."
The ancients attached more meanings to far fewer words--the world was simpler, working vocabularies smaller. This simultaneous simplicity of language and concentration of meaning allowed them to tell and to write stories that were accessible on many levels, for example, stories to which a child could listen but that a wise man could ponder.
The facts of the physical evolution of human beings become ever clearer. But it may be erroneous--and it is certainly a logical fallacy--to believe that this physical evolution must necessarily be accompanied by an evolution from a brute lack of intelligence--a la the cavemen in all the cartoons--toward whereever it is we are now.
If we take seriously a movement of language and meaning back through time from more words and less meaning to fewer words each with more meaning, we may imagine an arrow pointing to the prehistoric past. This arrow points in the general direction of a word containing all meaning, if you will. And "In the beginning was the word."
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4 comments:
(Sent elsewhere because it was too long but I've chopped it in two and moved it here because this is where it belongs...)
Hi Steve. I somehow stumbled across your blog entry about on ancient languages and really enjoyed it and couldn’t help sharing a couple of random thoughts that came to mind while reading it.
I wanted to say though that I think one way to add to your observations about meaning in ancient vs. modern languages is to consider not only the words themselves but also how a language decides to use those words (i.e., its grammar) and arrange them (its syntax).
So although Greek, for example, simply does not have the huge storehouse of vocabulary enjoyed by English, Greek grammar and syntax are much more sophisticated and nuanced than ours. (This is true of a lot of ancient languages and, what’s more, the older a language is, the more complex its grammar tends to be [thus while Greek has 4 cases and Latin 5, Sanskrit has 8]). As you pointed out, contrary to what one might expect, languages do not get cruder the further back you go. Indeed, grammatically speaking, we are comparative “cavemen” to the stuff Greek can pull off.
For instance, because Greek (like Latin, Sanskrit, etc) is an inflected language and the endings of the words themselves, not their position in the sentence, determine their grammatical function, Greek has a far greater freedom to do things with the words they have at their disposal. To take a famous example, the opening line of the Iliad is usually translated something like “Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” It has to be translated this way because English syntax requires the verb to precede the direct object in order for the sentence to be comprehensible and in order for us to even know what the direct object is. But in Greek the literal word order is “Wrath sing goddess son-of-Peleus Achilles.” The ‘-in’ ending of the word “wrath” in Greek (menin) tells us that it’s going to be the verb’s direct object and so we can stick it anywhere we’d like within the sentence. What’s great about this is that Homer can then begin his 15,000-line poem about all the death and violence brought on by Achilles’ anger with the word “anger” itself. Once you get that opening word, you get everything – the entire poem is encapsulated in its first word. (The particular word for anger here is itself significant but I won’t get into it…). But since English syntax relies on the linear sequencing of words in order to generate meaning, you can’t do that in the translation.
Part 2 of Meg's comment on ancient languages...
Similarly, Greek philosophers will sometimes arrange words within a sentence so that the cognitive work you have to do in figuring out the grammar often seems to reflect the very argument the author is making with that sentence. When Plato has a character, Callicles, state that pleasure and “The Good” are mutually exclusive, he places the word for pleasure and the word for “the good” as far away from each other as he can and in such a way so that in trying to figure out the sentence’s perverse syntax and how everything is supposed to fit together, you actually notice that this has happened. Thus, the point Callicles is trying to make (that pleasure and “the good” are separate) is simultaneously being played out at the level of the sentence’s syntax. So, in Greek, the ways in which words are physically arranged on the page often have a much closer and more self-conscious relationship to the ideas being expressed by those very words than they would in English (where what a words mean is completely detached from the grammar and syntax of that word). And all this stems from the fact that Greek is an inflected language and English is not (with a few exceptions).
There are of course many other linguistic features besides inflection within Greek which allows it to do all sorts of things that English cannot. Greek also tends to be more precise - it can signal a particular intention or idea with a single word that English needs a whole clause to spell out.
Hmmm…I'm sorry this is so so long. Not sure what came over me. I had only meant to point out that comparing the grammar and syntax of ancient and modern languages (in addition to the meanings of individual words) is another way in which to gauge and articulate differences between the cultures (and consciousness) of the people using these languages.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting blog and I hope all is well with you!
Yours,
Meg
Meg--Thinking about inflection, it's clear that this, too, shows an evolution (or at least a change) from ancient to modern. Neither Greek nor Latin has a separate word for "I," for example. To express "self," the speaker or thinker must inflect a verb. For instance, Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum" translates into five words in English, two of which are "I." I've tried to look into a mirror and not think "I," but I can't really do it. But think of an ancient person looking in a mirror and not having a word to express what we cannot help seeing...
Steve - There are personal pronouns (“ego” for “I” in both Greek and Latin) but since the ending of the verb already indicates its person and number, as you pointed out, the pronouns are only used for emphasis or contrast. So, a verb without an accompanying personal pronoun is “unmarked”/normal while a verb + the (redundant) personal pronoun is “marked”/over-determined.
I was reminded by your image of looking into the mirror and seeing only an “I” of the opposite experience in the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection when he peered into a lake, never realizing that he was only looking at himself. (Refusing to divert his gaze from his own reflection, he soon died, thereby traumatizing countless generations of Waldorf 5th graders.)
But what exactly are we meant to understand when we do come across an “I” in Greek? It’s tricky. In reading Greek poetry, for example, you can’t view the “I”s you encounter as a straightforward reflection of an actual individual the way perhaps you can when you’re reading, say, Emily Dickinson. This is because Greek poetry was always publicly performed (whether for a small group at a symposium or at a huge civic festival - no Emily Dickinsons hiding away by themselves writing poetry in private) and so there’s always an element of role-playing on the part of the speaker – the “I” reflects a persona or a character adopted by the speaker in performance more than a historical person. This gap between the performed “I” and the real poet can best be seen in examples in which male poets, such as Theognis and Anacreon, speak in the first person in their poems using first-person forms that are gendered feminine.
Another, completely different example of the way in which the ancient “I” contrasts with our modern sense of subjectivity is that, at least in the archaic and classical periods of Greece, the household, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of integrity. The individual is a representative of the house, but he’s just part of a chain reaching back to his ancestors and going forward to his descendants. That’s why in some parts of Greece there was a special form of punishment reserved for the worst criminals, the Bernie Madoffs of antiquity, which consisted of not only sending the individual who committed the crime into exile and banishing his descendents from the territory, but also exhuming the bones of his ancestors and physically throwing them over the border as well. It was important that the entire household (past, present, future), not just the individual, got wiped out.
So, personal pronouns for “I” exist, but what sort of subjectivity lies behind those “I”s is where things really start getting interesting.
Sorry for not keeping my comments "succinct." I hope, at least, they were "polite" :) Thanks again, Best, Meg
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