Hi Greg and all



I particularly like Marion's idea of making the point boustrophedon (so to speak) —

supposing one can vaguely justify it for Aeschylus.



A while ago I found on the Web a random bit of the Iliad so re-written  — boustr', hand-written caps, no accents —

 not an actual inscription, just an imaginative re-construction.  I printed it off and was very surprised

to discover that it was not at all difficult to read.



Susan

PhD candidate, Classics, College of Arts and Social Sciences

Research assistant, College of Asia and the Pacific

The Australian National University

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From: The Digital Classicist List [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Lamé Marion [[log in to unmask]]

Sent: 13 April 2015 04:11

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: [DIGITALCLASSICIST] what might Aeschylus' original text have looked like?



Hi Greg, Neel, Helma, Marja and Alcorac,





I apologise for my clumsy English.

I do agree with all the previous answers. Each invite in their own way to be precise and careful. I do thank you because it gave me the occasion to re-open my lesson book of Greek Epigraphy, that is the “small” Guarducci in one volume only.



GUARDUCCI, Margherita. 1987. L’epigrafia Greca Dalle Origini Al Tardo Impero. Roma: Libreria dello Stato / Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato.



Epigraphic communication has its linguistic rules and the linguistic common foundations/roots between epigraphic and non epigraphic texts shed lights to understand both categories. Nonetheless, they should not be amalgamated /mixed, as Helma explained well, inviting to be very careful in mixing epigraphic communication's style with literary texts. Otherwise, it would be like attempting to use hieroglyphs (epigraphic writing and language of Ancient Egypt) to illustrate what can be done with some lost demotic texts (daily writings on papyrus) to say it in a very insufficient, exaggerated and artificial way (we all know the linguistics rules of epigraphic and non epigraphic writings of Ancient Egypt, so we would not attempt such a thing, unless forced by good scholar motivation). In other words, it would be something like taking the inscriptions on post-world war II memorial of North America as a model to reproduce some lost Tennessee Williams' works: most of the time upper letters and very few punctuation on one hand, lower case letter, complex punctuation and specific layout in the other hand. Working without a genuine primary source of information implies the risk to create a digital unicum that never existed in the cultural reality of the society that produced the texts.



A lot depends on Greg's goal.





1) Trying to reach something closer to Eschylus text when it was produced (supposing that some written stable version existed at the time of representation on stage), taking inspiration of local inscriptions of the Athic region in the VIth and Vth century BC ? This is how I have understood Greg's goal, even if it seems to me risky and odd the way I just wrote down this question, so I am not sure that this is exactly his goal.





2) Displaying what can be down with genuine texts of the VIth and the Vth texts (whatever the text is), as Neel suggests? Isn't it already an on going work in Digital Epigraphy everywhere?



In the first case, very insufficient recommendations could be.

> * convert all etas and omegas to epsilons and omicrons + glyph “H” instead of spiritus asper. that matches Athic alphabet before the "riforma «euclidea»" in 403/2 B.C, as Alcorac confirmed. Even if the problems of glyphs: in Athic alphabet gamma take the shape of a upper lambda, many letters have several different atypical glyphs. H = H letter or etas, according to the Unicode encoding used, latin H means etas in betacode. And in the “Eschylus” case it would not mean none of those features. It is getting quite confused.

Poinikastas's letter forms are not very helpful to understand this aspect as letters does not seem to be organized by alphabets, but at least it gives a good idea of how heterogeneous and ambiguous glyphs could be: http://poinikastas.csad.ox.ac.uk/browseGlyphs.shtml





NB. the "psy" solution "PI" + "SIGMA", given by Neel, does not belong to Athic Alphabet and do not concern Eschylus as far as I know. You can find this writing phenonema in inscriptions of the Cyclades. And, in some places in Thessaly, one finds PHI+SIGMA combination instead of PSY.





In addition to this, according to epigraphic evidence, writing in retrograde way and boustrophedon writing are still used a lot during the VIth century (and less during the Vth century): would we propose all the configuration, ignoring what was the favourite writing direction of Eschylus?





> * remove all accents, let's say OK... even if many other signs exist on ancient Greek and Roman texts, epigraphic or not.

> * remove all punctuation: I suppose Greg's mean the one we insert when we edit a text.

> * remove all distinction between upper and lower case: capital letter is used for epigraphic texts mainly. I imagine Eschylus leading his work with his text written on huge inscriptions in capital letters displayed in front of the choir saying: "now, let's thing!". Capital letters is mostly an epigraphic way of writing (for legibility and technical reasons of writing on hard material such as stones). Wax tablets, ductile metal (e.g. lead) force to use other way of writings also on inscription as papyrus do too.

> * Marja recommendation with very old papyrus (PÖHLMANN & WEST) is good sense from aesthetic/design/layout point of view. In addition to Marja's suggestion with papyrus, I would add to have a glance to the draft of inscriptions (the “minuta”) that is still sometimes visible and to see Jean Mallon and others for the relationship between palaeography, daily writings and inscriptions.

Of course, inscriptions may look appealing: epigraphic texts are the most genuine evidence based material of the historical linguistic way of writing in Ancient Greece and they brought us so many interesting details. That is a huge temptation. But the Devil is also in the detail and I would avoid such attempt. I ignore if some quotations of some Eschylus' works exists with an epigraphic version of it, as it happens sometimes with some other famous literary work. My favourite inscriptions are quite of some examples of such relationship between epigraphy and literature. Moreover, epigraphies always cites literary works and vice e versa (see p. 41 to 45 in BODEL, John, P. 2001. “Inscriptions and Litterature”, in Epigraphic Evidence. Londres ; New York: Routledge). Epigraphic epigrams with also a Medieval tradition might be very good examples. So maybe some example of this kind would be more appropriate. So maybe, in the mailing list, some people could recommend a couple of such references.



Hope this help,



Marion





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De : Helma Dik <[log in to unmask]>

À : [log in to unmask]

Envoyé le : Dimanche 12 avril 2015 17h18

Objet : Re: [DIGITALCLASSICIST] what might Aeschylus' original text have looked like?



I kind of see the temptation of this, but I would want to push back a bit and stress that a language, and a fortiori, musical theater in that language, is never fully captured or characterized by its writing system or spelling conventions. Turkish written in Arabic or Roman characters is still the same language but it will be radically easier for most of us on this list to read it when in Roman characters. Ditto for the Greek alphabet vs the Linear B syllabary, an ungainly way to represent Greek of any era (or English, for that matter).



What you do by representing English in morse code, or Greek in beta code, or by removing it from our daily experience in any other way, like using a restored C5 notation for Greek, is momentarily causing an alienating effect, but to the C5 user, it would have been the best (for most familiar) notation at the time. Consider for a moment a more phonetic spelling of English: because we are so used to the look of words in their current spelling, it would slow us down dramatically.



Obviously, presenting students with scriptio continua texts, an exercise I'm sure many of us have been subjected to/have subjected our students to, is pedagogically useful when in the service of papyrology, epigraphy, and palaeography, just as our students are forced to start dealing with iota adscript vs. subscript conventions depending on the editions we choose to work with. And of course it is also in line with the time-honored tradition of "philology-as-torture-instrument". However, none of these non-conventional notations need be considered more 'wissenschaftlich'; I would rather tend to consider them affectations:-)



Anyway, to make it less like a parlor trick, one could look instead to the long tradition of third-party annotation (in the broadest sense, including the spatial organization of texts) instead: In many ways, these linguistic annotations  (the evidence from musical inscriptions, papyri, metrical inscriptions featuring word boundary markers, etc.) go back just about as far in time, and are more representative of what writing is used for: re-performance, re-interpretation, etc. by someone other than the original author. Here too, whether looking at papyri, inscriptions, or the Venetus A, and comparing early Aldine editions with, say, Teubners, you can show that the 19th century editions are not the only thinkable formatting choices available, so that yes, their representational choices should be considered forms of 'annotation'.



Recalcitrantly conventionally yours,

Helma



Helma Dik

Department of Classics

University of Chicago









On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Neel Smith <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:

Why not pull up a real 5th c inscription, even if can't be Aeschylus?



Two things not on your list that people who've already studied Greek often find jarring when they first look at a classical inscription:



- use of the "epsilon" and "omicron" characters to spell the "unechte Diphthonge", and absence of double consonants (xi and psi, spelled chi + sigma and pi + sigma)





Woodhead's _Introduction to Greek Epigraphy_ is probably an easy source to find good examples.







> On Apr 11, 2015, at 10:13 PM, Gregory Crane <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:

>

> I am getting ready to speak to the Mommsen Society in Germany next week and I would like to make the point that linguistic annotation is not new -- rather, it is so entrenched in our scholarship that we have forgotten the extent to which we embed it in our work.

>

> I would like to use an edition of Aeschylus as an example and to show first a 19th century edition and then show the text as it might have appeared if we had whatever text Aeschylus initially produced (however he produced it and assuming he had a single stable text).

>

> I am not an expert in the writing of 5th century Athens and assume we derive virtually all of our understanding from epigraphic data but there I am certainly no expert.

>

> To get a closer approximation of what Aeschylus might have produced I would do the following:

>

> * convert all etas and omegas to epsilons and omicrons

> * remove all accents

> * remove all punctuation

> * remove all distinction between upper and lower case

>

> Any suggestions to correct or improve that?

>

> Greg