HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The term Canaanite has two primary usages: (i) to designate the dialects of Northwest Semitic spoken in the region called Canaan in the second half of the second millennium BC; and (ii) to differentiate the “Canaanite” dialects of the first millennium, primarily Phoenician and Hebrew, from other Northwest Semitic languages spoken in Canaan after c. 1000 BC, primarily the Aramaic dialects. The principal feature defining Canaanite is the so-called Canaanite shift, that is, Proto-Semitic *ā realized as ō (e.g., Hebrew ṭōb “good” corresponds to Aramaic ṭāb).

For the Canaanite of the second millennium BC, there are two primary sources: (i) the texts written in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the time, by Canaanite scribes and which contain both Canaanitisms and explicit glosses, i.e., words written in cuneiform script as a gloss in the local language on a preceding Akkadian word; (ii) the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, that is, inscriptions written in archaic linear script and apparently recording the local language.

Some controversy surrounds what “Canaan” meant, both politically and geographically, in the second millennium BC (Na'aman 1994). In the second half of the millennium, the term was used to designate the area of Asia under Egyptian control, including a number of city-states. It comprised an area stretching roughly from what is today northern Lebanon to the border of Egypt, perhaps including some of the arable lands of Transjordan.

In this section you will meet a number of different features of grammar and syntax that are clearly described in GE pp. 315–318, #291–294. Notice particularly μή + aorist subjunctive = ‘don't …’ (GE #292), and φοβοῦμαι μή + subjunctive = ‘I am afraid that something may happen’ (GE #293).

Also there are verbal nouns ending in -τέος which express obligation (‘must’), GE #294–295.

16A

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3 ἀθύμως ἔχοντι Agrees with ʾΑριστάρχῳ. ἔχω + adverb expresses the state that someone is in, e.g. καλῶς ἔχω ‘I am well’, κακῶς ἔχω ‘I am in a bad way.’

10 τοὺς ἐξηγητάς These were state officials who advised what to do in cases of murder. Apollodoros' next question shows two of the procedures which they might advise on.

13 ἐπεποιήκει What tense? see GE p. 315, #291.

ἠδικήκει What tense?

17 διεξελθόντι δέ μοι … οὺκ ἔφασαν ἐξεῖναι … Literally ‘to me having related … they said that it was not possible to …’

ἐπεπόνθη What verb? What tense? Try πάσχω πείσομαι ἔπαθον πεπόνθα.

Translation for 16A

Apollodoros is going straight towards Ilisos, walking along the road outside the wall, beneath the wall itself. When he is at the gate, there he meets Aristarchos the son of Ariston, who is very depressed. Apollodoros, seeing Aristarchos coming towards him, addresses him.

There is relatively little grammatical input in this section. You learn the present and imperfect tenses passive (GE pp. 226–227, #220), which are the same as the middle, the genitive absolute (GE p. 228, #222), comparative adverbs (GE pp. 229–230, #225) and the optative of φημί (GE p. 231, #227).

The concept of the passive will present no problem to Latinists. GE p. 227, #221 will be useful.

Aristophanes' comedy Akharnians tells us much about Athenian politics and the feelings of the countrymen of Attica cooped up inside the city during the Peloponnesian War. It holds out a tantalising vision of peace.

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1 κυρία ἐκκλησία See RGT p. 91, Section 8A line 25 and the map on RGT p. 92.

2 ἡ Πνὺξ αὑτηί αύτηί is the extra demonstrative form. Cf. ούτοσί.

ἐρῆμος Why no feminine ending? It's a two-termination adjective, i.e. it has no separate feminine ending. Compound adjectives (e.g. ἀ-θάνατος, εὐ-δόκιμος) mostly fall into this category, as well as a number of other adjectives. See GE pp. 230–231, #226.

5 σχοινίον A rope with vermilion dye was swept across the agora to push people towards the Pnyx (the hill on which the ecclesia was held). The Assembly itself was proclaimed by a trumpet call; any citizen arriving with vermilion dye, and therefore touched by the rope, could be fined for arriving late.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Palaic was once the spoken language of the land of Palā, generally agreed to have been located to the northwest of Hittite territory across the Halys River (modern Kizil Irmak) in what is now north central Turkey. The country name is surely reflected in the later classical Blaëne and Paphlagonia. Palaic is attested in scarcely a dozen ritual fragments from the cuneiform archives of the ancient Hittite capital Hattuša (modern Boğazköy). The documents are contemporary with the Hittite (sixteenth to thirteenth centuries BC), including a couple of manuscripts from the Old Hittite period.

What little Palaic we have owes its preservation to liturgical use by the Hittites, chiefly for the cult of the Hattic god Za/iparfa. Palā, mentioned in the Old Hittite Laws as one of the three divisions of the Hittite state along with Hatti and Luwiya, appears only rarely in later texts. Its decline in importance is sometimes attributed to the depredations of the Kaskeans, a people of the northern mountains who caused serious problems for the Hittites throughout their history. It is likely that Palaic was extinct as a spoken language by the thirteenth century, and it may well have been so by the time of our earliest texts in the sixteenth. The extremely sparse documentation makes all aspects of the following description provisional. Palaic is interpreted largely in light of the much better attested Hittite so far as the facts permit.

In the following pages, the reader will discover what is, in effect, a linguistic description of all known ancient languages. Never before in the history of language study has such a collection appeared within the covers of a single work. This volume brings to student and to scholar convenient, systematic presentations of grammars which, in the best of cases, were heretofore accessible only by consulting multiple sources, and which in all too many instances could only be retrieved from scattered, out-of-the-way, disparate treatments. For some languages, the only existing comprehensive grammatical description is to be found herein.

This work has come to fruition through the efforts and encouragement of many, to all of whom the editor wishes to express his heartfelt gratitude. To attempt to list all – colleagues, students, friends – would, however, certainly result in the unintentional and unhappy neglect of some, and so only a much more modest attempt at acknowledgments will be made. Among those to whom special thanks are due are first and foremost the contributors to this volume, scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the languages of ancient humanity, without whose expertise and dedication this work would still be only a desideratum. Very special thanks also go to Dr. Kate Brett of Cambridge University Press for professionalism, her wise and expert guidance, and her unending patience, also to her predecessor, Judith Ayling, for permitting me to persuade her of the project's importance.

In this section the aorist tense is introduced (if you are uncertain of terminology, please refer back to the note at the beginning of Section 5). You may want to look at GE pp. 115–118, #128–138. You will find that in most cases the aorist adds a sigma before the ending, just like the future; but, as it is a past tense, it will also have an augment, like the imperfect.

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3 ἔκοψε, ἐβόησεν The first examples of the aorist. Note (a) the augment ἐ- (as for imperfect); (b) -σε in the ending; note also that π + ς = ψ. The contracted verb lengthens the stem vowel before adding the ending, just as in the future.

5 ἔκοψα, ἐβόησα 1st person singular (as ἐγώ indicates). Note ἐ- (augment), -σα (person-ending).

6 τίς ὤν σὸ τούτο ἐποίησας Literally ‘You being who did this?’ or ‘Who are you that you did this?’ (2nd singular aorist indicated by σύ). Again, ἐ- (augment), -σας (person-ending), and the lengthening of the stem vowel.

10 ποιήσω, κόψω What tense?

12 τίς ὁ κόπτων; ‘Who is the one knocking?’ Note the use of the participle. ἐπσύσατο The first example of the middle aorist. Note ἐ- (augment), -σατο (person-ending).

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17 ἐπαυσάμην Which person do you think this is? Cf. ἐπαυόμην. ὦ ʾγαθέ = ὦ ἀγαθέ.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Armenian forms an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. Although Armenian was spoken in areas adjacent to those inhabited by speakers of Anatolian languages, it shares few significant linguistic features with the Anatolian subgroup of Indo-European. Its closest linguistic relatives are Greek and the Indo-Iranian subgroup. These three branches of Indo-European show shared developments in their morphology and vocabulary which are not found in other Indo-European languages: for example, the use of the augment *e- to mark past tense verb forms; the use of a marker *-bhi (s) for the instrumental case; and the prohibitive particle *mē.

Some scholars have thought that the agreements between Armenian and Greek are sufficient to allow the reconstruction of a Helleno-Armenian subgroup of Indo-European, but their arguments are not conclusive, since it cannot be clearly proved that the agreements represent shared common innovations. Others, relying on an ancient tradition that the Armenians were a “colony of the Phrygians” (Herodotus 7.73) have tried to identify developments shared by Armenian and Phrygian, but have met with little success. Some of the phonetic developments which have been claimed for Phrygian also took place in Armenian, but all too often these sound changes rest upon very uncertain etymologies, and the close link between the languages is called into question by several well-established Phrygian forms. For example, the Phrygian form matar is generally taken to be a nominative singular meaning “mother,” from Proto-Indo-European *mātēr; the cognate Armenian form is mayr.

In the following pages, the reader will discover what is, in effect, a linguistic description of all known ancient languages. Never before in the history of language study has such a collection appeared within the covers of a single work. This volume brings to student and to scholar convenient, systematic presentations of grammars which, in the best of cases, were heretofore accessible only by consulting multiple sources, and which in all too many instances could only be retrieved from scattered, out-of-the-way, disparate treatments. For some languages, the only existing comprehensive grammatical description is to be found herein.

This work has come to fruition through the efforts and encouragement of many, to all of whom the editor wishes to express his heartfelt gratitude. To attempt to list all – colleagues, students, friends – would, however, certainly result in the unintentional and unhappy neglect of some, and so only a much more modest attempt at acknowledgments will be made. Among those to whom special thanks are due are first and foremost the contributors to this volume, scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the languages of ancient humanity, without whose expertise and dedication this work would still be only a desideratum. Very special thanks also go to Dr. Kate Brett of Cambridge University Press for her professionalism, her wise and expert guidance, and her unending patience, also to her predecessor, Judith Ayling, for permitting me to persuade her of the project's importance.

THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

The comparative method

The parent language of the Indo-European linguistic family is an “ancient” language in a special sense: it is a protolanguage, not attested but reconstructed. Since a protolanguage is, broadly speaking, the collection of all retentions in the daughter languages, the ability to segregate innovation from retention in the latter is crucial for the reconstruction of the former. The “comparative” method (in the narrow, phonological sense of the term) accomplishes that segregation to a large extent (on the comparative method of historical linguistics, see also WAL Ch. 45). Those innovations which we classify as sound-changes are capable of producing homophony among morphs; they are phonemic mergers, with the algebraic form /a/ > /m/, /b/ > /m/ (further elaboration is needed for conditioned sound-changes). Owing to the “Polivanov” property of sound changes (“no split without merger”), which follows from their definition as replacements statable in purely phonological terms (without reference, that is, to particular morphs), it is the case that if one phoneme, or one phonemic component (distinctive feature specification), or one phoneme combination (diphthong, cluster, syllable, etc.) in language A corresponds to one phoneme or phonemic component or phoneme combination in a related language B in one set of morphs, and to some other phoneme (etc.) in another set of morphs, then language A has in this detail innovated.