December 2024 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 296 other subscribers
Tag: Philology
Epictetus, Discourses I 1
Well, I don’t know if this is a good idea at all. But this is one of my favourite passages of Ancient Greek. Rendered in GoAnimate, with pseudo-Laurence Olivier Text-To-Speech. Epictetus, Discourses I 1, in the Loeb Oldfather translation from 1925.
Look for Etymologies on the Tiber
The Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog (to take a break from the problematic of Canada and go back to matters Hellenic) has recently unearthed the origin of that fine Greek apophthegm, πᾶς μὴ Ἕλλην βάρβαρος, “anyone not Greek is a barbarian”. (Which was in fact the original definition of barbarian.) The sentence is absent from Greek […]
Chioniades and Wilbour Hall
Our story’s not about him, really, but in the Year Of Our Lord 1295, Gregory Chioniades [Bio Enc Astronom, Wikipedia] went from Trebizond to Tabriz, to learn astronomy at the feet of the Persian masters. When he got there, he set about translating the Arabic Zīj al‐ʿAlāʾī under Shams al‐Dīn al‐Bukhārī. We’re reasonably sure he […]
The Ibycus mainframe
In re: TLG: Ibycus The Ibycus computer was what Thesaurus Linguae Graecae data crunching got done on throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It was the stuff of legend, an HP 1000 customised in David Packard Jr.‘s garage, with spelling and format checkers and text editors in assembler, that crunched through tens of millions of words […]
Scythians
From the Suda On-Line project I contribute to, a cloyingly heartwarming anecdote from the historian Phylarchus: The Scythians, when they were about to lie down to sleep, brought the quiver, and if they happened to have passed that day unharmed, they placed a white pebble on the quiver, but if [things had gone] troublesomely, [they […]