The Birth of the Cessative (An Encomium)

 It is long-established in the development of color that the first third way to emerge from the binary of black and white, light and dark, is red. From this point, all other colors flow. In the same way aspect begins as a binary: perfective and imperfective. The first views an event as that which is completed, while the second views an event as that which is ongoing. Aspect is decoupled from absolute time, but within this binary there is relative time: the imperfective is not yet perfective. Yet the only ground from which a new aspect can arise to form a trinity is the imperfective. The boundary, the borderlands where the imperfective and perfective touch, is not at the beginning, but the end of imperfective spectrum: it is meet, therefore, that a language with three core aspects would add the cessative rather than the inchoative. The cessative indicates 'to stop doing', an imperfective range on the marches of the perfective, which binds the binary aspects to a more temporal mode. Once the imperfective has borne the cessative, more aspects may come; but it is ironic that the aspect that begins a multiplicity of others should be the one associated with ceasing!

In Defence of the Bishop of London

 During the day of the Coronation, the Right Reverend and Right Honorable Dame Sarah Mulally, Bishop of London, misspoke, saying Natharess instead of Nazareth. The bishop, considering her office and ordination, is unlikely to be unfamiliar with the name of the Savior's hometown, so it is necessary to seek an alternate explanation - and refrain from puerile mockery born of anticlericalism. The z and the th in Nazareth are both fricatives, the former voiced, the latter unvoiced. A stressful occasion such as the first Coronation in seventy years just might trigger speech errors, thankfully none in the performative speech acts - and if anybody believes that clergy never err in more frequent recitations, that person has never been next to the officiant at Mass! A pure metathesis of the fricatives would produce Natharez,  while final devoicing would change z to ss. One should be grateful that the th of Nazareth was not fronted further to an f!

Sorrow, son of Unrejoicing: Euripides' Bacchae and Linguistic Archaeology

 In approaching the end of Euripides' Bacchae, a parallelism that has struck me is the mother-son pairs on either side of the conflict of the play. Dionysus is the son of Semele, daughter of Cadmus; Pentheus is the son of Agaue (sic), daughter of Cadmus. Pentheus' name means "the one who sorrows," a connection explicitly made within the text of the play. The context and conflict of the play is the arrival of the Bacchic rite to Thebes and its hostile reception, so names which have meaning are conspicuous and may be names of roles assumed in the rites. Within the Bacchic rites, whoever assumes the role of Bacchus becomes Bacchus in a sense, so it is reasonable to assume that the principal opponent would have a similarly dual role. On the maternal side, Semele is associated with a number of earth goddesses such as Rhea and Doso (Demeter) and happens to match the name of the Thracian Earth Goddess Zmele (because Thracian was a satem language, whereas Greek was a centum language - see Russian 'zemlya' 'land' for a more familiar cognate), so Agaue's name and role should also be significant.  Agaue murders her son Pentheus under the influence of the god, but her name also has meaning. Agaue may well be derived from the root 'gawe-', 'rejoicing', which lies at the sourche of Latin 'gaudium', 'joy'. The Greek verb 'gauroomai' occurs in the text in the discussion of Agaue's behavior. 'Gauroomai' can be broken down as follows: '-omai' is the first person singular present middle ending and can be safely excised. This leaves 'gauro-', which is an adjective. If the component which makes it an adjective is removed, i.e. -ro-, all that is left is 'gau', the part shared with the name Agaue. The -e of Agaue is just the feminine ending, so the important part for analysis is Agau-, which is -gau- with a negative prefix A-. The name Agaue, therefore, means 'The Woman Who Does Not Rejoice', which is a thematically (and dramatically?) appropriate name of the mother of The Man Who Sorrows, Agaue changes from rejoicing when she is entranced to not rejoicing when she recognizes what she has done.

Heracles, Hercules, Why So Many Names

 The mightiest son of Zeus has many names, but the two most frequently used in modern media are Hercules and Heracles. The simple explanation for this is that the Romans used Hercules, while the Greeks used Heracles (or Herakles). That suffices, but it would not be a Wednesday Classics post if there were not greater depths to explore.

The original name of Herakles was Alkaios, the name of his paternal grandfather, Alkaios, son of Perseus. This genealogical connection is why Herakles is sometimes referred to as Alcides, “descendant of Alkaios.” Herakles’ mortal parents were Amphitryon, son of Alkaios, son of Perseus, and Alkmena, daughter of Elektryon, son of Perseus. Alkmena’s name shares a root with Alkaios which indicates strength, because names in myth and legend are often extremely on the nose. Alkaios, son of Amphitryon, was a target for Hera, the wife of Zeus. After baby Alkaios strangled the two serpents sent to kill him in the first days of his infancy, he was renamed Herakles, “glory of Hera,” in a futile attempt to appease the wrath of Hera by dedicating the baby to her. That is the mythological background for the name.

Greek is an Indo-European language with a pitch whose placement is not automatic and a distinction between long and short vowels. The pitch on the name Heracles appears on the final syllable of the name; the length pattern of the name was long-short-long, a cretic according to Greek metrical naming conventions. This name did not fit well into the dactylic pattern of epic poetry, so alternate names were often used for Heracles in poetry. The Greeks used the Greek alphabet, which did not have the letter C; Heracles in Greek is spelled with a K (kappa).

 The Greeks travelled and colonized much of the Mediterranean, including what is now Italy. In Italy the Greek colonists met the Etruscans, the dominant ethnic power of northern and mid-Italy. The Latin peoples, the speakers of Old Latin, were under the power of the Etruscans. The Etruscans borrowed and adapted the Greek alphabet to write their previously unwritten language.

The Etruscan language was quite different from the Greek language. The variety of the Greek alphabet which the Etruscans adopted had three velar sounds: kappa, qoppa, and gamma. Kappa and qoppa were like a hard C sound in English, although the Etruscans could hear a difference. Gamma was like a hard G sound in English. The difference between hard C and hard G in Greek is called voicing; it was something which the Etruscan language lacked. The result of this lack was that Etruscan heard G as C. At this point, with three letters for the same or similar sounds, many language adopters would have chosen one; Etruscan retained all three and distributed them in front of specific vowels. Qoppa (Q) appeared before U. Kappa (K) appeared before A. C, the gamma which was now identical in sound to K but had one less stroke, appeared before E. Due to its slightly easier writing, C gradually annexed the vocalic territories of K, including before I, the fourth vowel of the Etruscan language.

The speakers of Old Latin learned to write from the Etruscans. They therefore adopted the three varieties of hard C. Q was useful because QU was a frequent combination of consonants in Old Latin. Old Latin did not need both K and C and opted for the simpler of the two – except in the important time word Kalends and some names. Since C was always an English hard C, any Greek words with K could be spelled with C.

An alphabet was not all Etruscan and Old Latin shared. The languages were in a Sprachbund, a kind of linguistic marriage in which certain features are shared between unrelated languages. One of the features in the Etruscan-Old Latin Sprachbund was consistent stress (not pitch) on the first syllable of a word. Herakles, therefore, became Heracle in Etruscan, with initial syllable stress. A frequent result of initial syllable stress is a decrease in stress on non-initial syllables to the point that the vowels in those syllables disappear; thus Heracle became Hercle. This form lasted in Etruscan until its eventual extinction.

Old Latin, however, did not like this consonant cluster. Old Latin, unlike Etruscan, was also a member of the Indo-European language family. Old Latin had long and short vowel lengths, which underwent different changes in initial and non-initial position. This distinction is why the Latin verb ‘facio’ has the perfect passive participle ‘factus’, but the same root with the prefix ‘infacio’ has the perfect passive participle ‘infectus.’ In Old Latin as well as Etruscan, Heracle became Hercle, but Old Latin broke the cluster by inserting a vowel to produce Hercules – Old Latin shared many declensions with Greek and therefore requires the case ending -s to use the name Hercules. The name Hercules had the same metric value as Heracles; thus this difficulty remained unresolved.

Latin, the descendent of Old Latin, had a different set of stress rules, but these happen not to affect the name Hercules. Although the native name Hercules was preferred, the Greek borrowing Heracles (with Latin C rather than Greek kappa) was available. Poets were still stuck with an awkward name – especially because Latin, due to the initial stress period and the loss of non-initial syllables, had even less short syllables.

When the Western portion of the Empire fell, most knowledge of Greek was lost, while Latin retained its position as the language of the church and of administration. The name by which the son of Jupiter, “Jovis filius,” was known for millennia in the West was Hercules, in accordance with the use of Latin names for the Greco-Roman gods. This can be confirmed in the English poetic tradition, which favors initial stress. The Greek names were not unknown, but not preferred.

In more recent times, however, there was a movement to use the Greek names, or at least the Latin spelling of the Greek names, of mythological figures. Heracles became a more common sight than it had been previously, but it did not displace Hercules in the popular consciousness. The next step was the restoration of the kappa in the name Herakles. This is most common in relatively historical or realistic accounts. While Hercules and Heracles have co-existed for a long time, the use of the name Hercules in the scripture of the Mouse is an indicator of which name remains preeminent in English-speaking, and particularly American, popular culture.