Tuesday, 10 February 2009
On Greek and Latin
An interesting facet of Classical studies as opposed to other academic majors is that it requires the study of two languages—Latin and Ancient Greek. Linguistically this is very unusual, in that the two languages come from completely different branches of the Indo-European family; that is, they are pretty unrelated.
The reasons for this are of course historical and not linguistic: our civilisation is based on Greek and Roman foundations, so those are the languages to learn if we want to understand our roots and our culture, whether they be related languages or not. But the side effects are very interesting intellectually, because the ways in which Greek and Latin differ are quite intriguing, and, I believe, very beneficial to the mind.
Ancient Greek to me is, compared to English but also any other language I've ever encountered, best described as 'florid'. Take this line from Homer (Iliad, I.96):
τοὔνεκ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἄλγε᾽ ἔδωκεν ἑκηβόλος ἠδ᾽ ἔτι δώσει·
Contractions, particles, that lovely movement implied in the almost-redundant-but-not-quite phrase "ἠδ᾽ ἔτι δώσει". What's more that same paragraph (which I won't quote in full here so as not to overwhelm my point) ends with the verb "πεπίθοιμεν"—an aorist optative. Greek verbs have so many levels of nuance between the indicative, subjective, optative, and imperitive (which can occur even in the third person) moods; the aorist, perfect, and present stems; passive, active, and middle voices—that although you can grasp these nuances in the Greek, trying to translate them into any other language just brings out how poor other languages' verb systems are in comparison. 
As for πεπίθοιμεν, we can always get the optative out of it by sticking in 'might' before it (although if we did that with every optative our translation would quickly become unreadable), but even then, 'we might persuade' in English is the same whether we're translating a present or aorist optative; the closed nature is just implied. One the one hand this means that it is not strictly necessary for understanding the meaning of the phrase—but you are still losing something by not having it.
If Greek is florid and organic, Latin on the other hand is clean, rational, logical. There is very little decoration in the way of unnecessary words. Having six cases instead of four certainly helps keep the word count down, but even the way Latin is written compared to Greek to me illustrates a different æsthetic: while Greek text dances with accents, breathings, iotic subscripts, and apostrophes, Latin text is dignified and unadorned. The reduction in particles and prepositions and the lack of articles make Latin verse somewhat freer than Greek verse, in the sense that its word order is even looser. Look at how different this line of Ovid is from our Homeric example (Amores, I.i.28):
Ferrea cum vestris bella valete modis!
It is impossible for me to wrap my mind around this verse without mentally re-arranging the word order, even though I usually make a point of trying to read the language as it is written. Parsing it is an analytical, logical process (even in the context of what is a very fun-loving poem), far removed from the flowing nature of Greek.
I don't mean to imply that these two languages are some how unique or 'better' than other languages, though. Hungarian has around twenty cases—far more than Latin's six. Armenian is an incredibly supple language. And Cherokee verbs are conjugated differently along an axis completely unknown to Greek: 'I carry' changes form according to whether the thing being carried is living or dead, long or round, or one of a number of such categories.
The difference is in the literatures of these languages: Cherokee may be fascinating linguistically, but Greek has Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes writing in it, while Cherokee literature is largely made up of old newspapers and missionary material. All I'm saying here, then, is that the languages that we do study in Classics have fascinating linguistic properties—I am not thereby implying that other languages do not. This is just an added benefit of studying Classics, in addition to the more obvious benefits of learning about the literary, philosophical, and historical foundations of Western Civilisation.
I wonder though if this interesting mental balance provided by studying expressive Greek and analytical Latin is not what makes students of Classics so succesful in so many and varied fields. (Any Classics department's website will have lists boasting of presidents, billionaires, generals, and other great minds who were Classics majors.) Whatever the case, I do find the two languages to be quite complementary, and I'm thankful for the variety they bring to the study of the ancient world.
