The Complutensian Polyglot, ahead of the times

In re:
http://www.supakoo.com/rick/ricoblog/Permalink.aspx?guid=873cc194-46b8-4dca-a0a8-d6ab8b688a3b

As I had added into the Wikipedia entry, the Complutensian Polyglot edition of the Bible in the 1520s marked the highpoint of the initial trend in Greek typography to come up with an unconnected Greek typeface. By the time of the Complutensian, 40 years in from the first attempts of the 1470s, the results were beautiful. Around that time, Aldus Manutius decided to go with the contemporary cursive as the model for both his Roman and Greek typeface; and everyone followed suit for the next couple of centuries of Greek. Now (as I've seen in a typographer's blog someplace), this made commercial sense --- Aldus used the bookhand his scholarly audience was familiar with from their manuscripts; and the results for Roman script were the beauty of italics. The results for Greek was squiggle, and by the 19th people was considered ugly. (That's because it *is* ugly.)

So as typographers tried to distance themselves from Aldus' typeface, there was a trend to try to go back to a lost ideal of Greek typography, nicely commented on in John Bowman's paper (in Greek) on British typography of Greek. The Complutensian begat Robert Proctor's Otter Greek font (see p. 158 of Bowman); Otter Greek begat Scholderer's Neohellenic (cf. GFS Neohellenic); Neohellenic begat Athenian font; and the Complutensian again begat the Greek Font Society's GFS Complutensian Greek, which I'm informed is planned for release by the Greek Font Society next year. [EDIT: since released as GFS Complutum] (See also the enlightening thread on the Typophile blog.)

The point is, the Complutensian has long been fetishised as a lost ideal of Greek typography, and I wanted to get me some. I've just received a 500 MB pdf of the PDF, and it contains a surprise I hadn't noticed. But first, a brief comment on what it looks like.

The Complutensian is pretty well described in a blog entry by Rick Brannan (ricoblog), and I suggest you pop out to it before continuing.

OK, you're back. :-) It's apparent from the gifs Brannan provides, but it truly hits you when you see the pages; the Old and the New Testament look totally different. The Old Testament looks impressive, and is quite a technical feat; but it does not look pretty. It's very busy, for one:

Septuagint Greek (with interlinear Latin)	Vulgate Latin	Hebrew
Targum Onkelos Aramaic paraphrase		Latin translation of Targum Onkelos

Some malicious bishop commented that the Vulgate text looks like Jesus with the two thieves crucified either side of him, and I can see why now. The Hebrew is Hebrew; it does look out of place next to the Latin, which is inevitable, although I'm not familiar enough with Hebrew script to tell if it's a good looking Dysmas. The Septuagint gets to be Gestas, the Bad Thief. The Septuagint column is not evil per se, and it's very utilitarian, but it's also quite messy: the Greek's in squiggle, the interlinear Latin's in a Bastarda that crowds out the spindly Greek it's meant to be a crutch for; ick. In the middle, the Latin's in a gorgeous, self-assured Antiqua. The Vulgate wins.

Zooming forwards to the New Testament is a shock to the eyes; it's sort of a Darien moment. Just two simple columns: no prima donna in the centre. The Latin's back in Bastarda, but it's a Bastarda that's been given room to breathe, instead of tripping over interlinear squiggle; and at full size, it's quite elegant. The shock of course is the Greek. It is simply gorgeous.

But the real shock is when you zoom in. (You can see it in the first gif on Ricoblog, but you have to click to enlarge and concentrate). The Complutensian typeface, the pinnacle of early Greek typography, the Eden from which Aldus' serpentine Greek expelled us and which has haunted several 20th century typographers, the bestest Greek font ever...

... is monotonic.

Seriously. No circumflexes or graves; no accents on monosyllables; no iota subscripts; no smooth breathings. There are rough breathings, but they're actually displaced to the left of the vowel, as they are normally on capitals; the Complutensian's pretty much treating them as letters not diacritics. (You can see it in the Ricoblog gif, ῾υπέρ, second line from the end.)

That's a shock alright. And it's a deliberate aesthetic choice: Jimenez' Spaniards certainly knew about accents, and their squiggle font in the Septuagint is drenched in them. The forerunners of their typeface -- da Spira and Jenson in 1470 -- used accents (see Zapf's paper on the history of Greek typefaces, p. 6). It's like the Complutensians said, we're designing the most beautiful Greek leters ever --- and we say we have no room on top of those letters for distracting squiggles. It's a deliciously bold decision.

Ο Νικολάου Τοναμύντωρ

In re:
http://www.sarantakos.com/language/l-akrotites.html

Ξαναδιάβαζα χτες τις σελίδες του φίλου Νίκο Σαραντάκου για τη γλώσσα, μεταξύ των οποίων και καταδίκες για το φαινόμενο της υπεράσπισης του πολυτονικού, ως το πιο πρόσφατο επεισόδιο στη διαμάχη γλωσσαμυντόρων και... άλλων γλωσσαμυντόρων. (Για να μην ξεχνάμε την εύστοχη παρατήρηση του Πήτερ Μάκριτιζ, πως η λογοτεχνική δημοτική δεν ήταν λιγότερο τεχνητή γλώσσα εν τέλει από την καθαρεύουσα.) Και παρότι συμφωνώ εν πολλοίς με το 40κο, βλέπω ότι στο θέμα του πολυτονικού, περνάω όλο και περισσότερο στη συντήρηση, καταπώς κάνω και σε κάποια άλλα κοινωνικά θέματα (π.χ. μοιχεία --- η σειρά "Και οι παντρεμένοι έχουν ψυχή" με κάνει μπαρούτι κάθε που το βλέπω· και μην αρχίσω για το ρεσιτάλ δεοντολογίας και κοινωνικής ευθύνης που αποτελεί το "Θα βρεις το δάσκαλό σου"). Για να γίνω σαφής: συμφωνώ ότι η δημοτική όπως τη γνωρίζουμε με πολυτονικό δεν γράφεται -- ή μάλλον γράφεται με ικανή αυθαιρεσία, μέχρι να αποφασίσεις τι θα πεις μακρό και τι βραχύ σε μια γλώσσα που μακρά και βραχέα δεν σκαμπάζει. Αλλά όταν βλέπω αρχαία σε μονοτονικό (κάτι που ο 40κος κάνει πειραματικά, αλλά που είθισται πλέον), ξενίζομαι. Και το ίδιο εν παρόδω νοιώθω για το μικτό λόγο των πρώιμων δημωδών λογοτεχνημάτων. Αν είναι αυθαίρετο να κάνουμε το <ούζο> <οὖζο>, αυθαίρετο είναι να κάνουμε και το <ᾦ> <ώ>.

Και αυτό νομίζω απορρέει από το ιδιάζον της γενιάς μου. Είμαι στην πρώτη γενιά που αποποιήθηκε το πολυτονικό στην εκπαίδευση --- το '81 ήμουν Ε! δημοτικού, και το άγιος και αγνός μετά χαράς αποποιήθηκα. Συμμεριζόμουν τον τρόμο της προηγούμενης γενιάς για την αντιδραστική και νεκρωμένη καθαρεύουσα --- δεν μπορούσα καν να διαβάσω την καθαρεύουσα του Νικολάου Πολίτη χωρίς δυσφορία. Αλλά λίγο η τριβή με το TLG (όπου μετά χρόνια ξανάμαθα το πολυτονικό, και έπρεπε και να το επιβάλω στον έλεγχο των κειμένων), λίγο η έκθεση στην καλαίσθητη καθαρεύουσα του Χατζιδάκι (καλαίσθητη στη σύνταξη, γιατί ειρμό τα κατεβατά του δεν έχουν ούτε για δείγμα), και πολύ η απουσία από την Ελλάδα, μου αναχαίτησαν την παλιά δυσφορία. Τους τόνους τους βρίσκω τώρα χαριτωμένους, αν και όχι σε βαθμό να τους χρησιμοποιώ τακτικά στο νεοελληνικό μου λόγο: γι' αυτό και η προμετωπίδα είναι πολυτονική και Μπόστεια ("ὁπουτζοῦ"), ενώ τα επιμέρους άρθρα είναι σε μονοτονικό.

Τη δυνατότητα να βλέπουμε το γλωσσικό μας παρελθόν ως χαριτωμένο μάς την έβλαψε και η επιβολή του αρχαΐζοντος ιδιώματος, αλλά και η πολιτική στροφή του γλωσσικού προβλήματος: η χρήση πλέον αρχαΐζοντος ιδιώματος από νεοέλληνα είναι πολιτικά βεβαρημένη. (Πάντως ευγενέστατη βρήκα τη συμβολή του Τέττιγα στο Ιστολόγιον, όπου σωστά κατακεραυνώνει τις συνήθεις ατοπολογίες για την πενία της νεοελληνικής, αλλά το κάνει... στα αρχαία. Και χαλάλι του το μονοτονικό.)

Σκέφτομαι το ευφυέστατο ιστολόγιο του ψευδο-Τσώσερ, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog, και αναρωτιέμαι αν είναι καν δυνατόν την σήμερον να γράψει κανείς ανάλογο στα ελληνικά. Ο ψευδο-Τσώσερ, η ψευδο-κουνιάδα του και ο ψευδο-ντε Μαντεβίλ διακωμωδούν την Πάρις Χίλτον και τον πόλεμο με το Ιράκ, ή τη θρησκοπληξία της εποχής τους, και είναι τρομερά αστείοι. Αστείοι, γιατί η γλώσσα αποτελεί σημαίνον και σ' αυτήν την περίσταση (πώς λέμε "το μέσον είναι το μήνυμα" κατά ΜακΛούχαν; και ο κώδικας είναι το μήνυμα, με την έννοια πάντα του Jakobson -- πομπός , δέκτης, κανάλι, κώδικας). Aλλά το σημαινόμενο της Τσωσέρειας αγγλικής ως κώδικα στο σημερινό αναγνώστη δεν επεκτείνεται πολύ πιο πέρα από το «γράφτηκα το 1400»· οπότε το χιούμορ του απροόπτου και του αναχρονισμού προκύπτει αβίαστα. Αν κάποιος ιστολογήσει περί Τατιάνας Στεφανίδου και Πανίκου Ψωμιάδη, μην πω με τη γλώσσα και το προσωπείο του Πλάτωνα ή καν του Άη Παύλου (τρομάρα μας), αλλά έστω του Πτωχοπρόδρομου, θα πάει ο νους μας απλώς στον αναχρονισμό; Νομίζω πως όχι. Είτε θα σκεφτούμε «αντιδραστικός» -- το πολιτικά βεβαρημένο σημαινόμενο της διγλωσσίας· είτε θα σκεφτούμε Μποστ -- διότι Μπόστ είναι το προηγούμενο της χιουμοριστικής χρήσης αρχαΐζοντος ιδιώματος, αλλά το χλευαζόμενο δεν είναι το περιεχόμενο του μηνύματος, μα πάλι ο κώδικας: η ελληνικούρα, η γλωσσική έπαρση. (Αποτελεί αντιπαράδειγμα ο Αστερίξ στα Αρχαία; Δεν κάνω ρητορική ερώτηση.)

Αν αυτό δεν ισχύει, τότε όντως έληξε πλέον το κεφάλαιο «γλωσσικό ζήτημα». Και για να κάνω τη σύνδεση με το τοναμυτορλίκι μου --- μπορώ τώρα να συμπαθώ μια πολυτονική που απαλλάχτηκα, διότι κάπως για μένα τουλάχιστον έχει αφαιμαχθεί πλέον ο καβγάς αυτός...

Ορολογία για ψηφιακές βιβλιοθήκες

In re:
http://conference.lis.upatras.gr/topics.php

Έπεσα τυχαία στην παραπάνω σελίδα καθώς έψαχνα τα του νέου μου επαγγέλματος. Καράφλιασα με την καταχώρηση:

* Οντολογίες (Ontologies)

... !! Και επίσης άσχημο μου φάνηκε το αμετάφραστο Tutorials. Όσο για το "Μάνατζμεντ" βιβλιοθηκών αντί διαχείρηση --- νισάφι! Βέβαια μετά μια ματιά στα μιξοεγγλέζικα του Μάξιμ ελληνιστί (ε, ο θεός να τα κάνει ελληνιστί αλλά τέλος πάντων), δεν δικαιούμαι να 'χω και πολλές αξιώσες. (Μου φαίνεται, ή τα εληνικά του πάλαι ΚΛΙΚ ήταν πιο πηγαία;)

Μάλιστα η ορολογία είχε και τα ωραία του: μ' αυτές τις εξαιρέσεις, φαίνεται συνειδητή προσπάθεια να παραχθεί ελληνική ορολογία στο πεδίο. Ιδίως μου άρεσε η απόδοση του Institutional Repository: "Ιδρυματικό Αποθετήριο". (Κρίμα βέβαια η ομοιότητα με το "αποχωρητήριο... :-) )

The tale of φαῖο

In my capacity of working on the lemmatisation of Greek for the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project, verbs are much more of a hassle than nouns, because Greek verbs just have more latitude to do idiosyncratic stuff than nouns. The running joke with Greek verbs, in fact, is that there is no such thing as a regular verb; even λύω, so favoured in textbooks as an exemplar (because its root ends in upsilon, one of the few consonants or vowels not to cause grief when it is juxtaposed to the tense suffixes), has variable length on that upsilon depending on the tense. However, the truly, insanely, every person is its own story verbs --- i.e. the athematic irregulars: εἰμί, εἶμι, ἠμί, φημί --- had already been covered by the lemmatiser I've been elaborating; and since they require a lot more deep Greek than I'm comfortable with, I've usually managed to steer clear of them. It doesn't help that these verbs are so irregular, that the lemmatiser deals with them in a completely different way from other verbs: they're basically treated not as stems + a class of suffixes, but each as their own set of suffixes, from scratch.

And so it was that a perfect storm of irregularities had me scratching my head for a full hour with a single verb in Moschus. Not a long verb, actually a rather short verb; which in Greek hurts you rather than helps you, because you can't, like, buy a vowel to work out what's going on. In fact, my problem was there were too many vowels. The verb was φαῖο, and it shows up in the following passage

αὐτὰρ ὃ μειλίχιον μυκήσατο· φαῖό κεν αὐλοῦ
Μυγδονίου γλυκὺν ἦχον ἀνηπύοντος ἀκούειν
(Moschus, Europa 97-98)

I have no idea what phaîo means. Neither does my lemmatiser. The thing doesn't look like a verb; but it looks like an Ancient Greek noun even less. I look for dictionary entries sarting with φα- that might help me make sense of this; no such luck. I leaf through my Smyth and (paper) Kühner-Blass grammars --- respectively the basic English and ludicrously detailed German grammar of Greek; no go. Now, in the cis-webic age, Google knows all, so I pop into the Project Gutenberg translation of Moschus to see if it would help; Moschus is writing bucolic Greek --- meaning Doric or Aeolic mooshed with Epic, and damn me if I have any idea what the mooing is about. The Gutenberg edition of the bucolic poets is old and out of copyright enough to be unhelpful at times -- Theocritus 30 is completely missing (and in the other Gutenberg Theocritus, the translator pretends it's addressed to a girl); but the Moschus passage has made it, moo and all:

Then he lowed so gently, ye would think ye heard the Mygdonian flute uttering a dulcet sound.

Nice to know bestiality wasn't as big a deal to the translator. OK, so φαῖο means "you think". Nope, still not getting it. I spend half an hour, uninformed Modern Greek speaker that I am, trying to yoke it to φαίνομαι "seem"; but there's no alchemy that's going to make that nu completely disappear absent a sigma to knock it over. (Keep that sigma in mind, it ends up with a candlestick in the conservatory.)

In desperation, I ask TLG central for a clue; and TLG central sends me the variant readings of the verb in their edition. The variants in the manuscripts are φαῖε, φαίε, and φαίης. Now, I don't know what φαίης means either, but the lemmatiser does: it's the optative active 2nd sg of φημί, "say"; so "you would say". "You would say" means pretty much "you would think"; the same happens in Modern Greek (λες και). Bell goes off in my head, I look at the verb table for φημί in my grammar, and I attain enlightenment.

Here's the perfect storm:

• First up, the optative is reasonably rare in Greek to begin with, and died early; so with my slapdash knowledge of Ancient Greek, it would be easy for me to have not clicked to it.
  
  
• Second, we have in φαῖο a middle/passive optative, not an active like φαίης. The middle/passive ending for the 2nd sg should have been -iso; but proto-Greek did away with its sigmas between vowels, so all that was left was -io. Which doesn't look like a verb ending I'd be familiar with, and for good reason: Middle Greek ended up putting such 2nd sg passive sigmas back in. (Ancient Greek has lou-omai "I am washed", *lou-esai > *lou-eai > lou-eːi "you are washed"; Modern Greek has restored the forms to lun-ome, lun-ese.)
  
  
• Normally Greek verbs are thematic: they have a vowel, an -e- or -o- depending on the person, between the verb stem and the personal inflection. This means that the optative passive ending is normally -oîo; and -oîo I had seen before enough to recognise. But φημί is one of those irregular athematic vowels --- meaning it's archaic enough not to have a thematic vowel. The -io goes straight onto the verb stem pʰa-. pʰa + io = φαῖο. Because I had not grokked the optative by being force-fed it at school, I wasn't familiar enough with the ending to make the conection.
  
  
• The killer was the change in Moschus. I had actually gone past the description of φημί in Kühner-Blass, who had a generous three or four pages about it, listing all its attested tenses. It turns out that standard, Attic Greek only used the verb for "say" in the active; having it in the middle voice is an other dialect thing, and since we have a lot more Attic than other dialects, we don't have all that many middle voice φημί in our literary texts to begin with. Nonetheless, Kühner and Blass (dunno which one, though Kühner's earlier solo edition is in Google Books) saw fit to include all known middle instances of φημί. They list the indicatives, the list the subjunctives, they list the infinitives, they list the imperatives.
  
  No optatives listed.
  
  
• Which can only mean one thing. In the 19th century, the editors of Moschus had gone with the common, normal Attic form φαίης. Kühner-Blass is 19th century, and so is Liddell-Scott. When A.S.F. Gow did his new edition of Moschus in 1952, he looked at φαίης and φαῖο, and did what a philologist should: he went with lectio difficilior. (OK, I've got a normal boring Attic optative, and a weird unknown Doric optative. Maybe the scribe who wrote that manuscript thought he'd out-Doric Moschus, so he made φαῖο up. That might have happened, and Kühner-Blass is adamant that that kind of thing has happened with Herodotus. But it is rather likelier that the scribe took one look at Moschus' φαῖο, had the same reaction I did, and plugged in the form of the verb he was much more familiar with.) In doing so, Gow brought back into the corpus a likely authentic Doric optative. But noone is bothering to revise the 19th century grammars, so the grammars won't tell me that.
  
  
• Moreover, the way irregular athematic verbs are handled in the lemmatiser, actives and middles are handled separately, as distinct classes of endings --- whereas normal verbs lump all the possible classes of endings together that would attach to a given tense stem. So it didn't guess at the middle version of the verb, whereas normally it would.
  
  

So that's the story of φαῖο. The lemmatiser now knows what the verb means; alas, it's the only instance of a middle optative of φημί in the corpus, but every verb counts (especially when it's in my performance index testbed). Not that I was happy to have been running around for an hour trying to work out a verb I should have grokked immediately. But that's how pioneers work, I guess.